A Song In Portuguese That I Don’t Understand (But I Don’t Have To)

Finding the shortcut to a lifetime of experience in just a few minutes. Or at least that’s what it felt like from where I was standing

One of the summers between high school years, I decided I wanted to be a beach guy for the rest of my life. Or at least my college career, which at that point was as close to the rest of my life as I could picture. I had just had an especially nice time at the beach on vacation with my family as well as my friends and it was settled. Disregard the fact that I lived in Pennsylvania, a famously land locked state.

What did it mean to me then to be a beach guy? What did I want to be when I thought about my life at the beach? This bohemian existence where my skin was perma-tanned and smoothed by constant sandy abrasion. My hair would be stiff and curly with salt. My shoes tastefully worn down by the grip tape of the skateboard I’d use for transportation and thrill-seeking. Hell, I might even start surfing. I wanted my vacation to never end. I wanted vacation to become my life, certainly not the other way around.

And there was the music, too. Because that’s inextricably linked to this.

I’ve admitted to plenty of less-than-cool musical interests throughout my life. I still stand by most of them. To run the risk of squandering what little credibility I have to the reputable music publications that occasionally pay me for credibility and the reputable readers who read it, it’s worth now letting you in on a secret far more damning than any very real ska phases or Red Hot Chili Peppers evangelism. I’ll gladly admit to that. It’s the white guy reggae that makes me a little itchy when I think of it.

Ballyhoo, Pepper and yes, when occasion called for it, Slightly Stoopid.

When I think of summer fun at this point of mid-high school with my friends, this is the soundtrack that I hear. Mortifying, especially, again, in Central Pennsylvania where there were neither beaches nor any of the fancy weed they were singing about, which definitely also scared me at the time.

Before the aux cables and iPods, before even an era where I could burn a cd and decide I was DJing the moment, families like mine were limited to the CD’s or cassettes that we not only owned but decided were important enough to bring on vacation. I think of three albums immediately:

The Wallflowers’ Bringing Down the Horse

Fastball’s All the Pain Money Can Buy

And No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom

Not a stinker in the bunch, really. My parents packed wisely.

At the time, these were big albums that were making waves in the culture. Not that I was participating in the culture at the time. I was a passenger - literally. But strange as it is to imagine my parents near the age I am now and thus paying attention to the good music of the time, they were, and I picked it up by osmosis. They became core memories, part of the wallpaper along with the way I remember the condo we rented in Ocean City, Maryland or Bethany Beach, Delaware.

Now 20-some years later, the songs are still around. Relevant isn’t the word I’d use to describe them, because their heyday is long over, even if the younger generation eventually unearths them and claims the sounds as their own. They come on and we all smile and sing along a little because we all know the songs. Over time, we’ve glued them onto our own memories, and they were ubiquitous enough that they belong to everyone equally in different ways. They are nice to hear, but they don’t define the era we live in or the culture of the time anymore. They were just part of the wallpaper in the room.

I think often about the idea of travel writing because I am a writer who loves traveling, I love reading travel writing and I would love the idea of being paid to visit all of these amazing places and meet new people and eat incredible food and do exciting things. In essence, the goal is to be on vacation for a job. Or have my job be vacation. However you spin it, it’s the impossible target of vacation never ending and real, boring life never creeping back in.

I’ve written here before about how traditional travel writing is not really much of a thing anymore.

I thought about it while climbing the seemingly endless stairs of Lisbon last week, taking in the technicolor beauty of the city and sweating through my shirts. The travel writer in the vein of Rick Steves, whose outdated books still sit in Airbnb’s, seems gone.

Basically what you’re left with are two ends of extremes: already famous people dispatched around the world for reliably popular content á la Conan, or complete unknowns with cameras strapped to their chests and mounted on sticks as they narrate their travels and over-react to street food hoping to trick the algorithm and come up first when you search for recommendations for a city you’ve just bought flights to.

There’s no way to really break in.

I still thought about what’s missing in the world of travel content. Where is there a gap? Where is there a niche to fill? What’s not being done? I thought about the often-Instagram Storied quote from Anthony Bourdain: “Be a traveler, not a tourist.”

Easy for him to say, right? He had a fixer to show him the places off the beaten path and allow his trip to transcend travel and, therefore, vacation. Friends and friends of the network to get him on fishing boats or backyard barbecues or Michelin star restaurants or illegal speakeasy.

So how does the average person transcend tourism and become a traveler? Where is the passage from surface-level interaction with a place and a true understanding of its soul?

The answer, I believe at least, lies in the mundane.

In the wallpaper.

As the sun set on Lisbon and my Garmin watch congratulated me on absolutely pile-driving my usual stair-climbing goal, the narrow streets filled in with makeshift bars and grill stations. Soon it would be wall to wall people speaking all sorts of languages and enjoying cheap Sagres and Superbock, grilled sardines and smoky meats. Turns out in mid-June the entire city becomes a party for the feast of Saint Anthony (or Santo Antonio as he’s known there). Finally Catholicism has done something fun for me.

Those colossal steps were now bleachers for the young and old to dance and sing along with the DJ stationed on the bridge above. I drank my Sagres and my ginha in the little chocolate cups, and my eyes hurt from standing too close to smoky grills waiting for my bifana. I felt like a tourist because I was one. The DJ would fade from one song to the next and the crowd would dance and cheer — mostly peppy pop songs in Portuguese, none of which I knew or understood. I didn’t pay much attention until he played something that sounded more at home on late 90s or early 2000s college radio. Sort of fuzzy alt rock, a little jangly. Familiar in its sound but not the words. I’ve heard this song before, or many like it, throughout my whole life. I just didn’t know this one.

But everyone else did.

It wasn’t like a big energy-boosting banger that would kick the party up a notch. It was just something they all knew and liked. It was like “Iris” or “Flagpole Sitta” or “Hey Jealousy” came on at a party. There was a clear comfort in the familiarity in the crowd. I frantically tried to catch a single phrase so I could look it up later, because I liked it and I thought about how there was this whole world of yesterday’s music in other cultures that I knew nothing about. There was something exciting in this idea of something that is old and largely uncool to so many being so new and fresh to my foreign ears. I thought about going up to the guy in the silly hat hanging out in the window by me and asking him about the song.

But then it was too late. It was over and I had overthought this moment that no one else around me even gave a second thought.

The DJ went back to pop music and I went on with my night, but then my opportunity struck again when a similar song came on shortly after. Similar enough in vibe that I wanted to pounce on it and at least come away with one new one. I grabbed Michele’s phone since she had service and yelled over the crowd SIRI WHAT IS THIS SONG and miraculously she told me.

Thinking about being able to unearth these songs that clearly have a space in people’s lives excited me, because I could go home with new songs to listen to while I run around my familiar streets and parks, looking the tourists of my own city as they look at me and project what it must be like to live full time in the place they’re only visiting.

These songs that are just dyed into the fabric of your life, where you sing along almost out of obligation and muscle memory more than excitement. The ones not so much purposefully taught to you but played near you while other things were happening. The ones that remind you of something else, where the song is almost incidental compared to the moment or moments it soundtracked. They’re so tied to those moments that no matter how many times you hear them and how many places you hear them, it still brings you back to something. Hopefully something good. Something happy. Maybe just something mundane like the drive somewhere or the grocery store checkout line back when the store felt impossibly large. Before you had any aspirations to be a 19-year-old east coast beach god.

To go back to this idea of how to be a traveler rather than a tourist, and by extension zero in on travel writing that goes beyond the Instagram reel, it all comes down to shared humanity, right? Common experiences and emotion that doesnt recognize political boundaries. That’s what the best of them did - point out what makes us all similar rather than different.

In that moment I got a window into what life was like here for a lot of the people in the streets and it felt like a shortcut to emotion.

A vacation is not real life. It doesn’t last forever nor should it because then it becomes real life. And real life is mundane.

Choosing to angle your tourism toward the mundane and sit with it for a second might not make you a “traveler” either. Because who even knows what that is and what he meant by that? Maybe it’s ultimately meaningless.

This moment — less the song and more the moment with it — is a souvenir like the kitschy tourist shit I got: soccer memorabilia and a fridge magnet. It’s something I can interact with and I’ll remember a moment in time. We’re good at picking up souvenirs, huh? We do it all the time and we don’t even notice.

Here’s the song by the way. It’s fine.