Antena: The Boy from Ipanema (1982)

Limitations can be helpful. They focus your actions, placing obstacles which you can react against. Otherwise, one can get bogged down in boundless options.

The two main limits I’ve placed upon myself here is that I only post (or reblog) videos that are actual videos (and, with a few exceptions, only original and authorized videos at that), not simply videos featuring record covers or photo montages or whatnot, and furthermore that I generally favor video over audio posts.

Given that a lot of what I post is music that didn’t exactly make much dent on the mainstream, finding videos for songs I want to post can at times be trying, if not impossible. It often works like this: I go looking for one thing; find another; realize it is pretty awesome too; post that other thing. It is this process of discovery that actually keeps this interesting for me.

I’ll be honest: I would rather be posting Camino Del Sol or maybe one of Antena’s other songs. But videos for those songs don’t exist. Or, at least, my search on YouTube was fruitless. And this song always kind of bugged me. It has become elevator music and its choice as a cover by Antena seemed self-consciously cheesy. And though many of the things I post are, arguably, cheesy, I do try to stay away from things that are self-consciously cheesy. I prefer earnestness.

But being limited to this video has made me give their version of the song another chance. And here is what I have decided: yes, they know this is cheesy. But they are using that, playing with it, not least with the gender inversion from the original (and the moans of satisfaction at the end). It works. Definitely. Of course.