Smack That

A small, dented radio sits on the counter in the kitchen where I work. I would enjoy the radio if it would be tuned to a Brazilian Lounge station or some Portuguese Live Jazz shindig, but alas: loud, static-interrupted American Pop music is what we hear – repeated over and over and over. I have found this sort of thing in many of the countries I have been – an absolute adoration for our top twenty “hits.” I’ve never been a huge fan of Britney Spears or James Blunt, but somehow, after three months in Brazil, I am able to sing along to their “Do You Want a Piece of Me?”s and “Same Mistake”s (respectively) with perfect intonation and timing. Most of the cooks and chefs walk around singing in time with the music but completely butchering the actual lyrics. It’s like they’re singing with an enormous amount of anesthetic in their tongues.
Some of my favorite moments in Graciliano’s dirty little kitchen have been when I am asked to translate lines from some of these ballads from English into Portuguese. The other day, a short, cute, innocent older woman who is in charge of meats asked me what “smack that” means, referring to the song by Akon featuring Eminem. Not knowing the Portuguese translation, I simply smacked her bottom. The entire kitchen (who had been wondering the same thing as she had I’m sure) roared with laughter. A while back, Zak, the middle-aged balding purchaser for Graciliano’s (who is known to walk around constantly whistling or singing either Tracy Chapman or Bob Marley in very poor English) asked me what Chapman’s lyric “baby can I hold you tonight?” means. I didn’t want to demonstrate on Zak, figuring it would be awkward and inappropriate, so I simply put it in my finest Portuguese: “Bed, you, me, tonight.” Since then, I have rarely looked Zak in the eye.
One of the waitresses is heartbroken that her boyfriend moved to Portugal to live with his parents. He sends her American pop songs over email and she becomes immediately obsessed with them. Last week she printed out the lyrics to Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around Comes Around” and asked if I could take them home and translate them so she could understand what her loverboy was trying to say to her from across the Atlantic. I did, but found it quite difficult to figure out a way to explain to her that “oooooh”s and “uhhhh huhhh”s aren’t really words.
While Peter was gutting tomatoes with one of the cooks, he noticed that she was hum-mumbling a song that he recognized. He started laughing, she asked why, and he told her the song was called “Short Dick Man.” His demonstration of it needs no further explaination.
The rickety radio in the kitchen has rekindled my fire for Snoop Dogg though, which is a plus.