I assume: excluding Amália, I can only hear one or two fados per quarter, perhaps a sensation similar to the one that stewed beans provoke to certain people.
In the past, fado smelled bad, it was poor and dirty, like horse mackerel wrapped in a sheet of the Diário Popular, in which the blood of the fish dyed the news, and the black ink of the Bairro Alto printers smudged his hands. The lyrics were about marialvas and bastards, saints and sacrifices, passions and stabs, scoundrel sex, motherfuckers who put their horns on, and they sang in the ghettos.
The interpreters were guided by higher testosterone levels than they, truth be told, higher than a gorilla in heat, wore funerary robes from head to toe, had a barrel-sized chest, and voices marinated by the contents of the even, usually Carrascão do Cartaxo. The marks of dyes on the skin that some had were reduced to small monochromatic doodles, memories of stays in Monicas or Linhó. Aside from references to motherly love in the colonies, these marks were shame that were quietly hidden.
