Sujeito De Sorte

A song from Alucinação

Alucinação, produced by Marco Mazzola and released in 1976, was the album that consolidated Belchior’s career, carried by “Apenas um Rapaz Latino-Americano”, “Velha Roupa Colorida” and “Como Nossos Pais”. Sujeito de Sorte, written by Belchior, is the fourth track on its first side.

Rolling Stone Brasil dates the song to 1973, when Belchior was already living in São Paulo and beginning to use his poetry to raise questions about the society of the time. Parcival Módolo, a conductor and arts coordinator at Mackenzie Presbyterian University in São Paulo, has described it as written in a period of political repression and as reflecting the culture shock of a young artist who had left a small town for the big city. On its release, he noted, it drew little attention.

A borrowed line

The song’s best-known line was not Belchior’s own invention. According to Rolling Stone Brasil and the historian Luiz Antonio Simas, speaking to Gazeta de São Paulo, it comes from Zé Limeira, a repentista, an improvising poet from the interior of Paraíba, whose surreal verses earned him the nickname “the poet of the absurd”. Gazeta de São Paulo adds that Belchior acknowledged the borrowing in interviews.

Simas also cautions that the existence of Zé Limeira’s verses is itself in doubt: the writer and journalist Orlando Tejo is suspected of having invented much of the poet’s work, together with other repentistas.

AmarElo and a second life

On 25 June 2019 the rapper Emicida released AmarElo, a single with the singers Majur and Pabllo Vittar, with a video filmed in the Complexo do Alemão. The track opens with a sample of Belchior singing Sujeito de Sorte, and the three artists also sing a version of the passage within the song. In remarks quoted by Rolling Stone Brasil, Emicida said the idea was for people to see themselves as bigger than their problems. The single gave its name to his album AmarElo, released that October.

Rolling Stone Brasil calls the song the gateway to Belchior’s work for many young listeners, and by 2022 CNN Brasil counted it as his most-played song on Spotify. The music journalist Alexandre Matias argued in the same report that a Belchior revival was already under way before the sample. Rolling Stone Brasil adds that the borrowed line inspired hashtags and even a Carnival bloc in Rio, and that the song was later recorded by Letrux and by Chico Chico.

Its reach goes beyond music. Before the match against São Paulo on 8 December 2024 that sealed Botafogo’s Brazilian league title, the club’s supporters hung a banner with the song’s best-known line at the Nilton Santos stadium, a reference to the previous season, when the team had led the league but lost the title. Belchior’s biographer Jotabê Medeiros, quoted by Gazeta de São Paulo, compared it with Geraldo Vandré’s Pra Não Dizer que Não Falei das Flores: that song became a symbol, he said, because people wanted its words to say what they were feeling, and he believes Sujeito de Sorte has the same appeal.

About Belchior

Antônio Carlos Belchior was born in Sobral, Ceará, on 26 October 1946. He left medical school in his fourth year, in 1971, to pursue music, moving to Rio de Janeiro and then to São Paulo. In 1972 Elis Regina recorded Mucuripe, his song with Fagner, and his first album followed in 1974; Elis also gave Como Nossos Pais its best-known version. He died on 30 April 2017, aged 70.

In Emblem World, Sujeito de Sorte sits in the Brazil music collection, where people discover and rate local food, drink and music.