Astrud Gilberto's melancholy, haunting, and consistently flat voice would never be allowed in today's AutoTune world. What a loss that would be.
Why do women so frequently sing "The --Boy-- from Ipanema" instead of the original lyrics? I think it works so much better and is so much more complicated than its elevator-music status when sung by a woman as the 'girl' from Ipanema. I've always imagined this to be about a girl who loves a boy who thinks he loves this mythical, totally unattainable "girl from Ipanema (GFI)" who apparently everyone who is young and lovely is also in love with. "She looks straight ahead not at he..." So probably this GFI knows just exactly how attractive she is and enjoys walking by the sea so as to attract all the attention which she can then ignore. And then there's this girl who is probably every bit as beautiful in her own way, but who is probably invisible to this poor sap because he sees her everyday. And so this second girl who loves the starstruck boy is heartbroken, because she feels badly that he is so desperately lovesick and at the same time wishes he would redirect his attention to someone who will return all the enormous capacity for love this sucker apparently has. And when Astrud Gilberto sings it, thats what it sounds like to me. That she observes this boy observing this girl and she acknowledges how beautiful the GFI is, and is maybe even a tiny tiny bit sweetly sardonic in describing her. The bridge is so much more legato and sustained than the back and forth of the A sections, and thats when she's being wistful about this moron she's had the misfortune to fall in love with.
That just seems like a heck of a much more compelling plot for an otherwise unremarkable bossa nova tune, and one that I think would go a long way towards rescuing that tune from the banality its been reduced to. And then men could still sing it as the Girl from Ipanema, and the storyline might be one of reminiscence about his younger self, and how captivated he was by this stunning beauty. Like he's a younger boy, and she's just enough older that he's totally and completely invisible to her by virtue of his age, and he's in love anyway.
Anyway, I still love the Gilberto/Getz version of that tune, and wish more people could play it honestly and without all the accreted irony and kitsch, and also without dumbing down the interpretation of the lyrics. So few tunes tell compelling stories and I think this could actually be one of them.
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