Shuffle Synchronicities: Volume 1 - #190
"País Tropical" by Jorge Ben Jor - 07/11/21
"País Tropical" by Jorge Ben Jor
"País Tropical" was composed by the Brazilian musician Jorge Ben Jor in the late 1960s and coincided with the Brazilian nationalistic spirit of ufanismo.
The opening lines are:
I live in a tropical country blessed by God
Which feels like how I feel today.
Because I found my wallet!
Which I wrote about losing yesterday.
The tropical fruit sellers on my block where I bought pineapple, mango, watermelon, melon, and more on Friday after tennis have it!
Sure, they implied they want a little propina for it.
But I’ll be picking it up tomorrow.
It’s a reminder that if you have trust in the benevolence of the universe, it’s almost always quite a benevolent place.
Or as Jorge sings:
I am a boy of ordinary outlook
It’s true, but I’m happy all the same
To secure the propina, which is a tip in Spanish, I asked my buddy who lives nearby in Echo Park if I could take him to a bank and Venmo him for some cash.
Afterward, he suggested, not me, that we get some Açaì Bowls, which is another synchronicity because it’s a Brazilian food!
While eating them, we watched the music video for 1990s New York rap group A Tribe Called Quest’s famous song, “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo”.
I left my wallet in El Segundo
I left my wallet in El Segundo
I left my wallet in El Segundo
I got to get it, I got, got to get it
El Segundo, for those that don’t know, is a small incorporated city in Los Angeles County.
But the funny thing is, and another synchronicity is that my friend reminded me that he had actually written about this song in his Instagram posts about the unincorporated cities in LA, and it turns out he wrote about it exactly 52 weeks i.e. one year ago.
So we left Brooklyn and we made big tracks
Drove down the Belt, got on the Conduit
Came to a toll, and paid and went through it
Had no destination, we was on a quest
Ali laid in the back so he can get rest
Drove down the road for two-days-and-a-half
The sun had just risen on a dusty path
Just then a figure had caught my eye
A man with a sombrero who was 4 feet highI pulled over to ask where we was at
His index finger he tipped up his hat
El Segundo, he said, my name is Pedro
If you need directions, I'll tell you pronto
He reminded me that Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest just used the name “El Segundo” as a joke, depicting it as a desert, and not the real coastal place in LA.
In the video, here’s where the map of their driving in the video ends:
So El Segundo is somewhere in a southern Ohio desert? Ha!
Q-Tip explained how he came up with the idea and lyrics for this song in an interview with Wax Poetics:
“On ‘I Left My Wallet in El Segundo,’ I would always watch Sanford & Son, and Fred Sanford always talked about El Segundo, [as a joke, like “Godzilla Eats El Segundo!”] so I turned it into a fun record. It was nonsensical.”
Here’s my friend’s post from a year ago and quoted below. He also reminded me that we actually went to El Segundo together for some of his photos including this one:
“City of El Segundo! -- In A Tribe Called Quest''s "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo," the city is imagined as a small town in the middle of the desert with a strong Mexican cultural influence. This is creative license. (The group had heard of El Segundo from "Sanford and Sons" and didn't realize it was a real place.) The video was filmed in Nevada. -- Real El Segundo is on the ocean and demographically one of the whiter cities in LA County. Gary Johnson hit 5% here in 2016. -- If you've ever taken the 105 to LAX and noticed a row of corporate headquarters on your left, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman: that's El Segundo. -- The city got its name from Standard Oil. It was the location of "the second" oil refinery they built on the west coast, when the land was first being developed for commerce and industry. Standard Oil is now Chevron, and the refinery is still there. El Segundo is a Chevron town; all the gas stations are Chevrons. -- They have a lot of filming there, but it's one of the most expensive film permits in the studio zone. El Segundo High School is shot all the time (Superbad, Fresh Prince). It has a very traditional look for a SoCal school building. There are frequent fights between the school and citizens over how many filming days they can have each year. -- Uphill from the beach, restaurants serve American bistro fare. The enchiladas I had were pretty good.”
So, yeah, while the adventure of getting back the wallet isn’t quite over, it’s looking good.
Or as Q-Tip raps:
we gotta go back
Come on, let's go
Okay, that’s the one hundred and ninetieth Shuffle Synchronicities.