During the later decades of the regime, the state increasingly appropriated fado as Portugal’s national song form and simultaneously promoted it in relation to Portuguese tourism. Along with the Catholic church, fado served as one of the three cultural pillars that bolstered the regime (fado, football, and the cult of the Saint of Fatima), sometimes referred to by Portuguese as simply as “the three Fs.” In the final decade of the regime, fado lyrics shifted more and more toward themes of saudade, romantic love, and fatalistic loss and away from expression of individual suffering, life story, or anything that might be read as critique of the regime. This tendency is reflected in the repertoire included in Amália Rodrigues’s 1957 Olympia album. Under censorship, lyrics proliferated that celebrated Portugal, the city of Lisbon and its quintessential fado neighborhoods, and Portuguese colonialism through a sentimental and romantic gaze. Some of these lyrics teach moral lessons, sometimes romanticizing poverty, extolling the moral virtues of humility and the nuclear family. Many lyrics from this period also implicitly or explicitly teach lessons about gender, how to be or feel properly feminine or masculine, woman or man, and what sentiments are appropriate in heterosexual romantic love. As a diverse and powerfully expressive poetic and musical genre that spanned multiple social strata while retaining deep roots in the working class, fado existed in a slippery and ambivalent relation to the state. While the dictatorship did much to control fado, censor it, and shape its message, some fado musicians and poets continued to sing and write fado, behind closed doors, that escaped the censors and critiqued ideologues and practices of the regime, sometimes singing and writing lyrics that listeners would understand by listening “in between the lines” (entrelinhas).
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