At what was supposed to be her last public performance, the singer Rita Lee, then in her mid-sixties, got into an argument with Brazilian military police in front of 20,000 people over a group of fans smoking a joint, calling the police, by several accounts, “horses,” “dogs,” and “sons of bitches.” It was a poetic end to a career whose provocations were indelible in part because of the casual confidence with which she leveled them, whether it was being a woman playing electric guitar during the mid-’60s (unheard of) or her frankness about mental health and female sexuality throughout the ’70s and ’80s. Her sound was always light—but her presence was something else. Born in São Paulo on December 31, 1947, Lee came to represent not only the shifting musical culture of ’60s Brazil, but its emergent cosmopolitanism and feminist consciousness. (She once told an interviewer that what separated her from her girlfriends in high school is that they wanted to marry a Beatle, but she wanted to be one.) She started her career with Os Mutantes, a band whose mix of Latin rhythms, American rock ’n’ roll, psychedelia, and elements from avant-garde and experimental music captured the playful rebelliousness of the late-’60s Tropicália movement. She left Mutantes in the early ’70s to start a solo career that kept her near the center of Brazilian pop culture for more than 40 years, including work as a children’s book author, radio host, and television presenter. She died in May 2023 at the age of 75.