BLITZ 40 years: “When my two albums were best of the year for BLITZ, I felt a tremendous honor. It was transformative”, Dino D’Santiago
As we enter the countdown to the big BLITZ 40th anniversary party, at Meo Arena, in Lisbon, on December 12th – with shows by Xutos & Pontapés, Capitão Fausto, Gisela João and MARO –we asked musicians, promoters, journalists, radio hosts and other personalities to go to the trunk to retrieve memories from four decades of history, also leaving us a message for the future.
“When my two albums were considered best albums by BLITZ… there’s nothing that can compensate for the joy of Kalaf saying to me: ‘bro, I think you’re the first person of African descent to receive BLITZ’s album of the year’. He said it in a way that made it seem like I had won a Grammy or an Oscar”, recalls Dino D’Santiago, referring to “Kriola” and “Badiu”, chosen by the BLITZ team as the best national albums in the years in which they were released in 2020 and 2021 respectively, “there are many albums that I would put in first place, but my best feeling was: I feel like I deserved this place. It was one of the few times I was able to exercise my merit. Until then, it had always been a ‘wow, hell, this isn’t for me’. I felt there, genuinely, that I deserved that, for all the process of spiritual and mental construction that I had to do. More than being for me, for all the people who worked on the album, Seiji, Kalaf, Branko. It was a tremendous honor. It was transformative, it was truly transformative. Don’t think that the top of the magazine doesn’t matter to us. It matters a lot, more than any other award, because it is the magazine of excellence that talks about our works.”
Going back much further, D’Santiago marks the year 2004 as the year that marks the beginning of his connection with BLITZ. “The oldest memory, oddly enough, is the enthusiasm with which the New Max [dos Expensive Soul] I was waiting for the newspaper. That fascinated me. As he didn’t read much newspapers, it was his enthusiasm, as he was a person very passionate about music, instruments and who played on the records… and that was something that was very wonderful about BLITZ: he went to the records and discovered who the artists were. producers, active subjects and ghosts. So, my most beautiful memory is precisely his enthusiasm waiting for the newspaper to arrive at the stationery store. My passion for BLITZ started there, in Porto, in 2004. Afterwards, I have images of Virgul very proud every time Da Weasel appeared on BLITZ, when Sam The Kid and ‘Pratica(mente)’ appeared or when Valete also appeared… They were historic moments for us… I have these strong memories, very connected to hip-hop.”
“BLITZ’s greatest contribution, for me, is that it has truly resisted the new times, the digital era, and managed to reinvent itself so as not to disappear. For me, it was going to be a huge mourning”, argues the musician, “when we found out that the magazine would no longer be published physically, we thought ‘and now, who will look after us?’. And, suddenly, they multiplied on the digital scene and very well. Always with long articles, giving time for the artist to speak. The photographs are always iconic. I feel that not losing BLITZ to a physical era, moving to digital, meant that I never stopped being punk, strong in that punk and hip-hop sense of disruption, without fear of what people might think.” For the future, he hopes that, “whenever possible”, there will be “a physical collector’s edition”. “I would really love for there to be this BLITZ book, which we will all want to have on the shelf, after these 40 years, but already designing the next 40. I would really like to understand, through your thoughts, how you imagine the next 40 years ”.
