Brazilian singer-songwriter, skateboarder, filmmaker, screenwriter and businessman best known for being a founding member and the vocalist/main lyricist of the influential alternative rock band Charlie Brown Jr. The newspaper Folha de S. Paulo critic André Barcinski considered him “the nearest thing to a punk hero Brazilian mainstream music ever had”, and Eduardo Tristão Girão of Portal Uai called him “the bad boy of Brazilian rock” and “the spokesman of the youth of the 1990s”. Having been born and raised for most of his childhood in São Paulo, Chorão was the only Charlie Brown Jr. member not to be a Santos native, and its only founding member to remain consistently in all of the group’s line-ups.
A cousin of journalist and television presenter Sonia Abrão, he experienced an unhappy childhood; his parents divorced when he was 11 years old, and he dropped out of school in the seventh grade as he couldn’t afford the tuition fees and due to his unruly behaviour.
Eventually taking skateboarding as a pastime, he received the nickname “Chorão” (roughly translated as “cry-baby”) from his friends due to his emotionality. Around this time he would also develop his long-time cocaine addiction, which would plague him for the rest of his life.
He died on 6 March 2013 at age 42 in his apartment in the bairro of Pinheiros in São Paulo; the police, who initially dismissed the possibility of homicide, stated that the apartment was “heavily damaged” and in “state of disarray”. His cause of death was later ruled a cocaine overdose, but investigators could not determine if the overdose was intentional or accidental.
He has a son also named Alexandre (born 1990), nicknamed “Xande” in order to differentiate him from his father. In 2017 Alexandre published the book Eu Estava Lá Também, a compilation of photographs and memoirs from his father dating from 2005–2012; in 2020 he revealed that, shortly after his death, he had ordered a diamond made of a lock of his father’s hair.
Link to Wikipedia biography