Yoñlu

Early life

Vinícius Gageiro Marques was born on September 1, 1989 in the town of Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil to Ana Maria Gageiro, a psychoanalyst and college professor, and Luiz Marques, a former Secretary of Culture who was also a college professor. Due his mother's job, he moved to Paris when he was three and started learning French, but moved back to Brazil when he was seven. He also gradually started to learn English through watching TV and listening to music, and even learned to speak Welsh and read Spanish. Due to a what his father called a "chemical imbalance", he started talking therapy at age nine.

Marques's musical talent also aspired from an early age. At age 4, he started to play drums for the first time, and later began to start playing piano and guitar.

Teenage years

To battle his growing depression and displacement at school and real life, Marques had a frequent presence on the Internet. When he was 13, he started capturing his daily life via a camera he bought, and started to demonstrate a critical sense on pop music. On July 26, 2004, he signed up for a gaming forum called RLLMUK, and quickly became a regular on there. He also made a blog via Blogspot, and over the course of his teenage years, he collaborated with others via music (which included a collaboration with Sabrepulse) or via photo projects, and shared drawings, photos, mixes, and music that he made, and became a fan of many types of musicians such as Gilberto Gil, Leonard Cohen, John Frusciante, Caetano Veloso, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Neutral Milk Hotel, Grandaddy, and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. He was also an avid reader of Franz Kafka.

Marques had first been shown to be suicidal in May 2006, when he posted to a thread he made onto RLLMUK stating "Quick, someone say something really nice about my songs before I decide to KILL MYSELF." However, due to generous words of support, he decided to "postpone" his suicide, and he frequently mentioned killing himself soon after that on the thread whilst sharing his songs to others up until his death.

At around this time, his mother found the lyrics to his song Suicide on his bed, and in a frantic state, she confronted him about it and searched online to find his traces of suicidal thoughts, and got him into a therapy session. However, Marques seemed to be doing better and improved afterwards.

Death

On the afternoon on July 26, 2006, Marques told his parents that he would be having a barbecue, and had them leave the apartment for the day since he wanted to impress a girl. However, he made plans to kill himself instead and locked himself in his bathroom with two grills, and posted on a forum asking for help to kill himself. While some people in the thread tried to plead him to stop, others in the thread helped him kill himself, and even a retired firefighter told him to lay face down with a damp towel over himself for the easiest way out. His last post was at 15:02.

In the meantime, a Canadian online friend of Marques's found out what was happening and immediately called the local police, and gave them his address. Although the police and medics were able to get inside the apartment and clear the smoke, Marques was pronounced dead by suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning at approximately 15:30 after unsuccessfully being resuscitated multiple times.

Marques left a CD-R of a few of his songs and a suicide note to his parents, which absolved them from any responsibility from his death and thanked them for their support.

Legacy

After his death, his father looked through his computer and found tons of his songs, and in 2008, the album Yoñlu was released on the Allegro label, featuring a scattered version of most of his songs. However, in 2009, the label Luaka Bop released a more flowing album titled A Society in Which No Tear Is Shed Is Inconceivably Mediocre, which received good reviews from critics and built his legacy as a troubled teenage songwriter.

In 2017, a movie based on the life of Marques, directed by Hique Motanari, is scheduled to come out.

Albums

EPs