As part of Afropop Worldwide's "Hip Deep" series, Christopher Dunn co-produced "The Tropical Soul of Jorge Benjor
on Afropop Worldwide". Here's the intro from his book, Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture (University of North Carolina Press, 2001)

Click here for a recommended reading list on Brazilian Music and Culture

Click here for more information including how to purchase.

Introduction

Every cultural complex has specific forms of consecration and adulation for its artistic luminaries. For Brazilian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso, perhaps the supreme moment of popular and official canonization came on February 20, 1998, as he surveyed a crowd of five thousand carnival celebrants in Salvador, Bahia while perched on top of a trio elétrico, a moving soundstage that transports electric dance bands through the city¹s streets. Since the early 1970s, he has made annual guest appearances on trios elétricos on the morning of Ash Wednesday to perform his songs that have become standards of the Bahian carnival repertoire.

This time, however, Veloso was there to receive the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the Federal University of Bahia for the "grandiosity of his oeuvre and his renowned wisdom."  In the past, the university had awarded the title to famous Bahian artists like novelist Jorge Amado, composer Dorival Caymmi, and filmmaker Glauber Rocha, but this was the first time the title had been conferred in the streets during carnival. For the rector of the university, it was a democratic gesture: "We want to integrate the university into society. For this reason we opted to pay homage to Caetano in the streets, together with the people celebrating carnival." Despite some editorial grumbling that the ceremony made the university look ridiculous, the event was a public relations success for the institution and its honored guest, an artist who has been at the forefront of musical innovation and cultural transformation since the late 1960s. As the carnival ceremony would suggest, Veloso is an artist who enjoys mass popularity as well as critical acclaim among intellectuals.

Veloso came to national attention together with his friend and colleague from the University of Bahia, Gilberto Gil, as leading figures of Tropicália, a short-lived, but high-impact cultural movement that coalesced in 1968. They worked collectively with other artists from Salvador, including vocalist Gal Costa, singer-songwriter Tom Zé, and poets Torquato Neto, and José Carlos Capinan. The so-called grupo baiano [Bahian group] had migrated to São Paulo where they forged a dynamic artistic relationship with several composers of the vanguard music scene, most notably Rogério Duprat, and the innovative rock band, Os Mutantes [The Mutants]. This alliance between musicians from Bahia, a primary locus of Afro-Brazilian expressive culture, and from São Paulo, the largest, most industrialized Brazilian city, proved to be a potent combination and has had a lasting effect on Brazilian popular music and others arts. Although Tropicália only coalesced as a formal movement in the realm of popular music, it was a cultural phenomenon manifest in film, theater, visual arts, and literature. The dialogic impulse behind Tropicália would generate an extraordinary flourish of artistic innovation during a period of political and cultural conflict in Brazil.  

The year of 1968 has special historic resonance for several nations around the world. Of course, significant events occurred on both sides of 1968, but in several national contexts the year serves as a generational watershed. In the United States, 1968 marked a public turning point against the Vietnam War, widespread antiwar student protests, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the emergence of the Black Power movement. In France, radical Maoist students and workers forged a brief tactical alliance against the post-war Gaullist State. The Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, putting an end to the democratic and liberationist aspirations of the Prague Spring movement. In Mexico City, student protests against high unemployment and repression of political dissent ended when hundreds of unarmed demonstrators were massacred by army and police detachments.

The symbolic density of 1968 is particularly evident in Brazil, especially for artists, intellectuals, students, workers, civilian politicians, and activists who opposed a right-wing military regime that had seized power in 1964. In 1968, broad sectors of civil society coalesced in opposition to the regime. Factory workers in São Paulo and Minas Gerais carried out the first strikes since the inception of military rule. Leftist students engaged in pitched battles with the military police and ultra-rightist allies in the universities. Meanwhile, more radicalized groups of the opposition went underground and initiated armed struggle against the regime. The government responded to civil protest and incipient armed resistance with a degree known as the Fifth Institutional Act (AI-5), which outlawed political opposition, purged and temporarily closed congress, suspended habeas corpus, established blanket censorship over the press, and effectively ended the protest movement. Thereafter, opposition to the regime would be expressed primarily through disparate movements of armed resistance, which were ultimately liquidated. The generation reaching adulthood at that time would subsequently be called the "geração AI-5," an emblematic reference to this draconian decree that initiated a period of intense repression.  

Cultural conflicts also came to a head in 1968, primarily within a largely middle-class urban milieu that opposed military rule. Artists and intellectuals began to reevaluate the failures of earlier political and cultural projects that sought to transform Brazil into an equitable, just, and economically sovereign nation. Tropicália was both a mournful critique of these defeats as well as an exuberant, if often ironic, celebration of Brazilian culture and its continuous permutations. As its name suggests, the movement referenced Brazil¹s tropical climate, which throughout history has been exalted for generating lush abundance or lamented for impeding economic development along the line of societies located in temperate climates. The tropicalists purposefully invoked stereotypical images of Brazil as a tropical paradise only to subvert them with pointed references to political violence and social misery. The juxtaposition of tropical plenitude and state repression is best captured in the phrase that serves as the title for this book, "brutality garden," which was taken from a key tropicalist song discussed in Chapter 3.

The musical manifestations of Tropicália did not propose a new style or genre. Tropicalist music involved, instead, a pastiche of diverse styles, both new and old, national and international. On one level, tropicalist music might be understood as a rereading of the tradition of Brazilian popular song in light of international pop music and vanguard experimentation. In Brazil, the tropicalists elicited comparisons with their internationally famous contemporaries, the Beatles, a group that also created pop music in dialogue with art music as well as with local popular traditions. The tropicalists contributed decisively to the erosion of barriers between música erudita, for a restricted audience of elite patrons, and música popular for the general public. Tropicália was an exemplary instance of cultural hybridity that dismantled binaries that maintained neat distinctions between high and low, traditional and modern, national and international cultural production.  

On a discursive level, the tropicalists proposed a far-reaching critique of Brazilian modernity that challenged dominant constructions of national culture. Instead of exalting the povo [masses] as agents for revolutionary transformation, their songs tended to focus on the quotidian desires and frustrations of "everyday people" living in the cities. Ultimately, the tropicalists would give impetus to emerging countercultural attitudes, styles, and discourses concerning race, gender, sexuality, and personal freedom. These issues were becoming increasingly salient in countercultural movements in the United States and Europe, but were manifested in distinct ways in Brazil during the period of military rule.

As with any cultural object or practice, the significance of Tropicália is not produced solely by the artists themselves. As Pierre Bourdieu has shown, the "symbolic production" (i.e. production of value and meaning) of art depends on a wide range of agents, including managers, producers, critics, and consumers.  A considerable body of journalistic and scholarly literature on Tropicália has accumulated in Brazil during the last thirty years. Cultural critics in the mainstream press of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro published the earliest articles about the movement. As the movement unfolded, the concrete poet and theorist Augusto de Campos wrote a series of enthusiastic articles which praised Veloso and Gil for their brazen critique of musical nationalism.  From the outset, several journalists were supportive of the movement, although other critics expressed anxiety over their unabashed enthusiasm for electric instrumentation, Anglo-American rock, and mass-media exposure.

In 1970, the literary critic Roberto Schwarz published a watershed essay about contemporary Brazilian culture and politics that became a fundamental reference for subsequent scholars of Tropicália.  Working within a tradition of Marxist criticism, Schwarz was the first critic to draw attention to the allegorical nature of Tropicália, noting its frequent allusions to anachronistic cultural emblems filtered through the "white light of ultramodernity" so as to convey the disjunctures of capitalist development in Brazil.  While recognizing the critical potential of the tropicalist allegory, he was troubled by its propensity to advance a fatalistic "atemporal idea of Brazil" that seemed to negate any potential for social transformation.  Several other critics revisited the question of allegory Tropicália during the 1970s, but with different conclusions. Celso Favaretto, for example, argued that the tropicalist allegory derived its critical effect precisely by leaving historical contradictions unresolved, thereby generating an indeterminate and fragmentary image of Brazil that could then be activated to satirize official culture.  The literary critic Silviano Santiago critiqued Schwarz for underplaying the specificity of Brazilian culture, which could not be adequately explained by dialectical reason.  Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda further contributed to the critique of Schwarz¹s position in her account of cultural politics during the sixties and early seventies. She asserted that Tropicália proposed a "new critical language" which refused the redemptive claims of more orthodox leftists, yet intervened directly on the level of individual attitudes and behavior, thereby paving the way for countercultural practices and discourses.  Veloso and Gil also contributed to debates surrounding Tropicália with their own volumes of collected interviews and articles from the mainstream and underground print media.

Tropicália has become the subject of a growing body of literature on contemporary Brazilian culture produced for a general reading public. Included in this category are didactic pocket books, secondary education texts, and lavishly illustrated coffee-table volumes.

In the 1990s, the music critic Carlos Calado, published two meticulously researched narratives relating to Tropicália-- one that focuses on the rock group Os Mutantes and the other that recounts the history of the movement.  Since the late seventies, Tropicália has been regularly revisited in the national press, usually in five-year intervals. The commemorative surge grew considerably in 1992-1993, when Veloso and Gil celebrated their fiftieth birthdays and recorded Tropicália 2, an album that reinterprets the movement within a contemporary context.

A wave of memorialist writing about the sixties in Brazil has also contributed to ongoing debates around the Tropicalist experience. Most of the earliest memoirs were written by former urban guerrillas and tended to ignore cultural debates.  Subsequent memoirs have focused more broadly on the existential crises, political disputes, and cultural conflicts of artists and activists. In 1997, Caetano Veloso published Verdade tropical [Tropical truth], a hefty tome that primarily focused on his personal experience in the tropicalist movement. Veloso offered a fascinating account of the sixties, political and cultural conflicts, and the lasting importance of Tropicália. His memoir provoked yet another round of debate in the national press over the value and significance of Tropicália, and more importantly, how it relates to contemporary culture.

The corpus of English-language literature relating to Tropicália is relatively small in light of its centrality to contemporary Brazilian culture. Drawing on the early formulations of Augusto de Campos, the ethnomusicologist Gerard Béhague, first introduced tropicalist song to a North American academic audience. Situating the movement within the context of post-bossa nova Brazilian popular music under military rule, Béhague argued that Tropicália had the effect of "liberating Brazilian music from a closed system of prejudices and giving it conditions of freedom for research and experimentation."  In the first scholarly book in the United States on Brazilian popular music, Charles Perrone explored the tropicalist poetics of Veloso and Gil, drawing attention to their "refined parody, sociocultural allegory, and structural experimentation."  In some ways, Perrone¹s book is a companion to Randal Johnson¹s study of Cinema Novo and David George¹s study of modern Brazilian theater, which discuss how Tropicália was manifested in these two artistic fields.  Following the resurgence of interest in Tropicália in Brazil and abroad, the journal Studies in Latin American Popular Culture dedicated an entire issue to the movement in 2000.

To fully appreciate the significance of Tropicália it is necessary to first examine preceding literary movements and musical phenomena that contributed decisively to what was understood to be a "national culture." The first chapter of this book discusses modernismo, a literary and cultural movement that began in the 1920s. Two basic imperatives guided the modernist generation: one oriented toward formal literary experimentation informed by European vanguards, and the other concerned with the articulation of what was distinctive about Brazil. I focus on two major modernist writers, Oswald de Andrade and Mário de Andrade, who both outlined projects for the renovation of Brazilian arts and letters that would have a sustained impact on subsequent generations.  Mário¹s pioneering work in musicology is particularly relevant to this book since it constituted a foundational statement of musical nationalism that would profoundly influence succeeding generations of composers and critics. Oswald is noted for his humorous and ironic interpretations of Brazilian history and culture most famously expressed in two manifestos. In his "Brazilwood Manifesto" (1924), he exhorted his colleagues to create a "poetry for export" that was neither deferent to, nor ignorant of metropolitan literary currents. Oswald further radicalized his project in the "Cannibalist Manifesto" (1928), which advanced a model for critically "devouring" cultural inflows from abroad. Cannibalism proved to be a compelling and controversial metaphor for artists and critics of subsequent generations. Forty years later, Veloso would claim that Tropicália was a form of "neo-cannibalism" relevant to the cultural context of the 1960s.

The vanguardist energies of Brazilian modernismo waned in the 1930s and 1940s, during the nationalist, populist, and ultimately authoritarian rule of Getúlio Vargas. The free-verse poetry, experimental prose, and provocative manifestos of the 1920s gave way to realist novels and social histories oriented primarily toward the "discovery" and documentation of Brazilian culture. Of particular salience was the articulation of a mestiço paradigm, which extolled cultural and racial hybridity as the foundation for a unified national identity. As elsewhere in the Americas, popular music would play a central role in the "invention," dissemination, and international projection of national culture. The samba singer and Hollywood film star, Carmen Miranda, played a particularly important role in this process and the tropicalists would later reference her with gleeful irony. The final part of this chapter examines eclipse of Miranda and other radio stars and the emergence of a cosmopolitan and internationalist aesthetic in the late 1950s, during a period of optimism regarding Brazil¹s prospects for democratic modernization and development. In the realm of popular music, the cool sophistication of bossa nova was emblematic of this period.

In the early 1960s, young artists who aspired to raise political consciousness among urban and rural working classes became increasingly disaffected with the introspective sentimentalism of early bossa nova. Chapter 2 discusses the populist and nationalist critique of bossa nova and the development of an urban protest culture following the coup of 1964. At this time, artists identified with an eclectic post-bossa nova category, which would later be denominated MPB (Música Popular Brasileira), were generally opposed to military rule. Like many other societies around the world, Brazil also had a homegrown rock movement known as the Jovem Guarda [Young guard], that attracted a large urban audience who were attracted to the consumer-oriented "youth culture" disseminated globally by the American culture industry. Many Brazilians associated rock with U.S. cultural imperialism and championed the MPB camp as the most appropriate musical expression of Brazilian modernity. The young Bahians were devotees of João Gilberto, the musical innovator of bossa nova, yet had become increasingly frustrated with an artistic community that defined aesthetic priorities according to the imperatives of cultural nationalism. In response, Gil and Veloso developed what they called the "universal sound," which they first performed during a televised music festival in 1967.

This event is generally considered to be an inaugural moment of the tropicalist movement together manifestations in film, theater, visual arts, and literature. Chapter 3 begins with a discussion of key cultural productions from other fields that converged with the musical project of the Bahian group and their allies in São Paulo. Of particular salience was Glauber Rocha¹s 1967 film Terra em transe [Land in anguish], a watershed in Brazil¹s Cinema Novo movement that allegorized the collapse of populism and the ascension of authoritarian rule in Brazil. Veloso has noted that the film represented a "traumatic moment" for left-wing artists, creating the conditions for what would soon be called "tropicalismo."  It dramatized a historical moment of crisis for progressive artists and intellectuals living under a right-wing military dictatorship. Rocha¹s directly influenced the "guerilla theater" of São Paulo¹s Teatro Oficina, which was subsequently identified with the tropicalist movement. Around the time that Gil and Veloso presented their "universal sound," Teatro Oficina staged "O rei da vela" [The candle king] (1933), Oswald de Andrade¹s modernist farce about the Brazilian elite, reconfigured for the present context. As shown in the color plates on this book, Tropicália also found expression in the visual arts, including album cover graphics, paintings, theater scenes, and installations from the late 1960s.

The story behind the naming of the movement suggests the degree of dialogic cross-fertilization among several artistic realms. After hearing one of Veloso¹s untitled compositions in late 1967, the cinematographer Luís Carlos Barreto detected affinities with an installation called "Tropicália" by the visual artist Hélio Oiticica. Despite Veloso¹s initial reluctance, he agreed to use "Tropicália" as the title of his song, which subsequently became a key song-manifesto of the movement. Tropicália would eventually serve as the name for the entire movement, although "tropicalismo" was more commonly used during the 1960s and 1970s. Veloso has expressed some ambivalence regarding the designation "tropicalismo" since it seemed to reduce the movement to a repertory of clichés about "life in the tropics" and evoked a remote affiliation with "Luso-tropicalismo," a theory of Portuguese colonial adaptability first advanced by Gilberto Freyre in the 1940s. The term "Tropicália," on the other hand, seemed to suggest a cosmopolitan and vanguardist attitude to which the Bahians aspired.  Like the 1920s avantgarde movement, Dada, the name Tropicália resists association with a succession of "isms." At the time of the movement, one critic argued that as a designation, "Tropicália," was preferable since "all Œisms¹ connote an extensive program with principles and norms, and all Œalias¹ (...) are composites intertwined with disparate and heterogeneous elements."  Although there is some merit in using "tropicalismo" to refer to the entire movement (as opposed to Oiticica¹s installation and Veloso¹s song), I have opted to use "Tropicália," or the "tropicalist movement," except when quoting directly from a source in which "tropicalismo" was originally used.

The remainder of chapter 3 is dedicated to the exploration of several representational strategies and themes developed extensively in individual efforts and a collective tropicalist "concept album" from 1968. I revisit the question of national allegory in the two tropicalist song-manifestos, "Tropicália" and "Geléia geral." This is followed by sections relating to the representation of urban migration, mass culture, political violence, and third-world marginality in tropicalist song. My general point here is to show that the tropicalists were engaged in critiquing quotidian life during a period of rapid and uneven modernization under military rule.

Although censors largely ignored tropicalist recordings, their public performances aroused suspicions among agents of the regime, who were disturbed by their caustic and irreverent attitude toward authority. Chapter 4 focuses on the conflicts and controversies surrounding tropicalist performances in music festivals, nightclubs, and televised programs. Soon after the promulgation of the Fifth Institutional Act in December 1968, Veloso and Gil were arrested and subsequently exiled to London. This chapter also discusses the brief "aftershocks" of the movement as represented by the tropicalist recordings of 1969, following the formal end of the movement. Of particular salience here were Gilberto Gil¹s recordings and press statements, which suggested a turn toward black cultural politics, which would become central to his musical production in the following decade. Following AI-5 many well-known Brazilian artists emigrated abroad, both for political and professional reasons. While most previous accounts of the tropicalist movement end in the late 1960s or early 1970s, I have extended my analysis to 1979, when the military regime passed an amnesty bill that allowed for the return of political exiles. Chapter 5 follows the artistic trajectory of the tropicalists, after the formal movement had ended. Gil and Veloso spent two and a half years in England, where they participated in the vibrant countercultural scene of "swinging London," revolving around the rock music scene, and interacted with the Caribbean immigrant community, absorbing emerging Afro-diasporic styles such as reggae. Upon their return, the former leaders of the tropicalist movement were celebrated as icons of a Brazilian countercultural movement, which was dedicated primarily to the politics of personal, rather than collective liberation. In the latter part of the 1970s, Gil and Veloso also became enthusiastic proponents of emerging Afro-Brazilian cultural movements associated with soul, reggae, and the Afro-Bahian carnival in Salvador. These phenomena were to varying degrees connected to a broader movement calling for the end of military rule.

The final chapter discusses the various revisitations and homages relating to Tropicália since the restoration of civilian rule in the mid-1980s. Throughout the 1990s, Tropicália received several public tributes during carnival, both in Rio and in Bahia. In 1992, Veloso and Gil produced a recording entitled Tropicália 2 that commemorated the movement and attempted to update its political and aesthetic concerns. This chapter highlights on the work of Tom Zé, an artist who launched his career with Tropicália, but then fell from public view as he continued to develop more experimental pop music. In the 1990s, he regained visibility with the international release of a compilation of his work from the 1970s and two innovative albums featuring new material. Together with the other tropicalists, Tom Zé found new audiences outside of Brazil, especially following a brief tropicalist vogue in the United States and Europe during the late 1990s. Attracted to the ironic and decentered pastiche aesthetics of Tropicália, international singer-songwriters drew attention to the movement and its principle figures. More importantly, the tropicalist movement has had a lasting impact on the production of popular music in Brazil. I will discuss the impact of this legacy on some contemporary artists who have claimed affinities with the tropicalist project.

This book provides both a diachronic and a synchronic analysis of the tropicalist movement. Chapters four and five focus exclusively on tropicalist cultural production during 1968. In each of the chapters, I have expounded on key issues that serve as thematic or theoretical detours from the narrative. Otherwise, it is structured chronologically so as to historicize Tropicália and to follow the trajectories of some of its key proponents after 1968. Instead of including long transcriptions and translations of entire song texts, I have highlighted phrases and stanzas that are particularly important to my arguments and observations. For readers who would like to hear audio samples and consult complete transcriptions and translations of lyrics, I highly recommend the CD Tropicália Essentials (Hip-O/Universal, 1999) a compilation of some of the most important tropicalist songs, many of which have since become standards of the Brazilian songbook. Well-crafted translations of several key tropicalist songs may also be found in Charles Perrone¹s Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Song and in the appendix to Gerard Béhague¹s essay "Bossa & Bossas." Readers of Portuguese who are particularly interested in the work of Gilberto Gil should consult his annotated book of lyrics, Todas as letras, organized by Carlos Rennó. Musicians may consult the two-volume songbooks of compositions by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil that feature lyrics and musical annotations of important works from the mid 1960s to the late 1980s. By the turn of the millennium all of the key figures of the tropicalist movement had also set up personal web-sites on the Internet that may be easily found using any search engine. There are presently several informative web-sites dedicated to Tropicália in Brazil and in the United States.





Contributed by: Christopher Dunn