The Big Bang of Brazilian Pop Music, Tropicália, Turns 40
Brazzil Magazine, News Report, Marcelo Ballvé, Posted: Mar 01, 2007
It was exactly 40 years ago that the musical revolution that came to be known as Tropicália was introduced to Brazil, and the world. Tropicália's genesis can be dated with some precision. It came when two musicians in their mid-twenties, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, courageously took to the stage at a 1967 song festival in São Paulo with compositions that they knew would sorely stress the boundaries of musical taste.
Their performance was epoch-defining. It was a kind of big bang from which much that came afterward in Brazilian pop music history evolved.
In part to needle what he expected to be a conservative audience, Veloso had selected an eccentric, long-haired band of Argentine rockers for his backup band, at a time when long hair was still nearly taboo, and delivered a song, "Alegria, Alegria", or "Happiness, Happiness", which electrified the booing audience into silence.
"Alegria, Alegria" was an unmistakable departure from Brazil's songwriting tradition. It was an erudite reworking of archaic genres (the song is set to the rhythm of a marchinha, an Afro-Brazilian form influenced by ragtime in the '20s) organized around a trinity of electric guitar chords.
The song's contemporary references to Coca Cola and television, and the absence of comfortable nostalgia or sentimentalism, marked it as an unmistakable artifact of the sharp-edged, uncertain present in a Brazil of military dictatorships and political ferment.
The next day, at the same festival, Veloso's partner in crime, Gil, sang an equally provocative tune, "Domingo no Parque", or "Sunday in the Park". The lyrics centered on a double-murder committed by a jealous lover, and the musical arrangement was clearly influenced by the Beatles.
The song also contained the ubiquitous sounds of a berimbau, a traditional, resonating instrument of African origin made of a gourd, a wooden bow and a metal string. Gil was backed by a large orchestra and youthful São Paulo rockers Os Mutantes. His performance was a novel melding of tradition and the cutting-edge.
The two musicians had intentionally set out to trigger a musical upheaval, and they succeeded. Their movement, Tropicália, went on to sweep away the petty divisions that up to then had divided Brazilian rockers from bossa nova die-hards and old school samba crooners. Tropicália would combine the cosmopolitan sensibilities and lyrical precision of rock with the entire geological depth of Brazil's considerable musical tradition.
In his book Veloso quotes Brazilian critic and poet Augusto de Campos on the concept of novelty. "The old that was once new is as new as the newest of the new," writes Campos, whose concrete poetry movement heavily influenced Tropicália.
Campos is offering more than just a tongue-twister with this formulation. What he's proposing is a different attitude toward the past than that espoused by the traditional posture of revolutionaries in the arts. Instead of throwing out the past, he suggests a more transversal view of cultural history in which the peaks of creative efflorescence across the ages are joined into a kind of timeless, immortal New.
Much the same concept was advanced by Veloso on the back jacket of his 1967 joint album with Gal Costa, Domingo: "I no longer desire to thrive on nostalgia for other times and places; on the contrary, I wish to incorporate that nostalgia into a future project." According to Veloso, this is as close as he ever got to putting the Tropicália manifesto into writing.
Of course, Tropicália's future was not to be limitless. In fact, the movement's real existence was rather brief: it was launched in 1967 and had run out of steam by 1972. Brazil's military government did what it could to suffocate a movement that consciously sought to create the soundtrack to Brazil's counterculture with lyrics that were critical of hypocrisy in the upper classes and the country's abysmal economic inequality. Gil and Veloso were imprisoned and exiled to London for several years, returning to record some final thoughts on Tropicália in 1972.
Apart from the repression its artists suffered, the movement's self-consciously vanguard approach gradually rendered itself irrelevant by having largely achieved its principal aim: clearing prejudices from the musical establishment.
Like many revolutions, its star faded once its message had seeped far enough into popular consciousness. What was left was an afterglow of radical acoustic open-mindedness in which MPB, or música popular brasileira, continues to bask today, to its great benefit.
Veloso writes an accurate eulogy for Tropicália in his book, evoking the grand aims and partial victories:
"We had not attained socialism, had not even found its human face; neither had we entered the Age of Aquarius or the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost; we had not overcome the West, had not rooted out racism or abolished sexual hypocrisy. But things would never be as they had been."
In other words, Tropicália had sought a musical and social utopia and failed. Yet its failure is one of the greatest successes in the history of a great musical nation.
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