Tropicália was a cultural phenomenon that emerged in the late 1960s in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro as Brazil was entering the most repressive phase of military rule. It was manifest in several areas of cultural production, including film, theater, visual arts, and literature, but only coalesced as a formal movement in the realm of popular music. The tropicalist movement was led by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, two young singer-songwriters from Salvador, Bahia, a city on the northeastern coast noted for its vibrant Afro-Brazilian expressive cultures. In the mid-1960s, they migrated south to Rio de Janeiro along with fellow Bahian musicians, Gal Costa, Maria Bethânia, and Tom Zé. By 1967, the "Bahian Group" had moved to São Paulo, the largest and most industrialized city of South America where they came into contact with the poetic and musical vanguards of the city. Through their friendship with the concrete poet Augusto de Campos, the Bahian group met future collaborators including the innovative psychedelic rock band Os Mutantes (The Mutants) and Rogério Duprat, an avantgarde composer-arranger associated with the Música Nova group. This alliance between the Bahians and the São Paulo vanguard would revolutionize Brazilian popular music. The tropicalists did not propose a new style or genre. Their music involved, instead, a pastiche of diverse styles, both new and old, national and international. 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. Tropicália was an exemplary instance of cultural hybridity that dismantled binary distinctions between high and low, traditional and modern, national and international cultural production. They were criticized by segments of the left-wing which doubted their political sympathies in the struggle against the dictatorship. Yet their anarchic and irreverant "happenings" also alarmed the military authorities who eventually arrested Gil and Veloso and exiled them to London in 1969. Ultimately, the tropicalists would give impetus to emerging countercultural attitudes, styles, and discourses concerning race, gender, sexuality, and personal freedom. Christopher Dunn A Look At Tropicalia by Chris McGowan & Ricardo Pessanha (An Excerpt From: The Brazilian Sound) When Caetano Veloso performed his Trópicalia anthem "Alegria Alegria" (Joy Joy) at Brazil's TV Record musical festival in 1967, he was booed. Much of the audience was intensely nationalistic. They revered "authentically" Brazilian music and detested what symbolized U.S. colonialism. To them, "Alegria Alegria" was Americanized because it was a rock song and Veloso was backed by a rock group, Os Beat Boys. Many also didn't respond to its strange, fragmented imagery. Walking against the wind Without handkerchief, without documents In the almost December sun, I go The sun scatters into spaceships, guerrillas . . . Teeth, legs, flags, the bomb and Brigitte Bardot Gilberto Gil's entry, "Domingo no Parque" (Sunday in the Park), received a much warmer response, in part because it wasn't rock and roll. But it was something markedly different. It included a Bahian capoeira rhythm, electric instrumentation, and cinematic lyrics. The song was arranged by Rogério Duprat, a Paulista who had a solid background in both classical and electronic music. He was willing to offer his experience as an avant-garde musician to the Tropicalia musicians, whose sonic experiments startled Brazil in the late '60s. The arrangement was influenced by the Beatles' "A Day in the Life" from their 1967 Sgt. Pepper's album. When Gil wrote "Domingo," he was listening over and over to the Beatles' song, which he says was "my myth of the time." Gil then created an equally fascinating song, in which Bahia met George Martin (and Rogério Duprat). At the TV Record Festival, the winning song was Edu Lobo's "Ponteio" (Strumming). The jury put "Domingo no Parque" and "Alegria Alegria" into second and fourth places, respectively. But those tunes had an enormous impact and introduced Tropicália music to the public. In the liner notes of the retrospective Grandes Nomes: Caetano, music critic Tárik de Souza wrote about Veloso's performance: "The introduction of electric instruments to Brazilian popular music, until then unplugged, the new costumes, made of plastic, the bristling hair of the performers and the aggressive stage performances, making a stark contrast with the acoustic guitar and the quietude of bossa nova, were elements that changed definitely the course of Brazilian popular music." When Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso--both from Bahia--moved to São Paulo in 1965 and were exposed to the burgeoning, heady arts scene there and in Rio de Janeiro, they developed the idea of creating an iconoclastic mixture of music in which everything would have its space. Luiz Gonzaga, the Beatles, João Gilberto, Chuck Berry, film director Jean-Luc Godard: everything would be cannibalized and put into the stew. Their lyrics would be sometimes poignant, other times surreal, always provocative. In Tropicália, anything went: rock and samba, berimbaus and electronic instruments, folk music and urban noise, the erudite and the kitsch. There had been rock and roll in Brazil since the late 1950s, but this was the first time it was being mixed with native styles (and much else). Tropicália was not only a musical phenomenon. It was an entire arts movement, which lasted roughtly from 1967 to 1969. It manifested itself in music, theater, poetry, and the plastic arts. The word Tropicália came from a 1967 ambient-art piece by Hélio Oiticica. Some of the Tropicalistas' ideas had precedents in the works of the Paulista poet Oswald de Andrade, who four decades earlier had created the concept of artistic cannibalism, which he discussed in his 1928 "Manifesto Antropofágico" (Cannibalistic Manifesto). Gil and Veloso took Andrade's ideas to heart, devouring everything--national music and themes and imported cultural elements--and then re-elaborating it all "with autonomy," as Andrade had urged. "Power to the imagination" and "Down with [aesthetic] prejudice" were slogans that inspired Tropicália. Other musicians who participated in the movement included Júlio Medaglia (another classical conductor), Gal Costa, Torquato Neto, Os Mutantes, Capinam, and Tom Zé. More About Tom Zé Musically and lyrically, Tropicalista songs were intelligent and often ironic montages. One of its most representative songs was Gil and Neto's "Geléia Geral" (General Jelly), which mixed bumba-meu-boi, a folkloric style from Maranhão, with electric rock instrumentation. In the song's lyrics, the traditional ("sweet mulata," "Mangueira where samba is purer," and "saintly Bahian baroque") was juxtaposed with the modern ("TV," "Formiplac and the azure sky," and "I get a jet, travel, explode"). Perhaps the most important recording by the movement was the group album Tropicália: Ou Panis Et Circensis, released by Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Rogério Duprat, Os Mutantes, Gal Costa, Nara Leão, and Tom Zé in 1968. Tropicália opened a temporary gap between the political avant-garde and cultural avant-garde, but by the early 1970s its ideas would be quite acceptable. Tropicália songs were aesthetically daring and sporadically brilliant and included a few masterpieces such as "Domingo no Parque." Ironically, the most controversial Tropicália tunes--the ones with the strongest rock and roll influence--were generally the weakest of the bunch. The movement had a brief life (it was over by 1969), but it greatly accelerated MPB's musical experimentation and hybridization and gave all musicians who came after it a greater sense of creative freedom. It would also reach out decades later to influence international artists from David Byrne to Beck. Excerpted from The Brazilian Sound: Samba, Bossa Nova and the Popular Music Of Brazil (Temple University Press, 2nd ed., 1998), first published in 1991. © Chris McGowan & Ricardo Pessanha, 1991 / 1998 Reproduction and web use not permitted without consent of the authors. Lol..uhm yeah sure I asked. Tropicalia By Jessica Moore The rise of the musical style known as Tropicalismo began in the early 1960s as young Brazilian artists and musicians, tired of the classic style of bossa nova and weary of the increasingly restrictive tenor of the government, began experimenting with new sounds that reflected the cultural changes they saw everywhere around them. Bossa had reigned supreme in the Brazilian popular music scene since its emergence in the late 1950s, but by the early '60s, it was considered passe by a younger generation eager to push the limits of artistic expression. The rise of a military dictatorship in 1964 served as a clarion call for Brazilian artists to band together and subvert the government's powers, using culture as their weapon. Pioneered by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, Tropicalismo emerged as an attempt to assimilate musical styles and achieve a compromise between national and international influences. To that end, Gil and Veloso combined strains of blues, rock, psychedelia, folk and jazz with Latin American genres bossa nova and samba, and dubbed the hybrid a "universal sound," which they debuted at a 1967 televised music festival. The music moved Brazil into the forefront of pop avant-garde. Veloso writes in his autobiography, Tropical Truth, that the movement found its roots in modernist poet Oswaldo de Andrade's anthropophagic philosophy. In the 1920s de Andrade wrote The Cannibal Manifesto, addressing the perceived European view of Brazil as a land inhabited by cannibals. De Andrade shifts this idea to discuss a cultural rather than a physical cannibalism, suggesting Brazil should take morsels of European culture and recast them in a Brazilian light. When Tropicalismo was emerging, Brazil already had its own rock style known as Jovem Guarda (Young Guard) which was popular with young urbanites who were attracted to the consumerism of American youth culture. This was in contrast to artists active in the Musica Popular Brasileira (MPB) movement, a post-bossa nova style. Followers of MPB detested the perceived imperialism of American music and culture, believing MPB was an appropriately independent type of musical expression for Brazil. "After the bossa nova revolution, and to a great extent because of it, there emerged the tropicalista movement, whose aim it was to sort out the tension between Brazil the Parallel Universe and Brazil the country peripheral to the American Empire," Veloso writes in Tropical Truth. The artistic combination of Brazilian and international styles made for an eclectic and sometimes jarring spectacle. Brazil's right-wing military regime soon deemed the new music subversive and some musicians on the left criticized it as a muddy fusion of styles. Larry Rohter of the New York Times writes that the movement sought to mix "electric instruments, political egalitarianism, foreign influences, sexual freedom, the celebration of home-grown musical styles considered déclassé, mind-bending drugs and avant-garde poetry." While music was the cornerstone of the movement, Tropicalismo's powerful current encompassed other improvisational art forms, and was seen on late 1960s album covers, on the stage, in paintings and in films. A particularly important example of Tropicalismo in a nonmusical format is the 1967 film "Terra em transe" ("Land in anguish"). Considered a landmark in Brazil's Cinema Novo movement, the film is an allegory for the rise of military rule in Brazil. The reign of Tropicalismo as a formal movement was brief, although its influences are still felt nearly 40 years later. It flourished in 1967 and 1968, until the Brazilian government passed the Fifth Institutional Act in December 1968. The act, which granted President Costa e Silva dictatorial power, was a catalyst for artists and musicians to flee Brazil. Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso were jailed for several months in 1968, and then lived in exile in London before returning home in 1972.