Tropicália

Western pop “exploded” everywhere in the mid-Sixties. The shockwave hit hard in Bahia too, the coastal province around Salvador, the city that stood as Brazil's musical heartland.

That region had once been a hub for the slave trade in the years when the country was still a Portuguese colony: even today it's home to the largest Black population in Brazil and maintains strong ties with Africa and the Caribbean. Bahia has its own food, its own customs, its own rites tied to the Yoruba religion, brought over by slaves from Nigeria.

It was in Bahia, precisely, that Tropicália was born.

Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Maria Bethania and Gal Costa in 1964 – the year of the military coup – together with Tom Zé, staged a show titled Nos, por exemplo, an anthology of classic Brazilian popular songs from the Thirties through the Fifties, inaugurating the Vila Velha theatre in Bahia. It was the first of an ongoing series of shows that would take the group across the whole of Brazil to spread the new gospel. Others soon followed, among them Nova bossa velha e Velha bossa nova.

Samba and bossa nova were, in effect, devoured (and reworked) by this new sound. A kind of “cultural and musical cannibalism” that drew on the “Antropófago Manifesto” written by the poet Oswald de Andrade in 1928.

The result was a massive hit with Brazilian youth, and for a while the military authorities approved.

The Tropicalistas didn't sing lyrics that were overtly political, but the military read their whole attitude as such. It was the way they dressed, the way they spoke, their support for hippies and “new ideas.” And that amounted to a challenge to the military, to its claim to dictate rules and customs to Brazilian society.

For those musicians, the birth of Tropicália felt like a painful process, the full ripening of a social awakening that also spilled over into politics and economics, tangled up with existential, aesthetic and moral urgencies that pushed them to question everything. A movement that, as a result, broke lucidly and violently with the traditional taste of the era.

In the early works of Tropicália you can hear the Twenties harmonies of the Black composer Pixinguinha; you can hear jazz and foxtrot horns blending with lurching Afro-Brazilian rhythms. And moving “up” into the Thirties, you reach the rhythms of samba-canção, a romantic take on street samba.

This post-bossa period overlapped with the musical current known as Música Popular Brasileira. The era of amiable, nationalist protest pop, epitomized by singers like Elis Regina and Edu Lobo, was giving way to a sharper form of cultural expression.

Tropicália was, strictly speaking, the title of a 1967 installation by the artist Hélio Oiticica. A work inspired by the artist's own experience of life in Rio's favelas, in what he called the organic architecture of Brazil's poor: half-finished structures, makeshift additions tacked onto cheap houses, and so on. From there came the term Tropicália. Musically speaking, these artists now looked out at the world, moving beyond narrow national borders.

Besides their renewed interest in bossa nova and the music of the Nordeste, Veloso and Gil shared a special fondness for the Beatles, and especially for “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band”.

“Tropicàlia: Ou Pan et Cicencis” from 1967 took on the role of a collective manifesto for the movement; it wasn't a simple sampler, but a genuine collaborative work, with different singers on each track. One of the songs, “Parque industrial”, bore the signature of Tom Zé: a masterpiece of both music and writing, Zappa-esque in the former, Cohen-esque in the latter.

Veloso's self-titled 1968 album contains “Alegria Alegria”, whose closing refrain “porquè nào” could have been read as a challenge to the restrictions imposed by the military government, or simply to the closed, exclusionary attitude of non-Tropicalista musicians, like the nationalists of Musica popular brasileira or the crooners of Jovem Guarda. Other tracks, such as “Supercabana” and “Baby”, are marked by thoroughly poetic lyrics and fiercely innovative music.

The military showed growing concern over the movement's astonishing success — both because of the music's anti-establishment stance, and because of suspicions that those rebellious-looking singers might belong to anti-government guerrilla organizations.

The album mentioned earlier, “Tropicàlia: Ou Pan et Cicencis”, embodied the coexistence of many different, seemingly opposite cultures within Brazil itself: a hybrid record, loaded with geographical references to the whole country, from the arid, impoverished Nordeste to Bahia with “Itapoa”, from Ipanema to Brasilia, but also classics such as “Luar do Serto” by Joào Pernambuco and “A banda” by Chico Buarque de Hollanda. The same traits could be found in Gilberto Gil's songs – “Batmacumba” and “Marginalia II” – where rebellion found a more vivid expression through the new arrangements.

Right at the end of 1967 came Gilberto Gil's second album, also self-titled — perhaps the finest of all the records the movement produced. The album is given extra weight by the snarling guitars of Os Mutantes within arrangements that also featured double cane flutes and brazen brass sections. On “Pega A Voga” Gil took a folk song from the Amazon and, with the help of producer Duprat (the movement's deus ex machina), turned it into an improvised shout-along that sounded like an out-of-control Yardbirds session, topped off by the smeared guitar riffs of Lanny Gordin. Amid carnival rhythms and indigenous musical structures, the themes of Gil's lyrics reflect the alienation of modern middle-class life. One song, “Ele Falava Nisso Todo Dia”, tells of the suicide of a twenty-five-year-old from São Paulo, more concerned with his own life insurance policy than with life itself.

Hot on its heels, and pushing the avant-garde, rule-breaking style even further, came the self-titled debut by Os Mutantes, which contains more studio post-production than any other record Duprat produced (worth remembering he studied at Darmstadt): tape hiss, backwards vocal tracks, amplified sewing machines. The band was a Zappa-style outfit built around a trio made up of guitarist Sergio Dias Baptiste, his brother Arnaldo on bass and keyboards, and singer Rita Lee.

1969 opened with the collective performance at the Teatro Castro Alves, which also marked the farewell concert of the two rebels Gil and Veloso, forced out by pressure from the military. The musicians took refuge in London, after a brief stop in Lisbon, and while Gil played the clubs with David Gilmour of Pink Floyd and even recorded an album (a hybrid of Brazilian and hippy music, with titles like “I tre funghi” and “Volkswagen blues”), Veloso spent his exile channelling singer-songwriter Donovan with a lysergic “London London”.

Three years later, once the military felt more secure and pop no longer seemed to pose a threat, Gil and Veloso were able to return from exile and continue their rise to international fame (Gil immediately began working with Jimmy Cliff, cutting several tracks together). That was the period of the albums “Juntos” and “Ao Vivo”, in which artists like Chico Buarque explored the marriage of old and new with passion and clarity.

Around the same time, Milton Nascimento set about shattering a symbol strangely left untouched by his Tropicalista friends: football, and specifically the national team, a great source of pride for the dictatorship. He did so with one of the few sambas in his catalogue, the song “Aquì è o pais de futebol”. The lyrics clearly present football as a kind of national anesthetic, capable of distracting people from their individual and collective problems. In true Tropicalista fashion, Milton passes no judgment on the social role of the sport — he simply exposes it, leaving listeners to draw their own conclusions.

It was January 1972, and Veloso had just returned from London, preparing for a new phase in his approach. In particular, his subsequent contact with African culture led him to rediscover the pleasure of dance paired with music: the sound of some of his compositions thus regained their typical Brazilian charm.

The true showman of the movement, however, turned out to be Antonio Josè Santana Martins, known by the stage name Tom Zé, a student of Ernst Widmer (himself a disciple of Bártok and Stravinsky), less inclined to travel and more firmly rooted in local reality, with a discography as bumpy as few others. Ancient traditions and unusual sounds came filtered through a light, graceful sensibility, capable of evoking, within the same song, the smoke of a jazz club and the mystery of the Amazon rainforest, the anger of going hungry and metaphysical flight, experimental humour and the most genuine ethnic resonances. All of it under the banner of sheer unpredictability, an utterly melodic sensibility, and a typically naif free spirit, forever balanced between Western pop and Brazilian moods, drifting in and out of improvisation.

Celebrated by his own champions Veloso and Gil on “Tropicália 2” (in 1993, for the movement's twenty-fifth anniversary, after Brazil had returned to democratic government), relaunched by Soul Jazz with the compilation “Tropicalia – A Brazilian Revolution In Sound”, and paid tribute by international artists such as David Byrne, Arto Lindsay and Beck (who in 1998 dedicated “Mutations” specifically to Os Mutantes), Tropicália remains a genuine revolution, in both words and music.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google