roberto schwarz

POLITICAL IRIDESCENCE

The Changing Hues of Caetano Veloso

T
he autobiography of an iconic singer-songwriter like
Caetano Veloso might seem to demand a reviewer versed in
musicology, and it should be said at the outset that I have
no such knowledge.1 But Caetano’s Tropical Truth struck me
as a work of genuine literary interest when I first read it in 1997; and
as time passed I came to feel that this memoir of the Brazilian music
scene in the 60s and 70s, the moment of tropicalismo, was as important
as Caetano’s songs and merited a close reading.2 Tropical Truth reads,
in part, like a novel of ideas in which historical circumstances, contem-
porary debates and the figure of the narrator, both a protagonist and a
committed intellectual, combine to offer new insights into a key junc-
ture of national life. As in the best realist prose, the chemistry between
the deliberate designs of the author and the latent structures of the nar-
rated material ensures that the composition is more than the sum of its
parts. Caetano has a gift for pen portraiture, and his characterizations
of fellow artists—sometimes spiced by professional rivalry—constitute
a lively contemporary gallery, in which the figures interact to produce
a vivid panorama of the ‘64 generation’ as a whole: his sister Maria
Bethânia, a famous singer in her own right; the film-maker, Glauber
Rocha; musicians like Chico Buarque and Caetano’s close collaborator,
Gilberto Gil; the theatre director, Augusto Boal; the modernist poet,
Augusto de Campos; and many more.

The memoir, covering Caetano’s early formation, fame, imprisonment

by the military regime, exile and return to Brazil, is also a chronicle of
tropicalismo, the iconoclastic musical and counter-cultural force that
flourished at the height of the dictatorship—the landmark collaborative

new left review 75 may june 2012 89

 90 nlr 75

album Tropicália, or Bread and Circuses was released in 1968—written

in virtuoso prose style. The inter-relations between private life, public
stance and artistic creation—the cultural-political challenges that face a
pop star in a Third World setting—lend a structuring unity to the whole.
It would be less surprising to find a memoir of this sort written by a prac-
titioner of ‘high culture’—an architect, a poet, a conductor. As Caetano
remarks, ‘that clear distinction between classical and popular musicians
robs the latter of the right (and obligation) to address themselves to seri-
ous cultural issues’.3 Yet Tropical Truth also demonstrates the intellectual
emancipation of Brazilian popular music, as a self-reflective component
of the contemporary scene; its discussion of the aesthetic and social
choices confronting musicians raises these questions to the level of
critical artistic practice, without abandoning or compromising his mass
audience. The interest of this difficult, perhaps unsustainable, position
speaks for itself.

In Brazil, as in other countries of the periphery, two senses of the term

‘popular’ co-exist: an older meaning, signifying illiteracy and social
exclusion, and a newer one, involving the mass market and the culture
industry. Since the conditions underpinning the first have not disap-
peared even as the second has triumphed, both are experienced together;
social exclusion (the past?) and the globalized market (progress?) are
not incompatible. This double sense of ‘popular’ structures the music
scene more than any other; Caetano’s representation of it thus comes
interwoven with a broader class reality, whose politics and aesthetics
go beyond any general notion of ‘pop’. The alliance of vanguard aes-
thetics with the popular culture of the marginalized and illiterate has
been a long-standing programme. Rehearsed by modernist circles in

1
This is a slightly shortened version of ‘Verdade Tropical: Um percurso de nosso
tempo’, in Martinha versus Lucrecia: Ensaios e entrevistas, São Paulo 2012. Caetano
Veloso is cus­tomarily described in the American and British media as a Brazilian
Bob Dylan: a star of the 1960s and 70s, whose songs have combined radical politics
and poetic lyricism, samba rhythms and electric guitar. Schwarz’s essay makes clear
how wide of the mark that comparison is. Deeply marked by the country’s social
divisions, the us popular music traditions of the early sixties—blues, folk, coun-
try-and-western—could not have produced a mass national-hegemonic cultural
movement, with a huge following on tv, to compare with Música Popular Brasileira
(mpb). In Brazil, the cultural ferment of the sixties was far more politicized. [nlr]
2
Caetano Veloso, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil, New York
2002; originally published as Verdade Tropical, São Paulo 1997. Henceforth tt.
3
tt, p. 275.
 schwarz: Caetano Veloso 91

Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s, it took shape as a larger social movement

in the early 60s when, under the sign of a political radicalization verg-
ing on pre-revolution, experimentalism became a part of, and metaphor
for, imminent social transformation—though with the military coup of
1964, Brazil would be steered to the right, not the left.

During this period, artistic life lost its esoteric character and became
what it really is: the intervention of the imagination in social real-
ity. Written thirty years later, Tropical Truth owes much of its affect to
Caetano’s fidelity to that time, which he calls ‘remote and dated only for
those intimidated by the challenges that presented themselves then, or
for those justifiably afraid to rise to such challenges now’.4 Yet, as we
shall see, the book also reflects the moment of its composition in the late
1990s, when global capitalist ‘normalization’ was in full swing. The vivid
sense of the conflicts at stake, which gives the book its exceptional scope
and depth, co-exists with a more conciliatory and complacent, even mys-
tifying, perspective; like shot silk, the writing can change its coloration
depending on the point of view. Yet, as with all great realist literature,
the power of the narrative’s overall composition can endow its internal
contradictions with meaning, enriching the complexity of the whole.

Santo Amaro

The beautiful, Fellini-like chronicle of Caetano’s boyhood in Santo

Amaro—a small town in Bahia, near Salvador—takes as its starting point
the 1950s fashion for Americanization, which lent the region’s back-
wardness a contemporary note. The combination of provincial family
life—Caetano’s father ran the local post office—with wider global trends
is revealing: neither Bahia nor the large, affectionate Veloso household
are as cut off from contemporary realities as might be supposed, while
the latter are more complex than they are often made to seem. The chap-
ter opens with a reminiscence of the handful of Santo Amaro teenagers
‘drawn to the American life of rock’n’roll and its style—boys in jeans
and boots, girls with ponytails and chewing gum’. The author was not
part of this group which, from the height of his fifteen years, he saw as
neither intelligent nor interesting: ‘apart from being exotic, they seemed
to me rather dull’; what alienated him was not their difference but their
‘clear sign of conformity’—the ‘impulse toward Americanization’ car-
ried no ‘trace of rebellion’.5 Though Caetano here found himself on the

4
tt, p. 9. 5
tt, pp. 10–11.
 92 nlr 75

side of the ‘right-thinking people of Santo Amaro’—hardly a sociological

category, but possibly a real one—his description of the rock’n’rollers
is full of irony, very different from the nationalist stereotypes deployed
against us imperialism. The imitation of American novelties does not
strike him as inauthentic in itself: what matters is not the provenance of
cultural models but how useful they might be for rebellion; authenticity
is defined in opposition to conformity, rather than to foreignness. The
problem of American influence therefore becomes one of monopoly and
imposition. How should one situate oneself in relation to it, without loss
of freedom—not least the freedom to avail oneself of more advanced and
interesting models? The question will be taken up from many different
angles, politicizing and complicating the narrative, closely interwoven
with the power relations of the American century.

In broad outline, Tropical Truth’s opening chapters counterpose two

attitudes towards Americanization. On the one hand, a subaltern accept-
ance, whether from a 1950s rock’n’roller or a foreign minister—Caetano
is referring to Juracy Magalhães, who famously declared, ‘What’s good
for the United States is good for Brazil’. On the other, a revolt that is
embedded in the local context, but open to the world: the experience
of Santo Amaro can help to assess imported novelties, while foreign
innovations can be used to confront provincial narrowness. The unin-
hibited openness of this approach—refusing to grant pre-eminence to
the metropolis, but aware of the limitations of small-town life—is a con-
siderable intellectual feat. In part it is due to the independent spirit of
a non-conformist boy, who has great ambitions but is not prepared to
abandon his primary universe. ‘I remained convinced that if I wanted
to see life change, it had to change from within—it had to start with
Santo Amaro’, Caetano writes. Yet there is another aspect to his icono-
clasm which also needs to be registered here. At a certain point, Caetano
decides to tell his family of practising Catholics that he does not believe
in God. However, ‘I did not make an official announcement, or even
a clear statement, as I had heard my brothers say that this would be a
terrible blow to my Aunt Ju’. This mixture of rupture and attachment—
or, later, provocation and the desire for conciliation—will be a recurrent
theme of the book.6

6
Thus, even at moments of intentionally scandalous behaviour, with the launch
of tropicalismo under the dictatorship, Caetano hopes that his adversaries will
recognize there was no ill intent and that ‘we believed that in time all would see
that our gesture benefited everyone’. At a literary level, the tranquillity with which
 schwarz: Caetano Veloso 93

The Santo Amaro that needs shaking up—both oppressive and

beloved—is patriarchal, Catholic, mestizo; conservative without fanati-
cism, though with ex-colonial traces. The boy who is different—doesn’t
believe in God, opposes sexual taboos and masculine prerogatives, wears
odd socks, won’t resign himself to the surrounding poverty, intervenes
in his younger sister’s education, likes to sing Portuguese fados, full of
verbal arabesques, and doesn’t see why black girls should straighten
their hair—is a carrier of unrest. His dissatisfactions are inter-related:
questions of race, musical taste, sex, class, family, backwardness, all
have a bearing on the social formation as a whole. Caetano assumes
this vanguard role of criticism and change from early on. As an aspir-
ing reformer, first of his family, then the town, before long of Brazilian
culture, he naturally would not want to be confused with kids whose
greatest ambition was to enter a rock’n’roll contest.

Though it seemed rooted in the past, even Santo Amaro was on the
move. On the day World War Two ended, Caetano’s father went out into
the street waving the Soviet flag, to show his socialist sympathies, which
were balanced by a portrait of Roosevelt in the dining-room. An older
cousin, fed up with the restrictions of her life in Santo Amaro, longs
for the freedom of the French existentialist philosophers. Radio pro-
grammes are another window on the contemporary world: ‘American
music was always competing with the Cuban rumba, the Argentine
tango, and the Portuguese fado, even as Brazilian music remained—as it
still is—the most consistently popular music in Brazil.’7 In the local cin-
emas, Hollywood competed with French, Italian and Mexican products
often of excellent quality. Thus foreign politics and culture were a nor-
mal part of provincial daily life; the operative contrast was not between
national and foreign, as if these were watertight categories, but between
alienated consumption and living appropriation, whether domestic or
external. The striking passages describing the co-existence of American
and European productions in Santo Amaro’s cinemas are instructive in
this respect. The social seriousness of the Italian films, the sexual frank-
ness of the French, made the North Americans seem conventional and
impoverished by comparison—though their musicals were dazzling.
Caetano’s evocation of his youthful reflections on the beauty, salaries and

the author concedes the upset his initiatives caused is very effective; yet it seems
strange to assume that in the last instance the opposing parties were in the same
camp. tt, pp. 33, 15, 164.
7
tt, p. 15.
 94 nlr 75

emblematic importance of Bardot, Lollobrigida and Monroe, different as

they were, captures something of the social-aesthetic character of the
period, including the dimension of geo-political rivalries, of which Santo
Amaro cinephiles constituted a tiny but real component. Unencumbered
by the prescriptions of hegemony, external models became a means of
self-understanding, not of alienation. Thus the town’s burly, trombone-
playing butcher was caught crying by Caetano and his schoolfriends as
he came out of Fellini’s I vitelloni: ‘Somewhat embarrassed and wiping
his nose on his shirt, he offered as if to excuse himself: “That movie
is our life!”’8

Salvador

The quest for a freer, more contemporary present takes on a new dimen-
sion when Caetano and Maria Bethânia swap Santo Amaro for the
provincial capital, Salvador de Bahia, to carry on their studies. Here a
historical moment of de-provincialization and emancipation is under-
way. At the initiative of Edgar Santos, its enlightened rector, the Federal
University of Bahia has opened schools of music, dance and theatre, as
well as a modern art museum, and ‘he invited avant-garde companies
to visit, so that young people could see the most interesting experimen-
tal performers’.9 Brazil’s pre-1964 cultural and social ferment is vividly
evoked. Subtending this, the explosive—and formative—encounter of
artistic experimentation, underdevelopment, political radicalization and
popular culture, with the possibility of socialism on the horizon, pro-
vides the wider context, never explicitly addressed, for all that happens.
Salvador emerges as a microcosm of Brazil on the eve of great changes.
What the radio, records and films had done to open Caetano’s mind in
Santo Amaro was now repeated on a grander scale. The expanding uni-
versity brought him into contact with revolutionary works of modern art,
from Stravinsky, Eisenstein and Brecht to Antonioni and Godard, com-
bined with student agitation, the non-bourgeois nature of the popular
fiestas in Bahia, the hopes linked to the popular government of Miguel
Arraes in Pernambuco, the leftist experimentation of the Centres for
Popular Culture. In parallel with this, the life to be changed was no
longer that of the family or the small town, but that of the country, with
its indefensible class structures, its paralysing cultural backwardness
and subordination to imperialism:

8
tt, p. 17. 9
tt, p. 34.
 schwarz: Caetano Veloso 95

We talked about literature, film, pop music; we talked about Salvador, life
in the provinces, people we knew; and we talked about politics. Politics was
not our forte, but in 1963 . . . we were moved to write political plays and
songs. The country seemed to be on the verge of implementing reforms
that would transform its profoundly unjust face and allow Brazil to rise
above American imperialism.10

At this point, it may be worth noting, in preliminary fashion, the retro-

spective scepticism that Caetano’s 1997 viewpoint provides. ‘Later on’,
the passage continues, ‘we would see that such a transformation was not
even close. And today we have good reasons to think perhaps it was not
even to be hoped for. But the illusion was lived with great intensity—an
intensity that would later serve as a catalyst for the military coup.’ We will
come back later to the re-alignment that this revision—getting beyond
American imperialism was perhaps not even desirable—entails.

In retrospect, indeed, there is a common pattern to the three situa-

tions: the well-mannered family, tolerant of its eccentric children; the
old-fashioned town, where traditions are respected but there is sympa-
thy for the young people’s enthusiasm for modernist trends; and the
progressive university, which imports elements of the avant-garde to
stimulate the city’s cultural ambience. In each case, the license to experi-
ment came from above: the Veloso family, Santo Amaro, the rector; and,
beyond them, Brazil’s developmentalist state itself, no longer identified,
under Goulart, with the backward order that was by now out of date.
The political colouration of this unexpected, modernizing opening was
distinctly anti-capitalist, though perhaps more moral than political, in
petit-bourgeois vein. Caetano writes: ‘Within the family or among one’s
circle of friends, there was no possibility of anyone’s sanely disagree-
ing with a socialist ideology. The Right existed only to serve vested or
unspeakable interests.’11 Perhaps, too, there was a way in which the
aspect of his personality noted earlier—comfortable with provocation,
but averse to antagonism as such—was well matched to the pre-coup
situation in Brazil, when for a while it seemed as though the country’s
contradictions could be taken to the limit and still find a harmonious
resolution, trauma free, that would lift Brazil from its backwardness and
make it the admiration of the world.

10
tt, p. 37. 11
tt, p. 5.
 96 nlr 75

This enlightened provincial outlook, for which socialism seemed reason-

able and capitalism mistaken, did not have majority support, but it was
widespread enough to give the illusion that it represented the real course
of things, whereas the opposing camp was a sorry anachronism, about
to be superseded. This created a kind of euphoria about the direction of
progress, which later proved naive; but it explains the almost utopian
atmosphere of Caetano’s chapters on Salvador in the early sixties, when
students could freely re-invent the world, drawing on popular life and
high culture, sheltered by the authorities but above all by their distance
from the pressure of capital. For historical reasons that the book does
not go into, which had to do with the high point and crisis of devel-
opmentalist nationalism, left-wing sympathies were represented at all
levels of society, including the government. Thanks to this support, both
moral and practical in scope, a non-market re-alignment of political,
intellectual and institutional forces was in progress, trying out socialist
solutions almost as though capital did not exist. The hypothesis proved
to be fantastical, but the beauty of these chapters is due to the plenitude
of life that it promised and, in some ways, made possible.

Musical education

The first steps in Caetano’s musical professionalization—his term—are

illustrative of this. Far from the alienations of showbiz, they were stim-
ulated by many different sources, all estimable and curiously lacking
any negative charge: intense youthful friendships, an innate aesthetic
intelligence, hunger for modernity, the impact of Maria Bethânia’s voice,
his—affectionate—dissatisfaction with the condition of the region and
of Brazil, desire to make the art of song contemporary, though with-
out breaking the line of descent of Brazilian popular music; finally, a
conjunction of ‘intellectual responsibility and existential commitment’.
Recalling his early aesthetic education, he felt he ‘lived in a homoge-
neous country whose inauthentic aspects—and the various versions of
rock certainly represented one of them—were a result of social injustice
(which fomented ignorance) and of its macro-manifestation, imperi-
alism, which imposed its styles and products.’12 However briefly, the
intolerable world order, inequalities in Brazil and questions of art were
interlinked, establishing a dialectical basis for reflection. In its main out-
lines, this was the position of the left nationalism of the time, or of the

12
tt, p. 161.
 schwarz: Caetano Veloso 97

communists, with their merits and limitations: latifundios and imperial-

ism were seen as the source of cultural inauthenticity (which was no
doubt true), and at the same time were regarded as somehow external
to the country itself, foreign bodies in an essentially good and frater-
nal nation (which was of course naive). The young Caetano dreamed of
a purification of sound: the saxophone was crass, the drums ‘a circus
attraction’; not to mention the bad taste of the accordion. The aim of
this project, which was more than merely musical, was the expression of
the real Brazil, liberated from foreign impositions and native ignorance.
This radicalization, if we have understood it properly, had nothing to do
with aestheticism, the desire to get away from a degrading reality. On the
contrary, it was a sort of perfecting, a condensation and stylization of the
best aspects of Brazil, which with luck would impel the rest.

Owing little to professional training, and even less to the market,

Caetano’s first initiatives were those of a gifted student seeking to partic-
ipate along with his generation in a moment of national transformation
that would allow everyone the possibility of fulfilment. Something simi-
lar applied to many of those active in the cultural movement of the time;
this entailed no lowering of intellectual ambition—quite the contrary.
The outstanding example, though with a greater charge of radicalism
and negativity, would be Glauber Rocha. The historical dynamic and the
energy of the debates taking place provided an extraordinary education,
an intensive process of formation, for many of the figures who would
soon be at the forefront of different creative fields: the turbulent artistic
environment, involvement with the social struggle, university influ-
ences, fidelity to earlier experiences combined with an often precarious
mastery of the craft, which was no impediment to experimentation, and
to some extent favoured it. Caetano, who has a sharp grasp of these
paradoxes, remarks that the originality of his first recordings was ‘born
more often of limitation than invention’. In the same spirit, he writes of
the work of some friends: ‘The record, as usual, is not good. But on the
other hand it is wonderful.’ Musical inexperience changed its meaning,
or took on a new one. Memorably, he notes of Glauber Rocha’s Deus e
o diabo na terra do sol: ‘It wasn’t so much Brazil trying to get it right (or
proving that it could), but determining to fall short or succeed on its
own terms.’13

13
tt, pp. 94, 115, 58–9.
 98 nlr 75

Bossa nova

The passages on bossa nova and João Gilberto are high points of Tropical
Truth. The rarely captured dialectic between artistic creation and its his-
torical moment has always been the subject of left critique; here, the vivid
reciprocity between aesthetic reflection and historical account—and the
alternating relationship between analytical and narrative prose—takes
on a formal quality with its own features. The dialectic, which unfolds at
several different levels, suggests a cultural revolution. In Caetano’s beau-
tiful exposition, the technical innovation of bossa nova came in response
to an impasse that was social as much as musical. The ‘new beat’ of the
guitar rhythm that João Gilberto invented in the fifties was based on his
‘deeply penetrating and highly personal interpretation of the spirit of
samba’, linked to a ‘command of the cool jazz idiom, which was then the
cutting edge of musical invention in the United States’. Gilberto brought
together a Brazilian tradition, with its own class and racial markings,
and an avant-garde innovation, giving it an international dimension that
de-provincialized it, so to speak, making it viable for foreign markets but
equally for a new audience in Brazil. The result was a ‘radical process
of cultural transformation, which led us to re-evaluate our tastes, our
heritage and—even more important—our possibilities’.14 The formal
innovation, fruit of a simultaneous reflection on samba and jazz, had
both an internal logic and wider social implications: reconstituting the
field of Brazilian popular music could suggest a new model for relations
between classes and races, and propose a more productive engagement
with the dominant culture of the time.

Caetano discovered Gilberto’s music at the age of seventeen: it ‘delighted

my intelligence’. The singer was a ‘redeemer of the Portuguese language,
violator of Brazilian social immobility—its inhuman and inelegant
stratification . . . [an] architect of refined forms and mocker of every fool-
ish stylizing that is their diminution’.15 At the centre of Tropical Truth’s
account of bossa nova’s impact is a real dialectical flourish: a sentence
some thirty-two lines long, whose syntax aims to capture the complexity
of the process itself. Its breadth of vision, organizational power, capacity
for paradox and ability to envisage the present as a moment in historical
time make it a tour de force. The revolution that João Gilberto’s reinter-
pretation of the samba effected—‘through a mechanically simple but
musically challenging guitar beat that suggested an infinite variety of

14
tt, p. 22. 15
tt, pp. 22, 326.
 schwarz: Caetano Veloso 99

subtle ways to make the vocal phrasing swing over a harmony of chords
progressing in a fluent equilibrium’—would not only make possi-
ble ‘the whole evolution’ of the musicians of his own generation and
‘open the way’ for new players, but also allowed one to listen with a new
ear to the explorations of his predecessors in the forties, modernizers
who had been ‘striving for renewal through an imitation of American
music’. João Gilberto ‘had it over all of them in his command of the cool
jazz idiom’—and, critically, was able to achieve this in a way that ‘re-
connected with what was greatest in the Brazilian tradition’—‘in sum,
the whole world which the “modernizers” had thought it necessary to
leave behind’. Finally, ‘by establishing a position from which to innovate
while still enjoying the popular music traditions of Brazil, imagining
a different future, which put the past in a new light’, Gilberto struck a
chord with ‘classical musicians, avant-garde poets and the percussion
masters of the samba schools’.16

Characteristically in dialectical prose, the subject of the sentence—here,

João Gilberto’s bossa nova revolution—commands widely dissimilar
verbs, whose objects in turn are very varied, pertaining to different, some-
times antagonistic domains, which thus become drawn into a relation
with each other. Both verbs and nominatives act in several dimensions at
the same time, referring back to the point of departure, which they also
develop and which thereby acquires a larger and unexpected dialectical
unity. In Caetano’s prose, as in reality, figures separated by different spe-
cializations or by the abyss of social class are brought together through
bossa nova, in a productive movement. The flux becomes dizzying when
Gilberto’s innovation affects not only present and future, but the past—
the experiments of the forties—which now recomposes itself before our
eyes. Summarizing its impact, Caetano writes:

To have known rock as something relatively contemptible during the deci-

sive years of our intellectual growth and, on the other hand, to have had
bossa nova as the soundtrack of our rebellion signifies for Brazilians of my
generation the right to imagine an ambitious intervention in the future of
the world, a right that immediately begins to be lived as a duty.17

The observation captures the spirit of benign and bloodless revolution

that surrounded bossa nova; the next step would be for this generation—

16
tt, p. 22, slightly modified; the English translation re-punctuates this syntactical
flourish into half a dozen sentences.
17
tt, p. 31.
 100 nlr 75

which, thanks to the richness of the domestic musical environment,

would not experience the arrival of rock music as a crushing cultural
onslaught—to influence the future of the world.

Cultural logic of counter-revolution

This euphoria was cut short by the 1964 military coup, which united
Brazil’s pro-American armed forces, capital and the country’s immense
reserves of conservatism, with Washington’s backing, against the popu-
lar ascendancy and the left; it met almost no resistance. Since Caetano’s
position was to change soon afterwards, it is interesting to note his initial
reaction, perfectly in tune with the left of that time. ‘We saw the coup as
a decision to halt the process of overcoming the terrible social inequali-
ties in Brazil and, at the same time, to maintain the North American
domination of the hemisphere.’18 A vast movement of democratization
was cut short. An anti-social Brazil, frightened of change, in favour of
repression, the traditional ally of exploitation, now emerged from the
shadows. Domestic inequalities and external domination were no longer
anachronistic residues in the process of disappearing, but became the
chosen forms of both present and future, guaranteed by the dictatorship.
For another section of Brazilian society, reality now took on features that
were unacceptable and absurd.

It was the aesthetic conclusions which Caetano drew from the coup
that made him an inescapable figure in Brazilian cultural life; but he
did not reach them straight away. The catalyst, as he explains, was a
crucial scene in Terra em transe, Glauber Rocha’s great film of 1967, deal-
ing with the role of intellectuals confronted with the coup. The film’s
protagonist, Paulo Martins, is a poet and journalist from a ruling-class
family, on the side of the social revolution and allied to the Communist
Party. Exasperated by the passivity of the masses, who seem incapable
of challenging their duplicitous leaders, Martins relapses into oligarchic
savagery—a Brechtian effect of distancing and provocation. Covering
the mouth of a trade-union leader who has respectfully addressed him as
‘Doctor’, Martin speaks directly to the audience: ‘Do you see what the peo-
ple is? Illiterate, imbecilic, apolitical!’ Half-sadistic, half self-flagellating,
the episode underlines the ambivalent position of the intellectual com-
mitted to the people’s cause while retaining reactionary views—rarely

18
Verdade Tropical, p. 177; passage omitted from English version.
 schwarz: Caetano Veloso 101

this explicit—of the popular classes; in fact, the rejection of the workers
on the grounds that they would not make the revolution would lead to
the adventure of armed struggle without popular support. For the left,
this scene—an artistic invention of the first rank—was a series of sacri-
leges, a painful mocking of all the ideological certainties of the time. The
workers were far from being revolutionary, their relation to the leader-
ship was paternalistic, the populist politicians were in league with the
enemy camp; the distance between Marxist theses and social realities
was dispiriting; none of this lessened the grotesquery of the ruling elite
and its class domination, which remained untouched—in fact, was exag-
gerated. The revolution was not unnecessary; quite the contrary; but it
found itself in a historical blind alley, with no way forward. The general
tone was one of despair.19

Disconcerting as the scene was, Caetano’s conclusions pointed in

another direction. They were almost euphoric, seeing opportunities and
openings, whereas Glauber Rocha’s film ended in political frustration,
self-questioning and death. It could be said that they simply accepted
Martins’s devastating words without taking into account the charac-
ter’s problematic aspects, which are central to the artistic complexity
of the work.

I experienced that scene—and the indignant, heated discussion that it pro-

voked in bars—as the nucleus of a great event whose brief name I now
possess but did not know then (I would try to name it a thousand ways for
myself and for other people): the death of populism . . . it was the very faith
in the popular forces—and the very respect the best of us felt for the man
of the people—that here was discarded as a political weapon and an ethical
value in itself . . . Tropicalismo would never have come into being but for
that traumatic moment.

Consequently, Caetano explains, ‘when the poet in Land in Anguish

declared a lack of faith in the liberating energy of “the people”, I heard
this not as an end to possibilities but rather as a proclamation of what I
now needed to do’.20

It is worth noting that ‘populism’ here is not given its usual sociologi-
cal meaning: personalized leadership exercised over poorly integrated

19
For an excellent analysis of the character of Paulo Martins, see Ismail Xavier, ‘The
Intellectual out of the Centre’, Alegorias do subdesenvolvimento, São Paulo 1993.
20
tt, pp. 61, 67; translation modified.
 102 nlr 75

urban masses. In the sense that Caetano gives it, the term designates
the special role reserved for the working people in the hopes and concep-
tions of the left: bearing the brunt of social injustice, and therefore the
subject and necessary ally of a politics of liberation. The respect that ‘the
best of us felt’—but feel no longer?—‘for the men of the people’ is linked
to this conviction. ‘Or perhaps it is I myself I am despising in their eyes’,
Drummond wrote of the workers in 1940.21 Thus, when Caetano appro-
priates Martins’s words as a means to affirm and salute ‘the death of
populism’, it is the beginning of a new epoch that he wants to signal; an
era in which the historical social debt owed to those below will cease to
exist. Caetano thus dissociated himself from the defeated forces of 1964,
who in this sense were all ‘populists’. This was a considerable switch,
which set him in opposition to his own previous positions, to social-
ists, nationalists and left-wing Christians; to the progressive tradition in
Brazilian literature since the late 19th century; even to those who were
simply enlightened enough to think that the organic link between riches
and poverty was a given of the modern condition. Martins’s disillusion
was transformed into a disavowal of obligation.

This rupture lay at the origin of the new freedom brought by tropicalismo.
In the eyes of the left, the leading force in the resistance to the dictator-
ship, to discount as Martins had the ‘liberating energy of the people’ was
tantamount to selling out. For Caetano, it meant freeing himself from
a suddenly outdated myth that restricted his personal, intellectual and
artistic freedom. Given the subsequent course of events—not irrelevant
for a book written in the 1990s—it might be said that the artist had intu-
ited the coming reversal of the tide of world history, which would leave
the struggle for socialism stranded. As the American scholar Nicholas
Brown has suggested, the victory of the counter-revolution and suppres-
sion of socialist alternatives in Brazil between 1964–1970 fostered a
precocious passage from the modern to the post-modern, with a condi-
tion of the latter being that capitalism was no longer relativized by the
possibility of its supersession. In line with this, bossa nova can be read as
a late expression of modernism and tropicália an early post-modernism,
born from socialism’s defeat.22

21
Carlos Drummond de Andrade, ‘O operário no mar’, in Sentimento do mundo, Rio
de Janeiro 1940.
22
Nicholas Brown, Utopian Generations, Princeton 2005, pp. 176–7.
 schwarz: Caetano Veloso 103

Libertarian transgressions

That said, Caetano’s conversion did not make him a conformist. If any-
thing the radicalizing instincts of the pre-1964 period were sharpened
when he adopted the provocative, ultra-rebellious role of the counter-
cultural rocker. His total opposition to the established order now included
the conventional left, who ‘talked of anti-imperialism and socialism’ but
‘never discussed topics such as sex or race, elegance or taste, love or
form’.23 Ambiguous in the extreme, his new position saw itself as ‘to
the left of the left’, tacitly supporting the armed struggle of Guevara and
Marighella, while at the same time defending ‘economic freedom’ and
the ‘health of the market’. Caetano attracted and shocked—another way
of attracting—making himself a controversial but obligatory reference
for everyone. His disdain for coherence was ostentatious, almost an
act of bravado: ‘A politics of one voice, palatable and simple, was not
to evolve out of this.’24 Abandoning ‘populism’ translated into a nota-
ble increase in irreverence and a disposition towards smashing things,
which clashed with the do-gooder ethos of the progressives and, of
course, with the minimum of discipline needed for political action.
The transgressive, libertarian position he adopted rejected equally—or
almost—the established left and right, scandalizing both with his stage
antics, while at the same time never losing sight of the market. These
provocations—‘behavioural anarchy’, as he calls it, outrageous hair and
clothes—reached their height when, during the darkest days of the
dictatorship, Caetano appeared on stage under a banner made by the
artist, Hélio Oiticica, paying homage to a bandit killed by the police:
‘Be marginal, be a hero.’ Predictably, if not intentionally, this resulted
in several months in jail, on the initiative of a judge who was at the
concert with his mistress.25

Caetano writes with unconcealed delight about his sense of complicity

with the officer interrogating him in prison, who attacked the ‘insidious

23
tt, p. 67. 24
tt, p. 286.
25
There was an element of rivalrous identification here with those of his generation
who were taking the route of armed struggle. Caetano writes: ‘While I was uncer-
tain what might come of armed revolution, the heroism of the guerrillas as the only
response to the perpetuation of the dictatorship earned my terrified respect. Deep
down, we felt a certain romantic identification with them, something we had never
felt for the conventional Left or the Communist Party.’ tt, p. 272.
 104 nlr 75

subversive power’ of the tropicalistas’ work and recognized that ‘what

Gil and I were doing was much more dangerous than the work of art-
ists who were engaged in explicit protests and political activity’. As he
now explains with disarming sincerity, Caetano’s rejection of the two
‘establishments’ was never perfectly symmetrical. Accustomed to
public hostility from a part of the left, who accused him of being too
Americanized and booed him on stage, he thought that he would be safe
from political-military repression for the same reason; the regime would
not see him as an enemy and would leave him in peace. Thus Caetano
felt himself doubly misjudged, once in being arrested by the Right,
without having done anything in particular—his assessment, though
elsewhere he states the opposite—and again in not being recognized as
a revolutionary by the left.26

At one point Geraldo Vandré, one of the figureheads of the protest-song

movement, asks the tropicalistas not to compete with him; the market
could only deal with one main big name at a time, and what was needed
under the dictatorship was to raise mass consciousness. Caetano per-
ceptively observes that this may be, in embryo, the same bureaucratism
that stifled the cultures of the state-socialist countries, in the name of
history. Unlike some on the left, who dreamed of conquering the market
through their political appeal, the tropicalistas bet on ‘a broadening and
diversification of the market’, competing both in people’s minds and
‘nas caixas registradoras’—at the cash registers.27 At one level this cheer-
ful cynicism, portraying its proponents as agents of cultural democracy,
was less hypocritical than the rigidities proposed by their adversaries. At
another level it was worse, since the idea of competition just ‘in people’s
minds’ ignored the police state, which in the end was the determin-
ing factor. Purposely chosen to annoy the socialists, the ‘cash registers’
served to highlight the commercial aspect of the musical-ideological
struggle that was waged across the mass-audience tv shows; which the
engaged artists, being anti-capitalists, preferred to gloss over. That said,
the cultural-political battle was a real social phenomenon, even though
it was manipulated and exploited by the media. The rivalry on stage, a
symbolic struggle for the leadership of the movement, was related to the
battle in the streets and the realities of the dictatorship, if in an indirect
and distorted manner. It was part of a more difficult process of discern-
ing between secondary and principal contradictions, close adversaries
and the real enemies.

26
tt, pp. 255, 219, 193. 27
tt, p. 272; Verdade Tropical, p. 281.
 schwarz: Caetano Veloso 105

There was much confusion over this question. Was the devastation
caused by the dictatorship, which suspended civil liberties and broke
up popular organizations, of the same order as jibes, or even aggres-
sion, from student audiences or fellow musicians? Caetano’s reaction to
a comment by a libertarian friend, Rogerio, is instructive:

I trembled to hear him declare that the National Student Union (une)
building really should have been burned. une had been set on fire by right-
ist groups immediately after the coup of April 1964, an act of violence that
revolted the Left as a whole, the frightened liberals, and all good souls in
general. Rogério vehemently expressed his personal reasons for not joining
the chorus of outrage: the intolerance that his complicated ideas had met
with among the members of the une made him see the group as a menace
to freedom . . . The strange exaltation of our growing rapport overtook my
initial shock at his heretical view.28

For Caetano, this amounted to a stark re-evaluation of the recent past.

The left-democratic advance prior to 1964, which gave the chapters on
Santo Amaro and Bahia their beauty, is now seen as an incubator for
intolerance. At times, Caetano’s pontificating on the coup would not be
out of place in a conservative editorial: ‘Today there are many indications
that any attempt at non-alignment with the interests of the capitalist West
would result in monstrous violations of human rights’29—this referring
to a moment when fundamental freedoms had in fact been cancelled,
but by the right-wing dictatorship. In terms of literary consistency—
of coherence between the different sections of the work—the anti-left
viewpoint jars, since it has been given no basis in the narrative’s repre-
sentation of the pre-1964 period, when, as Caetano describes it, there
was unprecedented freedom for artistic and social experimentation.
The formal disjuncture represented by the new insistence on the anti-
democratic character of the struggle for democracy should perhaps be
understood in terms of the post-coup balance of forces when, having
suppressed and outlawed the social aspirations of the earlier period, the
regime liked to paint them in the colours of Stalinist terror.

What are the reasons that led Caetano to celebrate the fall of the left—
though not the victory of the right—as a moment of liberation? The
discomfort begins with the language of class. Why were the poor and
‘pitifully disorganized’ workers of Recôncavo dubbed ‘proletarians’, a
name that would not have occurred to them, when anyway they would

28
tt, p. 62. 29
tt, p. 31.
 106 nlr 75

have loved to wear hard-hats and earn a steady wage? Similarly, was
socialism really ‘the only solution’, a panacea for all woes? In a common-
sense way, Caetano notes the misalignment between vulgar Marxism
and local realities. Poverty still existed, however, and unhappiness with
words would not make it go away. ‘Of course, I cared about social justice
and felt enthusiasm about belonging to a generation that appeared to
have the potential to effect profound change’, Caetano recalls. But: ‘I
sincerely did not feel that the construction workers of Salvador, or the
few factory workers one could identify as such . . . any more than the
“proletariat” seen in films and photographs . . . could or should decide
what my future should be’.30 He does not say whether his reservations
about workers influencing his future also applied to bankers, business-
men, career politicians or the owners of tv channels.

Conceptually, the left—once considered a source for critique of the

bourgeois order and of backwardness—was now seen as an obstacle to
the intellect. The triumph of capital over the popular movement was
not accompanied by any refutation at the level of ideas, but it brought
about a shift in intellectual agendas. As Caetano puts it: ‘This assault
on traditional left-wing populism liberated one to see Brazil squarely
from a broader perspective, enabling new and undreamt-of critiques of
an anthropological, mythic, mystical, formalistic, and moral nature.’31
Conspicuously absent from this list of ‘broader perspectives’ is any cri-
tique of capital, let alone any project of demystification; the new freedom
consisted, it seemed, in abandoning any specifically modern perspec-
tive. The convulsion caused by the military defeat of the left is thus seen
as having its positive side, opening intellectual vistas that had previously
been inaccessible (but had anyone forbidden them?), which ‘tried to
reveal something about our condition and ask questions about our des-
tiny’. One might note here that, far from being novel, the consideration
of ‘anthropological, mythical, mystical, formal and moral’ views of Brazil
and its ‘destiny’ harked back to the past: static definitions of national and
racial essence, the religious heritage, Portuguese colonialism—precisely
what the historicizing perspective of the early sixties had been attempt-
ing to reconfigure and translate into contemporary complexities.

For that matter, the left was by no means a single homogeneous bloc.
The finest critical thinkers of the time were not only socialists but anti-
Stalinists, and well-disposed to experimentalism in the arts: Mario

30
tt, p. 67. 31
tt, p. 61.
 schwarz: Caetano Veloso 107

Pedrosa, Anatol Rosenfeld, Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes and Antonio

Candido. Caetano seems to be generalizing to the left as a whole the
nationalism of students who had booed him at concerts, as well as the
stale idealization of popular life propounded by the Communist Party.
This is surprising given that much of the artist’s success was due to
the most radicalized sectors of that same left, who felt themselves to
be represented by pop language, transgressive behaviour, atonal harmo-
nies and, more generally, by avant-garde experimentation. Thus it seems
unlikely that it was the intellectual limitations of the left that led Caetano
to turn against it. The reason for the hostility perhaps lies simply in the
left’s general reservations about a triumphant capitalism, its killjoy nega-
tivity before the coming vortex of commercialization.

The prophet

In an unforgettable passage, Caetano describes going down into the

street to witness the military repression of a student demonstration at
close hand.32 He is dressed in hippy garb—new at the time—with a gen-
eral’s cape over his naked upper body, jeans and sandals, bushy hair
and ‘an Indian necklace made of big animal teeth’. Walking against the
flood of students, who are fleeing the police, being caught and beaten,
this strange figure is gripped by a ‘holy wrath’. He starts to harangue
the passers-by, ‘challenging their fearful indifference to (or perhaps tacit
support of) such brutality’. How should this strange scene be read? The
central protagonists, of course, are the students and the military, bat-
tling for control of the streets and for the rule of the dictatorship itself.
Caetano does not play a direct role in the conflict, neither aligning him-
self with the demonstrators nor speaking to them, even though they
are, in the end, his people; nor does he address the soldiers. Instead,
he invents a role for himself as a man possessed, and starts ranting at
the passers-by, who are only interested in getting away as fast as possi-
ble. His holy rage is qualified, too, by some level-headed considerations
about his personal safety in the course of this performance: ‘The soldiers
barely paid me any mind: I was moving against the flow of the students,
my course a tangent, in fact, to the eye of the storm, and I did not appear
to be one of the demonstrators. I yelled furiously, but no soldier ever
came close enough to hear what I was saying.’ In sum, his role was less
risky than it might have seemed and not really an intervention as such,
since the position he takes up is external to the struggle. The episode,

32
tt, pp. 200–1.
 108 nlr 75

hard to classify, is perhaps most interesting for the complex motives in

play. Caetano sees it as a happening, street theatre or poetry:

Amid this strange descent into the streets, I was conscious of having
enacted something—a serious and extravagant performance by the light of
the sun, an improvisation of political theatre, a poem in action. I was a tropi-
calista, free of ties to traditional politics, and therefore I could react against
oppression and narrowness according to my own creativity.

But if the performance bears all the hallmarks of the sixties neo-
avant-garde—the improvised, open-air performance with a political
dimension; anti-conventional poetry; libertarian inspiration—its dynam-
ics suggest an alternative characterization. The prophet who frightens
already terrified people, instead of attempting to clarify the situation and
reason with them; the staging of a happening while his contemporaries,
resisting the dictatorship, are being beaten up; the doubts as to where
oppression and narrow-mindedness now lie; the superior if ill-defined
position of a tropicalista, ‘free of ties to traditional politics’ (which ones?);
the purely subjective pay-off of the performance—however inventive,
none of this is straightforward. The truth of these extraordinary pages
lies not in the artist’s harangue, as Caetano supposes, but rather in
its affinity with the disintegration going on all around him and thus
its instantiation of the historical moment, as in the inner dynamics of
a realist novel.

The textual framing of the episode makes this clearer still. At the begin-
ning of the chapter, Gilberto Gil is experimenting with auasca tea and
discovers a capacity to feel ‘love for the world in all its manifestations,
including the military oppressors’.33 Soon after the description of the
demonstration, and underlining the impression of instability and gid-
dying conversions, the narrative leaps back to the days leading up to the
coup, when Caetano was still sympathetic to projects of social transforma-
tion, such as Paulo Freire’s adult-literacy strategy and the student-based
Centres for Popular Culture, which he would soon come to detest to
the point of condoning the arson attack on the student union building,
une. When the narrative returns, finally, to the post-coup period, he
notes that the multitudes who flock to his concerts and demonstrate in
the streets, where ‘God is on the loose’, are quite as stimulating as any
drug. Temptations to messianism are trips themselves: it was ‘in this
climate of delusionary exaltation and conflagration in the street’ that the

33
tt, p. 194. 34
tt, pp. 189, 201.
 schwarz: Caetano Veloso 109

hallucinogenic auasca made its appearance.34 The literary value of these

passages lies in their representation of the turbulent historical totality
comprised by this wildly disparate experience: artistic ambitions, army
rule, revolutionary militancy, public indifference, psychedelia, perfor-
mance art, celebrity status, Cold War coordinates; the moral costs of the
installation of the new regime are portrayed with a power unparalleled
in recent Brazilian literature.

A new aesthetic

This approach underlay the aesthetic of tropicalismo itself, born in 1968

with the iconic album Tropicália, which juxtaposed ultra-fashionable
elements with aspects of the country’s underdevelopment. The combi-
nations, not unlike magical realism, were unexpected and often done
with humour. As in Caetano’s performance, combining the hippy-style
happening with the exaltations of a popular preacher and the necklace of
teeth, tropicalismo assembled references from heterogeneous times and
places within the same song; their coupling was an absurdity, yet one
that resonated as a functional representation of the realities of Brazil, an
effective allegorization of its internal dislocations and precarious mod-
ernization. Tropicalismo’s aesthetic ambitions were all the more striking
since the project’s origins lay in consumer culture. Caetano envisaged
songs that would combine the achievements of João Gilberto’s bossa
nova revolution with the great modernist writings of João Cabral and
Guimarães Rosa, while appealing to the audience for commercial hits,
including the trashiest—the rock star Roberto Carlos or daytime-tv host
Chacrinha—and using the national platform of a pop star whose public
stance could make a difference, especially under a dictatorship, to influ-
ence both art and daily life.

The scandalous atmosphere that surrounded tropicalismo served to some

extent to conceal the revolutionary import of a programme that sought
to turn pop songs into great art and establish free traffic between aes-
thetic excellence and daily life, through the good offices of the market.
Of course, pre-coup artistic and social movements had also aimed at the
subversive redefinition of relations between high and popular culture,
through new forms of cultural militancy, the reworking of avant-garde
repertoires, both domestic and foreign, in the specific conditions of
Brazil’s social struggles. Yet the contrast between the pre-64 moment
and that of tropicalismo could not have been greater. With the defeat
 110 nlr 75

of the popular movement, these cultural-political impulses took on a

distinctly mocking note, including a form of self-mockery, which seemed
indispensable to the truth of the new order. This had far-reaching artistic
consequences, since it offered a critical viewpoint on the truncation of
the social revolution in Brazil, a determining moment of contemporary
history. In an oblique way, the tropicalista carnival alluded to the transfor-
mation that the country ought to have had.

There is an obvious parallel between tropicalismo and the ‘anthropophagic’

poetry of Oswald de Andrade, forty years earlier. Andrade proposed
‘cannibalizing’ the poetic solutions of the European avant-garde and
combining them with the very different social realities of the ex-colony.
The result, striking in its originality, was like a gleeful joke that offered
a glimpse of a utopian solution to Brazil’s backwardness. In this cheer-
ful cannibalistic hypothesis, the country would wed its primitive base
to modern technology to leap over the bourgeois present, and so avoid
a sad stage in the history of humanity. Tropicalismo also linked fashion-
able pop forms to aspects of underdevelopment, but with the opposite
effect, in which what predominated was the grotesque. In this light,
the country’s absurd historical dislocation appeared eternal, just as the
dictatorship had affirmed. Each in their own way took Brazil’s backward-
ness for granted; but for Andrade in the 1920s, the perspective was full
of promise, while the tropicalistas, in Caetano’s words, ‘flirted with the
darkest pessimism’.

For Caetano, ‘the key to understanding tropicalismo is the word “syn-

cretism”’, with its anti-purist implications of heterogeneity but also
of deficient integration; this thoroughgoing opposition to the concept
of organic form was perhaps its most distinctive trait.35 The import of
the movement’s hostility to established distinctions was ambiguous,
expressing the earlier revolutionary impulse as much as the subsequent
triumph of commercialization, which was also anti-traditional in its way.
Tropicalismo gave form to the discordant era the country was entering,
to which the traditional popular genres, with their conventional, circum-
scribed universe, had no access. The advance, in terms of modernizing
popular music and bringing it more into line with the aesthetic avant-
garde, was indisputable. As Caetano puts it, the idea was to ‘transcend’
oppositions between genres, ‘sophisticated modern music (whether it be
bossa nova, samba-jazz, neo-regional, or protest song) and the standard

35
tt, p. 183.
 schwarz: Caetano Veloso 111

commercial music of whatever origin (Argentine tangos, whorehouse

boleros, sentimental sambas-canções, etc.)’.36 The implications of the
term ‘transcend’ are worth noting: in each case, it would involve giving
some measure of offence—‘scandalizing’—by mingling rival genres or
rubrics, needling the presumptions, which also included issues of class
and generation, on which their differences were based. By shaking up
this substratum of social-cultural animosities, and re-conceptualizing it,
tropicalismo was renewing and deepening the debate. Also in play, how-
ever, was the question of what the new relations between them would
be: bossa nova set above samba, pop vulgarity below highbrow music?
The oppositions tropicalismo wanted to overcome had their own hegem-
onic ambitions, and in this sense it was the notion of overcoming itself
that was being superseded; or rather, the idea of progress itself that was
being deactivated by a different sort of modernization.

Thus tropicalismo did and did not ‘overcome’ the opposing elements
above which it hoped to soar. The estrangement it achieved was suffi-
cient to allow conflicting propositions to co-exist within the same song,
but not so great that the antagonistic spark between them was extin-
guished, for that would also have eliminated the scandalous aspect of
their admixture, an indispensable ingredient. It was a distancing which
changed one’s view of the landscape while leaving everything as it was
before, except with the dynamic of supersession diminished. At most
it offered a more contemporary point of view, a new feeling about the
present, beyond good or evil; one that refused to take sides and took this
deadlock as its own vital source, valuing both the vanguard and the retro-
gressive or kitsch. Despite the carnivalesque tumult, what it established
was a sort of stasis—an instance of conservative revolution.

The representation of the country by means of its ready-made stereotypes

was given a sarcastic, avant-garde twist: virgin forest and hyper-modern
capital city, social militancy and brainless masses, rockers’ yeah-yeah-
yeahs and the family patriarch saying grace at table, the superlative bad
taste of Dona Iolanda, the dictator’s wife—all given a modish pop wrap-
ping. Far from a blemish, the recipe’s simplicity gave it a wide appeal,
allowing a new generation to speak, in ingenious and revelatory terms, of
what Caetano calls ‘the tragicomedy that is Brazil, the adventure, at once
frustrating and brilliant, of being Brazilian’.37 Functionally, and with a
high degree of ambivalence, the effect was to make the static contrasts

36
tt, p. 74. 37
tt, p. 116.
 112 nlr 75

switch signals: dissonances and humiliations became part of an amus-

ing, semi-patriotic portrait of national life, a celebratory definition of
‘what we are’. This carnivalesque ideology of national identity harmo-
nized and vindicated the country’s social divisions, ridding them of the
negative charge they had had in the pre-coup period of struggle against
underdevelopment. Glaring social contrasts now happily co-existed, side
by side, equally likeable, with no perspective of going beyond them. On
another level, distinct but related, this reconciliation of the historical pre-
sent with itself was the imitation, or subjective assimilation—perhaps
more satirical than complacent—of the logic of commercialized cul-
ture: tv and radio programmes also operated across a whole gamut of
audience interests, retrograde or progressive, just as long as they were
profitable. Differences galore, but no antagonisms: the world came to
seem like one vast market.

That said, the text itself offers a darker account of the dynamics of
tropicalismo than the positive, conciliatory vision which Caetano ret-
rospectively provides; it chronicles a vertiginous social and artistic
radicalization, perhaps miscalculated, culminating in provocation and
death. In Divine, Amazing, Caetano’s last tv series before his arrest, the
provocation reached its limit: the stage was behind bars, the musicians
staged the burial of the movement and played in cages, Caetano himself
sang while pointing a gun at his own head. The (always denied) affini-
ties with protest art could not have been more apparent. A balanced
assessment of tropicalismo must therefore capture its contradictory
dynamics, which permit different readings. On the one hand, its jarring
contrasts could signify a positive moment of decompartmentalization, a
sort of fearlessness in face of the extravagant, chaotic diversity of Brazil,
perhaps finally reaching the stage of reconciliation. Though it did not fit
easily with military rule, this euphoric attitude did exist at the time, shot
through with a savage irony that is now hard to imagine. Caetano’s role
as a redeemer of Brazilian popular music was closely associated with
this perspective. If, however, we focus on the temporal dimension that
ultimately structures and animates these combinations, in which the
ultra-modern and the obsolete, even the trashy, form a sort of destiny,
an inescapable aberration, then the meaning becomes more historically
specific and decidedly negative. The picturesque ‘Land of Contrasts’
is replaced by a country branded with the iron of dictatorship; a lop-
sided yet systematic combination of capitalist modernization with the
reinstallation of social backwardness—the juxtaposition that underlies
 schwarz: Caetano Veloso 113

all others—of which the tropicalista formula is the outstanding struc-

tural and critical manifestation.

Functions of myth

After the chapters on prison, release under surveillance in Salvador,

then nearly three years exile in London—no small set of punishments—
there is the return to Brazil. These pages are full of interest, but what
is striking is their deliberately apolitical character. In particular, the
section on prison is disconcerting. Highly literary, full of Proustian
excursions, it concentrates on the ways that sleep, libido, moods and
reasoning are upended by the loss of freedom; there is no desire to
resist, no reflection on the continuing opposition movement—to which,
for better or worse, the narrator still belonged. Where the traditions of
the genre of political prison writings would usually suggest a balance
sheet of the movement’s past and perspectives for its future, Caetano
adopts an unconventional and subjective stance, concentrating on his
incapacity to cry or to masturbate, the revelation that tears and semen
are akin. How are we to understand the narrator’s choice, three dec-
ades later, to focus on his frailties, his inability to resist? It seems to be
presented as a form of reverse-heroism—demonstrating his superior-
ity to the narrow-mindedness of militants, perhaps, or a second-degree
revolt. Yet this long descent into the inferno can be read not only as tes-
timony, a faithful recollection, but also as a diversion, freeing the writer
from having to resume the militant stance in which he had been seized
by the regime. Commenting on ‘That Embrace’, the song with which
Gilberto Gil said farewell to Brazil, after prison and before going into
exile—‘without the least rancour’, ‘love and forgiveness stronger than
pain’—Caetano commends its wisdom: ‘“That Embrace” was, in this
sense, the opposite of my state of mind, and even in such a condition,
from the depths of my depression, I knew that this was the only way to
keep going without being overrun.’38 The lesson taught by the military
dictatorship had had its effect.

The realignment was completed with Caetano’s return to Brazil in

1972, the height of the dictatorship, to play once again at the carnival in
Bahia. The description, replete with melodrama, magical coincidence
and apotheosis, verges on the overblown. Learning that his song, ‘Rain,

38
tt, pp. 266–7; translation modified.
 114 nlr 75

Sweat and Beer’, composed in exile, was a huge commercial hit, Caetano
does not know whether to laugh or cry. The atmosphere of pan-sexuality
in the streets, the mingling of costumed revellers and genuine hippies,
carnivalesque transvestites and gay liberationists, seemed to be the
popular realization of the tropicalista programme—dissolving bounda-
ries between traditional and modern, local and cosmopolitan, masculine
and feminine. There was ‘a sense of tremendous freedom’ in the air. By
coincidence, rain starts to pour just as the band begins to play, and the
crowd carries on singing and dancing: ‘All of it seemed like a great feast
of welcome that Brazil had planned for me in the depths of its imagi-
nation.’ Mounted on the truck from which the band was playing was
a model space-rocket, inscribed ‘Caetanave’, and he climbs up on it to
thank the crowd:

Something struck my face that was not a raindrop. As I raised my hand to

see what it was, the thing wafted onto my chest, and that’s when Roberto
and I realised it was a mayfly [in Portuguese esperança, which also means
‘hope’]. Despite the heavy rain, this green mayfly had flown toward the
truck lights and landed on me. I said to Roberto: ‘Does this mean there is
hope?’ And he answered with the tranquil joy of one who expects nothing
less: ‘Of course!’

The spaceship heads towards the house where Caetano’s friend and
collaborator Gil was sleeping. Thinking at first he was seeing a flying
saucer, Gil takes a moment to understand what is going on:

When he saw me descend from the strange object making the tremulous
sound, he understood at once that the magical and ordinary reality were
reaffirming each other, that the symbolic and the empirical were not to be
distinguished—that at this great moment, reality was pregnant with myth.
The rejection of exile had not only dissipated: it was giving way to an affec-
tionate repatriation.39

As in a fairy tale, pouring rain, winged creatures and the Bahian people
unite to welcome, in the name of Brazil, the artist who was once rejected
but has now come home. As wish-fulfilment, the appeal to magic is
understandable; as an explanation of the course of events it is a real
abdication. A mythicized personification of the country replaces sober
examination of the facts, with obvious ill effects: the account occludes
the fears and fragility of the politically persecuted, the squalid calcula-
tions of a dictatorship in search of cultural legitimation, the backstage

39
tt, pp. 301–2; translation modified.
 schwarz: Caetano Veloso 115

negotiations needed in a case like this. Above all, the play of conflicting
forces disappears, the class alliances and antagonisms that underlie aes-
thetic invention, without which beauty is deprived of its social meaning.
Caetano has a masterly perception and analytical grasp of these relations,
which makes his conversion to mythification all the more disappointing.
That said, the work would be less representative without these pages.

Bad is good?

Yet perhaps the most disconcerting passages of Tropical Truth come in its
introduction, which is very strange—full of feints, including a deliberate
display of crassness, as if aimed at disorienting the reader; nevertheless,
the use of discomfort as a problematizing literary device is also one of
the book’s original features. Taking positions that do not square with the
civilized consensus—condoning an arson attack, sneering at the political
capacity of workers or representing oneself as a mythical character—
Caetano turns the space of reading into a field of provocations, conflicts
and insecurities. The uncertainties are all the more troubling since this
is not a work of fiction but a testimony; still, this approach, interesting
in itself, may be truer to contemporary realities than the stale certain-
ties that assure the literary assent of the well-thinking. The book starts
with some jaw-dropping reflections on the singularity of Brazil: the year
2000 will commemorate not only the turn of the millennium but the
500th anniversary of Cabral’s discovery of its shores, ‘an accumulation
of meaning not shared with any other country in the world’. Caetano dis-
tances himself, partially, from this numerological banality by attributing
its superstition to his compatriots: ‘The flood of omens let loose at this
juncture is closely allied with the psychology of Brazil—a failed nation
ashamed of having once been called “the county of the future”.’ The
move is again highly dubious: the problem is not that the ‘failed nation’
lacked a realistic self-understanding, but that it did not have the power
to believe in other, more promising omens—‘fortunately or not . . . we
remain very far from a sensible realism’.40

This does not go quite so far as to exalt the superstition of national essence,
but it comes astonishingly close to it. The relativization of advantages
and disadvantages is repeated for other polarities, following a familiar
procedure that would see the status of the imaginary—myth, dream,
superstition—and reality, the name and the thing, as equally acceptable

40
tt, p. 3.
 116 nlr 75

and desirable. This can lead to statements that will seem, according
to one’s point of view, either suggestive or vacuous; thus Brazil is ‘the
Other’ of the United States: ‘the double, the shadow, the negative image
of the great adventure of the New World’, and so on. These are the collo-
cations of a fantasy patriotism, half poetic, half mythic, that invites us to
take our debilities as riches. Yet the reader soon discovers that the praise
of absurdity and the license to be inconsequential have a rhetorical func-
tion: establishing the double-hued but complacent intellectual ambience
Caetano needs in order to introduce the question of the 1964 coup, the
nerve centre of the chapter. His generation, he observes, dreamed in
adolescence of reversing the ‘brutal legacy’ of Brazilian inequality. Yet:

In 1964, the military took power, motivated by the need to perpetuate those
disparities that have proven to be the only way to make the Brazilian econ-
omy work (badly, needless to say) and, in the international arena, to defend
the free market from the threat of the Communist bloc (another American
front of the Cold War).41

A careful reading is required to appreciate the ideological lurches of this

sentence, which seeks to capture—through estrangement, in sarcastic
spirit, as a justification?—the viewpoint of the victorious right. In the
process, the historical task of overthrowing the ‘brutal legacy’ of inequal-
ity gives way to the ‘need to perpetuate’ it. The use of the term is highly
ideological: whose need, for what? Similarly, the need for military action
evokes a situation of patriotic grandeur, belied by its sordid objectives.
The sophism, given a materialist twist, that perpetuating inequalities
is a necessity for a country whose economy cannot function without
them, remains unproven; the fact remains that the existing country is
the fatherland of those who benefit from inequality. Finally, the coup is
needed to defend the free market at the international level, in the con-
text of the Cold War. There is undoubtedly some truth to this clause,
which has the merit of indicating the narrowed horizons of the counter-
revolution without ceasing to be an indictment of market realities. The
initial, semi-frivolous hesitation between myth and reality—which
would be better?—is continued in this back-and-forth between the left’s
reasoning and that of the dictatorship itself. The skirmishes continue in
the following paragraphs, which suggest that the left, contrary to what it
thought, did not have a monopoly on noble sentiments, while the right
was not as evil as it was made out. These rectifications, claiming a—
clearly skewed—equidistance, in fact have very little to do with the brutal

41
tt, pp. 4–5.
 schwarz: Caetano Veloso 117

realities of the dictatorship or the questions that divided the country in

the period before it: agrarian reform, popular demands, underdevelop-
ment, independent foreign policy, deepening of democracy.

Written from a distance of three decades, at the moment of globaliza-

tion’s triumph, Tropical Truth captures the memorable effervescence of
the sixties, of which tropicalismo was a high point. Its war of attrition
against the left did not prevent the movement from being part of the
wave of student and anti-capitalist rebellion that culminated interna-
tionally in 1968. Loyal to the aesthetic values of that rebellion, Caetano
treasures its worth. Yet imbricated, too, in the triumph of the new order,
in which capitalism cannot be questioned, he shares the viewpoint and
the discourse of the Cold War’s victors. However problematically, the
renunciation of negativity also makes the book a valuable document of
its time. Thus the best way to make the most of this extraordinary work
includes a good deal of reading against the grain, to bring it into focus as
a double-sided historical dramatization: on the one hand, the promises
and the reality behind the defeated impulse; on the other, the lowered
expectations of triumphant capital.

Translated by Nicholas Caistor