Traditional Mutants:

Tropicália, Nationalism
and Authenticity
Richard Greenan
Music, Culture, and Politics MA
10th September 2010

Cardiff University
Prifysgol Caerdydd
 Contents
Introduction, 1

Chapter One: The Polemics of Tropicália, 5

The Defence of Tradition, 6
The Tropicalist Intervention, 12
Modernismo and the Cannibalist Aesthetic, 14
‘Why not?’: the Defiance of Lyrical Tradition, 22

Chapter Two: The Authenticity of Tropicália, 26

The Tradition of Anthropophagy, 26
The Invention of Tradition, 33
Chaotic Visions of a Chaotic World, 36

Conclusion, 45

Discography, 51
Bibliography, 48
 Introduction
The Cuban Revolution of 1959 signalled the beginning of a period of political
uncertainty for much of Latin America. Fearing the threat of socialism, the army
seized power in Brazil in 1964. The masses, mobilised but disorganised and unarmed,
could only look on passively as the agreement was made amongst generals. A brand
of authoritarian nationalism heavily pervaded Brazilian culture for the rest of the
1960s. As the Brazilian literary critic Roberto Schwarz observed in 1969, the people
soon felt the consequences of the military coup: ‘interference and terrorization in the
unions; terror in rural areas; a general reduction in wages; purges, especially in the
lower ranks of the Armed Forces; a military investigation in the universities; churches
were broken into; student organizations were dissolved; censorship prevailed; habeas
corpus was suspended, etc.’1
The military’s economic development programme was accompanied by an intense
nationalistic propaganda drive. Bumper stickers and TV and radio advertisements
sprang up all over Brazil, proclaiming the regime’s ominous message to dissenters:
‘Brazil - love it, or leave it.’2 In response, the left embraced its own nationalistic
ideology, inspired by ‘traditional regional popular culture, the conditions of the urban
worker and a rejection of the government’s modernising project.’3 The coup signalled
a sharp rise in support for a consolidation of Brazilian national identity; cultural
struggles intensified between the engajados and the alienados (those ‘engaged’ with
national identity and those ‘alienated’ from it). The influential think tank, the Institute
of Higher Studies (ISEB), was entrusted with the task of pointing out the Brazilian
nation’s best future direction. ISEB’s view was that ‘the economic domination of
Brazil had historically also been accompanied by a cultural domination’: Brazil was
seen as an exploited state, regarded as backwards by its occidental counterparts (e.g.,
the United States) and reduced to ‘copying’ their cultures.4 It was decided that an
aggressive enough policy of nationalism could emancipate Brazilian culture from the
restrictive influence of the ‘developed world’.
Hence the Brazilian popular music scene was subjected to increases in institutional
intervention and censorship. The military dictatorship’s involvement in the arts
brought about a heightened general awareness of the social function of music and its
capacity as a vehicle for nationalism. Critics, such as José Ramos Tinhorão, began to
place great emphasis on the importance of ‘authenticity’ in Brazilian popular music;
foreign influence was to be stamped out, and the linha evolutiva (evolutionary line) of
Brazilian popular music was to be protected. Around this time, the initials MPB
(música popular brasileira) came into use to distinguish ‘authentic’ music of
Brazilian ‘national character’ from that tainted by foreign pop. This nationalistic
taxonomy led on from a judgement prevalent since the 1950s: that Brazilian popular
music fell into one of two camps: ‘one for traditional or nationalistic music rejecting
foreign influence, and one for slavish imitations of American pop.’5 By the mid-1960s
1
Roberto Schwarz, ‘Culture and Politics in Brazil 1964-1969’, Misplaced Ideas (London:
Verso, 1992), p. 127.
2
Lorraine Leu, Brazilian Popular Music: Caetano Veloso and the Regeneration of Tradition
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 3.
3
Ibid.
4
Sean Stroud, The Defence of Tradition in Brazilian Popular Music (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2008), p. 25.
5
Bryan McCann, Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil
(London: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 133.
the engajado/alienado cultural conflicts manifested themselves in controversies over
the importation of Anglo-American rock and roll, and the Brazilian offshoot genre iê-
iê-iê (‘yeah-yeah-yeah’) - styles branded by traditionalists as degenerate.
Despite the repressive political climate, the mid to late 1960s was a period of
invention for Brazilian popular music. In the period that began with the military coup
of 1964 and ended with the promulgation of the Fifth Institutional Act that officially
sanctioned state repression and censorship (1968), ‘popular music had become the
privileged vehicle for the expression of political dissent.’6 Left wing protest song
came in the form of bossa nova. 1965–69 was to become known as the ‘golden age’
of Brazilian popular music festivals. These hugely popular competitions drew large-
scale media attention, the fates of the entrants being decided on air by the vociferous
crowd. In autumn of 1967, the third year of the festivals, two Bahians, Gilberto Gil
and Caetano Veloso, took to the stage in front of the television cameras in São Paulo.
They would soon be recognised as the twin figureheads of the ‘Tropicália’ movement,
a radical new strain of MPB. Gil, backed by Os Mutantes (‘The Mutants’), a young
trio clad in kitsch plastic outfits and brandishing unfamiliar electric guitars, performed
‘Domingo no Parque’ (‘Sunday in the Park’), a Beatles-inspired pop-pastiche, to a
lukewarm, slightly bemused reception. Veloso’s effort ruffled more traditionalist
feathers; ‘Alegria, alegria’ (‘Pleasure, pleasure’) was a seemingly unintelligible
barrage of harsh amplified noise and abstract, fragmented lyrics. Veloso was booed
and whistled from the stage. Initially these odd, unsuccessful performances might
have suggested only a small blip in the trajectory of MPB, but it would become clear
that they represented the beginning of a new epoch.
Tropicália gathered momentum and a circle of like-minded artists formed: Veloso,
Gil and Os Mutantes were joined by Gal Costa (singer), Tom Zé (composer),
Torquato Neto (songrwriter), José Carlos Capinam (lyricist), Rogério Duprat
(arranger), Hélio Oiticica (artist) and Guilherme Araujo (impresario). In July 1968 the
group released their ‘musical manifesto’, Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis
(‘Tropicália: or Bread and Circuses’). To the infuriation of the politically ‘engaged’,
the Tropicalists claimed to embody the next stage of the Brazilian popular music
linha evolutiva (‘evolutionary line’). By December 1968, the imposition of the fifth
Institutional Act brought about intense governmental censorship. Veloso and Gil, the
leaders of the Tropicália movement, were imprisoned then deported. The Tropicalist
experiment had finished abruptly.
But why did Tropicália cause such uproar? Were the protagonists wrong to place
Tropicália in the evolutionary line of Brazilian popular music? And what - if anything
- was the deeper cultural meaning of the Tropicália experiment? This dissertation
intends to address these questions by examining Tropicália’s interactions with
Brazilian cultural heritage. In chapter one I will discuss the controversy caused by
Tropicália: its supposed defiance of Brazilian musical authenticity, and its role as a
vehicle for unpopular political messages. In chapter two, I will argue the case for
Tropicália’s authenticity as a Brazilian music. This will first include discussing the
invention of tradition in Brazilian music. Second, I will refute the image of Tropicália
as a rootless menagerie, a sort of international free-for-all. Rather, I will point to the
movement’s very ethos of inclusion as a hallmark of Brazilianness. Finally I will
discuss Tropicália’s modernist/primitivist reflection of Brazilian society.

6
Carlos Basualdo, ‘Tropicália: Avant-Garde, Popular Culture, and the Culture Industry in
Brazil’, Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture, Basualdo ed. (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2005), p.
12.
 1. The Polemics of Tropicália
Brazilian popular music is the most complete, most totally national, most powerful
creation of our race so far.

Mário de Andrade7

Oh, this business of music meddling with politics, big beards, long hair … The only
music I’ll waste my time on is classical music or a nice samba-canção.

Erasmo Dias, Public Security Secretary for

São Paulo during the military dictatorship8

Tropicália was rejected by both sides of the political spectrum. Caetano Veloso
testifies, ‘the left booed me, they pelted me with bananas. Until the day I was arrested
by the military and then, exiled from the country.’9 In a time when nationalism
pervaded cultural production, Tropicália offered something else, something irreverent,
kitsch, and mercurial: a revolution of taste in Brazil. Veloso explains, ‘my expulsion
from the country … was based on aesthetic considerations and on a possible violation
of certain customs and traditions of the Brazilian people.’10
In the following chapter I will explore the ways in which Tropicália was seen to
violate Brazil’s musical customs and traditions. I will begin by exploring the
historical background of nationalism in Brazilian popular music, focussing on the
debates over the fear of ‘cultural invasion’ that began in the 1930s and intensified
towards the time of the Tropicália movement’s inception. I will consequently examine
the ‘inauthentic’ nature of the Tropicalist aesthetic itself.

The Defence of Tradition

As Sean Stroud observes, ‘popular music in Brazil has frequently interlinked with
political and cultural ideologies since the 1920s.’11 Having identified the Brazilian
problem of cultural dependency (as Júlio Mesquita put it in 1916, ‘we think with a
foreign brain; we are dressed by foreign tailors; we eat a foreign diet’12), the
intelligentsia devoted themselves to building a national identity founded upon the
hybrid culture of Brazil, thus ending the era of European tutelage. ‘National identity
[in Brazil] was constructed by an intellectual elite that created an ideal image of “the
people” and decided which kinds of traits were worth emphasizing and which ones
7
Cited in Christopher Dunn, Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian
Counterculture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 23.
8
Cited in Leu, Brazilian Popular Music, p. 24.
9
Caetano Veloso. Cited in Leu, Brazilian Popular Music, p. 24.
10
Ibid.
11
Stroud, The Defence of Tradition, p. 9.
12
Júlio Mesquita. Cited in Suzel Ana Reily, ‘Introduction: Brazilian musics, Brazilian
identities’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 9/1 (2000), p. 3.
were to be dismissed as decadent or inauthentic.’13 A character central to this effort
was Mário de Andrade, intellectual leader of the nationally orientated modernismo
movement that united a variety of Brazilian artists. In his essay, Ensaio Sôbre a
Música Brasileira (1928), Andrade provided a coherent explication of the nationalist
cause that would shape the thinking of generations of Brazilian composers and
musicians from its publication right up until the emergence of Tropicália. Andrade’s
vision focussed on a concept of musical nationalism, symbolised by his ‘belief in the
prospect of an evolutionary process by which Brazilian popular music would
eventually break free from the shackles of international influences, to be regenerated
by innately Brazilian qualities.’14
Ensaio was a nationalistic rallying call for Brazilian composers and musicians; it
placed the onus on them to construct an autonomous culture reflecting the unique
Brazilian psyche, something achievable only by breaking the habit of imitating
European cultural models. As Suzel Ana Reily summarises, ‘Ensaio made a plea to
the music circles of the time, arguing that Brazil could be freed of its cultural bondage
through the conscious agency of the artistic world.’15 Ensaio was groundbreaking in
that it delineated for the first time the stylistic features that marked music as
‘essentially Brazilian’. Andrade located these features in what he found the most
compelling aspect of Brazilian culture: folklore. Andrade amassed extensive
collections of the national repertoire during several expeditions to various parts of
Brazil. For Andrade, such folk music ought to act as the ‘authentic’ source of artistic
inspiration for Brazilian composers. He encouraged composers to source folk music
as a raw material, thus drawing on the Brazilian nation’s cultural legacy, transforming
the ‘popular’ into the ‘artistic’.
The idea of music as an ideological conduit developed concurrently with the
commercial expansion of the Brazilian popular music industry. By the 1930s the
burgeoning radio, film and magazine industries allowed audiences to intimately
connect with the stars of popular music for the first time. Stylistic advances in popular
music could be powerfully articulated by these new structures, a development met
with hope and fear in the music community. By the late 1930s, clear disputes were
developing over the ‘correct’ path for Brazilian popular music. Composer Radamés
Gnatalli’s pioneering ‘samba with strings’ style was a particularly divisive innovation.
Gnatalli’s arrangement of Orlando Silva’s interpretation of ‘Aquarela do Brasil’
(1939), in which he favoured a lush string accompaniment over more traditional
‘regional’ instruments such as cavaquinho, accordion, flute, pandeiro and guitar, was
anathema to some music critics. ‘Gnatalli immediately received letters of complaint
from those who considered that Brazilian music should only feature the guitar and
cavaquinho, a foretaste of the resistance to the “dilution” of popular music that was to
follow.’16
The radio industry continued to expand. By the early 1940s, Rio’s broadcasting
scene had come to resemble a ‘Brazilian Hollywood’, complete with glittering stars
and lavish productions. The station Rádio Nacional was receiving on average over
26,000 letters every month from listeners throughout Brazil.17 The radio boom was a
cause of anxiety for those eager to preserve the ‘purity’ of popular music; Brazil’s
13
Martha de Ulhôa Carvalho, ‘Tupi or Not Tupi MPB: Popular Music and Identity in Brazil’,
The Brazilian Puzzle, eds. David J. Hess and Roberto A. Damatta (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1995), p. 163.
14
Stroud, The Defence of Tradition, p. 12.
15
Reily, ‘Introduction: Brazilian musics, Brazilian identities’, pp. 3–4.
16
Stroud, The Defence of Tradition, p. 15.
17
Ibid.
radio audiences were appealing targets for U.S.-based marketers. In the words of
Bryan McCann, those who sought to preserve musical tradition

trembled before the fearsome technological and administrative apparatus that enabled these
marketers to place the polished products or an advanced popular cultural industry in the
constant sight and earshot of the residents of Brazil’s major cities.18

Hence the Brazilian popular music arena of the 1940s was permeated by nationalistic
fervour. In 1941 the prominent composer Heitor Villa-Lobos conducted a survey of
the Brazilian popular music community, expressly designed to ‘call attention to what
Villa-Lobos believed to be the pernicious presence of foreign popular music in Brazil
and to inspire a reaction against it.’19 The leading nature of the questions (e.g., ‘Does
Brazil, with all its original and excellent elements of popular manifestation, need the
current influence of foreign popular music?’20) revealed his exercise to be nothing
more than a xenophobic rant. At one point Villa-Lobos implicitly suggested that
‘foreigners who did not like samba should be exiled.’21
The music market had come to resemble a cultural battleground. Observers
bickered over the definitive musical qualities of Brazilianness. Songs were upheld as
authentic or condemned as impure. Faith in the authenticity of the recording industry
began to wane. As McCann notes, many observers ‘viewed the market as a realm of
perdition: as authentic folkloric creations became commodities, their Brazilianness
was inevitably diluted or corrupted.’22 One such of these observers was radio
announcer Henrique Forei Domingues (more commonly known by his nickname,
Almirante). Renowned for his zealous nationalist rhetoric, Almirante rallied against
the threat of internationalisation from the late-1940s to the mid-1950s, using his
extremely popular broadcasts to promote O Pessoal de Velha Guarda (The Old
Guard): a group of Brazilian musicians including Benedito Lacerda and Pixinguinha,
who practised traditional Brazilian styles of music such as choro, xute, lundu, and old-
fashioned samba. Almirante went so far as to recommend that ‘Brazilians, when
travelling abroad, identify themselves by whistling the most famous choro
composition, Carinhoso.’23
Radio restrictions progressively loosened throughout the 1950s, allowing genres
such as jazz, blues and other types of North American pop music regular airtime. The
mid-1950s saw the birth of a samba derivative dubbed ‘bossa nova’ (approximately
translated: ‘new fashion’ or ‘new way’), a phenomenon that would revolutionise
Brazilian popular music. Bossa nova provoked strong criticism from the nationalists
over its alleged foreign influences. A product of the ‘internationalised’ pop scene, the
style specifically drew on North American jazz. In the words of Gerard Béhague,
‘debates grew from questions involving the alleged disruption of the traditional samba
or the lack of authenticity of the new samba style because of “Yankee Imperialist”
domination of Brazilian composers and performers.’24
18
McCann, Hello Hello Brazil, p. 137.
19
Ibid., p. 150.
20
Villa-Lobos survey, Diretrizes, 15 May 1941, pp. 12–13. Cited in McCann, Hello Hello
Brazil, p. 150.
21
Ibid., p. 151.
22
McCann, Hello Hello Brazil, p. 13.
23
Byran McCann, ‘The Invention of Tradition on Brazilian Radio’, The Brazil Reader: History,
Culture, Politics, eds. Robert M. Levine and John J. Crocitti (London: Latin America Bureau, 1999), p.
478.
24
Gerard Béhague, ‘Bossa & Bossas: Recent Changes in Brazilian Urban Popular Music’,
Ethnomusicology, 17/2 (May, 1973), p. 211.
 The 1960s was a time of political radicalisation for Brazil. Following the suicide of
Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas in 1954, the support base for populism had begun to
deteriorate. Furthermore, the 1959 overthrow of the U.S.-aligned Batista regime in
Cuba galvanised anti-American and leftist sentiments throughout Latin America.
Influenced by anti-imperialist and socialist ideas, Brazilians in increasing numbers
became politically mobilised in student organisations, trade unions and peasant
leagues. ‘Culture, including song, was now required to play a conscious, active role in
expressing the interests and aspirations for the movement for social and political
change.’25 The idea of a revolutionary popular culture was becoming a tangible
reality. Bossa nova developed from a ‘dissonant’ avant-garde entertainment into a
rather earnest, musically nationalistic social protest movement, Canção de Protesto, a
metamorphosis concurrent with the period of increasing political uncertainty leading
up to the military takeover. For the protestors (largely high-school and university
students), the ideological construction of popular-national solidarity projected by the
samba tradition of the 1950s was no longer an adequate representation of
Brazilianness. In the words of David Treece:

In the age of populism, the audience had … been reduced to a homogenous mass of
anonymous spectators watching melodramas of desperate, suicidal unrequited love, or set-
piece extravaganzas celebrating the national ‘carnival’.26

Thus Canção de Protesto was regarded by some as an attempt to articulate a more

autonomous, authentic Brazilian community; it represented a clear message of protest,
with revolutionary connotations, while remaining faithful to the tradition of popular
music on a formal level.
By the start of the 1960s, a rock and roll ‘craze’ had enveloped Brazilian culture.
Large crops of bands, such as The Pop’s, Os Jovens, Os Inocentes, The Fevers and
The Brazilian Bitles (sic), began performing Brazilian articulations of Anglo-
American rock and roll. The style was dubbed iê-iê-iê (yeah yeah yeah). With its
unashamed commercialism, assimilation of North American and European fashion
and trends, and overwhelming similarities to the North American rock and roll model,
iê-iê-iê threatened to obscure the roots of Brazilian popular music. The
engajado/alienado confrontation appeared in the form of a ‘war’ drummed up by
record companies and the newspaper industry, in which fans of national popular
music were pitted against the fans of iê-iê-iê. The supporters of samba and Canção de
Protesto attacked iê-iê-iê ‘for being shallow and unsophisticated, the political subtext
being that it was foreign and ‘alienado’ [apolitical].’ For the left wing, iê-iê-iê was
guilty of disregarding the role of popular music - ‘to articulate a national ideal,
conceived in terms of revalorizing cultural “roots,” and to exercise freedom of
expression in open opposition to the ideological and political project of the military
government.’27
Furthermore, with the help of the notorious film Blackboard Jungle (1955), which
dealt with the themes of rock and roll culture and teenage rebellion, connections were
drawn between iê-iê-iê and antisocial behaviour. The notion of rock and roll as a
degenerate force was demonstrated by the MPB singer Elis Regina in a tirade against

25
David Treece, ‘Guns and Roses: Bossa Nova and Brazil’s Music of Popular Protest, 1958-
68’, Popular Music, 16/1 (Jan., 1997), p. 2.
26
Ibid., p. 11.
27
Basualdo, ‘Tropicália: Avant-Garde, Popular Culture, and the Culture Industry in Brazil’, p.
12.
iê-iê-iê; upon returning home from a tour she was disgusted to find large portions of
Brazilian society in the style’s sway:

What I saw was this submusic, this noise that they call iê iê iê, capturing thousands of
youngsters who are beginning to be interested in music and who are being led astray. This iê
iê iê is a drug: it deforms the minds of young people. Just look at the songs they sing: most of
them have very few notes which makes them easier to sing and to memorise. The lyrics don’t
have any message: they talk about dances, sweet talk, frivolous things.28

Defensive sentiments held in the traditional popular music community were so strong
that a protest march against foreign music was organised in São Paulo in 1966. It
would come to be known as ‘the march against electric guitars’. MPB musicians Elis
Regina, Edu Lobo and future Tropicalist Gilberto Gil were amongst the crowd.
Looking back on the event years later, Gilberto Gil ruefully recalled that ‘the
demonstration had been anti-iê iê iê, and had been slightly xenophobic and
nationalistic in character.’29

The Tropicalist Intervention

Tropicália’s central premise was a polemical intervention into the debate on the
function of Brazil’s popular music. By attempting to articulate the transformations to
Brazilian society brought about as a result of modernism and internationalisation,
Tropicália posed a radical examination and questioning of the ideologies responsible
for consecrating and upholding Brazilian musical, lyrical and performing conventions.
In other words, according to the Tropicalists, an invigorating injection of foreign
culture was required to save Brazilian popular music from stagnation. As Treece
observes, by 1968 the aesthetic properties of MPB had been reduced down to hardly
more than ‘partisan, propagandist pronouncements on behalf of this or that pre-
determined position, rather than critical and creative activities of reinvention.’30 For
Veloso and Hélio Orticica, left wing movements such as Canção de Protesto ‘only
succeeded in rendering the cultural materials with which they worked folkloric,
thereby inhibiting the possibility of elaborating an effective and mobilizing critical
stance on contemporary Brazilian culture and its place in the international context.’31
For Veloso, the birth of bossa nova had represented the promise of essential
reinvention in Brazilian popular music - the reinvigoration of its evolutionary line. He
praised the genre in an interview around the time it was discredited by nationalist
criticism as a diluted, internationalised samba. Crediting particularly the innovations
of João Gilberto as paving the way for a regeneration of the Brazilian popular music
tradition, Veloso remarked, ‘for me João Gilberto represents the exact moment that
this happened: the material of musical modernity utilised to re-create, to renovate, to
take a step forward in Brazilian popular music.’32 In Veloso’s eyes, however, bossa
nova’s appropriation by the nationalist protest song movement was to compromise its
position at the leading edge of Brazilian popular music. Hence Tropicália was a
28
Elis Regina, interview for Intervalo. Cited in Stroud, The Defence of Tradition, p. 24.
29
Ruy Castro, Chega de Saudade: A história e as histórias da Bossa Nova (São Paulo, 1990), p.
405. Cited in Stroud, The Defence of Tradition, p. 25.
30
David Treece, ‘Rhythm and Poetry’, Cultural Politics in Latin America, eds. Anny
Brooksbank Jones and Ronaldo Munck (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 37.
31
Basualdo, ‘Tropicália: Avant-Garde, Popular Culture, and the Culture Industry in Brazil’, p.
12.
32
CaetanoVeloso. Cited in Leu, Brazilian Popular Music, p. 9.
reaction against the populist didacticism of Canção de Protesto as well as the cultural
hegemony of the right wing. In his memoir, Tropical Truth, Veloso makes clear
Tropicália’s anti-nationalist cause: ‘we had to free ourselves from the Brazil that we
knew. We had to destroy the Brazil of the nationalists, […] and do away once and for
all with its image.’33 Gilberto Gil has also mentioned in interviews Tropicália’s
struggle against social formulas as being defined by ‘demystify[ing] the fascistic
insistence on cultural isolation and on the national meaning of Brazilian-ness.’34
Tropicália represented a divisive aesthetic shift for Brazilian popular music. In the
liner notes of the retrospective Grandes Nomes: Caetano, music critic Tárik de Souza
writes of Veloso and Gil’s infamous performances of ‘Alegria, alegria’ and ‘Domingo
no Parque’:

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. 35

Oiticica, coiner of the term Tropicália (the chosen name of his experimental art
installation of 1967), articulated the difficulty of spearheading such an avant-garde
cultural regeneration: ‘How to explain, in an underdeveloped country, the appearance
of an avant-garde and justify it not as symptomatic alienation, but as a decisive factor
in collective progress?’36 In the following sections I will detail the contentious aspects
of the Tropicalist aesthetic.

Modernismo and the Cannibalist Aesthetic

Central to the Tropicalist aesthetic was the movement’s reappraisal of Brazilian

modernism and especially the work of the poet Oswald de Andrade (no relation to
Mário37). Oswald was widely regarded as the enfant terrible of the so-called heroic
phase of modernismo (1920–30). Oswald and his cohort - a group of composers,
writers and visual artists from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro - sought to promote
unprecedented artistic openness to foreign influences as a means of bringing about
change in social, cultural and political affairs. The modernismo movement signalled
transformations in Brazilian culture that culminated in the nationalist-populist
Revolution of 1930, led by Getúlio Vargas.
Modernismo stood in direct opposition to the dominant, land-owning classes,
whose world view ‘affirmed stasis and nostalgia rather than process and social
change.’38 Rather, as Alfredo Bosi notes, the modernist concerns lay with two key
imperatives:

33
Caetano Veloso, Verdade Tropical (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), p. 50. Cited in
Hermano Viana, ‘Tropicália’s Politics’, Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture, p. 132.
34
Gilberto Gil, Gilberto Gil: Expresso 2222 (Salvador: Corrupio, 1982), p. 33. Cited in Vianna,
The Mystery of Samba, p. 96.
35
Tárik de Souza. Cited in Chris McGowan and Ricardo Pessanha, The Brazilian Sound
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), p. 84.
36
Hélio Oiticica, ‘General Scheme of the New Objectivity’. Cited in Basualdo, ‘Tropicália:
Avant-Garde, Popular Culture, and the Culture Industry in Brazil’, p. 11.
37
But from here on referred to as ‘Oswald’ to avoid confusion.
38
Sérgio Bellei, ‘Brazilian Anthropophagy Revisited’, Cannibalism and the Colonial World,
eds. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iverson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), p. 88.
 a futurist imperative calling for formal experimentation, engagement with technology, and the
representation of urbanity; and a primitivist imperative with its emphasis on the quotidian
experience and cultural practices of the Brazilian people.39

Oswald elegantly expressed this futurist/primitivist binary in two polemical tracts.

The first, Poesia Pau-Brasil (‘Brazil-wood Poetry’, 1924), cemented Oswald’s
reputation as an arch subverter of linguistic conventions. His subject matter, however,
was essentially ‘old-fashioned’. This synthesis is illustrated well by the poem Pobre
alimára (‘Poor brute’):

The horse and cart

Were stuck in the
tramline
And as the driver
was getting impatient
Because he was taking the lawyers
to their offices
They extricated the vehicle
And the animal bolted
But the light-footed carter
Jumped onto his seat
And punished the harnessed fugitive
With a fearsome whip.40

Oswald’s avant-garde agenda is reflected in the poem’s rudimentary form: simple

elements, arranged without sentimentality and isolated from the usual prejudices and
connotations. The poem, with its juxtaposition of the backwards and the modern (the
horse and cart stuck in the tramlines) and its contrasting social classes, times and
worlds (on the one side, the tram, the lawyers and the tram driver; on the other, the
horse, the cart and the carter), functions as an allegory of a technologically limited,
hierarchically structured Brazil. In the words of Schwarz:

The construction of the poem superimposes incongruous coordinates, whose clashes are a
direct challenge to historical awareness: avant-garde versus provincial resentment; cart Brazil
versus office Brazil; a rudimentary individualism versus patriotic allegories or the cult of
subjectivity.41

Oswald’s second tract, Manifesto antropófago (‘Cannibalist Manifesto’, 1928),

would provide the Tropicalists with their key aesthetic device: antropofágia
(anthropophagy), or ‘cultural cannibalism’. Communicated in a series of telegraphic,
witty aphorisms, Oswald’s message was that in order to produce truly Brazilian art,
locals needed to ‘cannibalise the foreign, thereby eliminating its threat while
incorporating its power.’42 With the famous phrase ‘Tupi or not tupi, that is the
question,’ Oswald performed an irreverent and parodistic cannibalisation of
Shakespeare while simultaneously raising the issue of Brazil’s cultural identity crisis.
43
The aphorism traced the idea of artistic anthropophagy back to sixteenth-century
39
Alfredo Bosi, Históra concise, pp. 385–386. Cited in Dunn, Brutality Garden, p. 14.
40
Oswald de Andrade, Poesias reunidas (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizaçã Brasileira, 1974), p. 120.
Cited in Roberto Schwarz, ‘The Cart, the Tram and the Modernist Poet’, Misplaced Ideas (London:
Verso, 1992), p. 112.
41
Schwarz, ‘The Cart, the Tram and the Modernist Poet’, p. 117.
42
McCann, Hello, Hello Brazil, p. 133.
43
Oswald de Andrade, ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’, trans. Leslie Bary, Latin American Literary
Review, 19/38 (Jul.–Dec., 1991), p. 39.
native South American religious cannibalism; ‘Tupi’ is both a reference to ‘to be’, as
in identity, and ‘Tupinambá’, the first known native Brazilian tribes.
As Martha de Ulhôa Carvalho writes, ‘for the Native Brazilian Tupinambá, the
physical and spiritual worlds were intermingled, and it was possible to “eat” what
came from both worlds.’44 That is to say, to devour another being was to capture its
qualities. Human sacrifice would lead to the birth of another self in the cannibal (and
a new name). Carvalho continues:

They [the Tupinambá] had an animistic vision of the world and did not distinguish between
themselves and nature. For example, one would not eat a slow-moving animal because one’s
ability to run could be jeopardized. By the same token, vital energy was absorbed through
cannibalistic practices.45

Oswald deployed anthropophagy as a metaphor for the practice of absorbing foreign

and native art as a means to construct a new Brazilian national identity. He interpreted
Brazil’s malaise of cultural dependency as responsible for a disharmony between
bourgeois models and the realities of Brazilian rural patriarchy. The solution was a
coming together of technological development and primitive wisdom. As Schwarz has
put it, Oswald’s ‘anthropophagous’ project ‘tried to give a triumphalist interpretation
of our backwardsness … Local primitivism would give back a modern sense to tired
European culture, liberating it from Christian mortification and capitalist
utalitarianism.’46 In the words of Sérgio Bellei, Oswald’s antropofágia proposes that
‘primitivism should no longer be understood as a stage to be overcome, but indeed as
a valuable instrument for redeeming modern society from the excesses of
capitalism.’47
Contact with the European experiments of Surrealism and Dada no doubt
stimulated Oswald’s attempt to promote an aesthetic revolution commensurate with
modernity. Specifically, the self-conscious adoption of a primitivist identity is a
common device between the movements. In 1920 the French Dadaist Francis Picabia
had in fact published a ‘Manifeste Cannibale Dada’, but Oswald’s antropofágia was
by no means imitative. As Robert Morse argues:

For Brazilians cannibals were a historical reality, not a divertissement. That is, once one
accepts the Tupi as the original Brazilian, his cannibalism is no longer savage, exotic, or an
anthropological curiosity. It now becomes the Indian ritual ingesting of the strength and power
of enemies and eventually of European invaders … They could now repudiate the clumsy
binomial between mimicry of Europe and a ‘native’ culture cut from whole cloth.
Cannibalism recognized both the nutritive property of European culture and a transformative
process of appropriation.48

By adopting the image of the cannibal, Oswald’s work connoted a return to a state of
purity, a back-to-nature authenticity. Indeed, upon meeting members of the Tupi tribe,
the French writer Michel de Montaigne not only praised them as ‘living examples of
the triumph of nature over art,’49 but raised the Brazilian cannibal ‘to the status of an

44
Carvalho, ‘Tupi or Not Tupi MPB’, p. 159.
45
Ibid., pp. 159–161.
46
Roberto Schwarz, ‘Brazilian Culture: Nationalism by Elimination’, Misplaced Ideas, p. 7.
47
Bellei, ‘Brazilian Anthropophagy Revisited’, p. 102.
48
Robert Morse. Cited in Peter Hulme, ‘Introduction: the cannibal scene’, Cannibalism and the
Colonial World, p. 27.
49
Rogério Budasz, ‘Of Cannibals and the Recycling of Otherness’, Music and Letters, 86/1
(Dec., 2005), p. 1.
orator and philosopher, a free and fraternal citizen or a back-to-nature utopia.’50
Furthermore, Budasz argues that, for the Tupinambá, ‘cannibalism was also a kind of
speech’, and, rather than arising from hunger, it was motivated by a sort of ‘noble
revenge and the will to take a name that, for some Europeans, seemed to resonate with
those familiar values of honour and courage found in chivalric literature.’51 We are
reminded of the ‘noble savage’ trope, and of Rousseau’s ringing declaration, ‘man
was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.’ By reappropriating the image of the
cannibal, Oswald sought to construct an indigenous, authentic Brazilian culture. As
Carvalho writes,

[Oswald] and the modernists claimed an identity with the very first inhabitants of Brazil, not
in the romanticized sense of the nineteenth-century version of nationalism, but in the modern
sense of a quest for barbaric innocence.52

The Tropicalist movement was indebted to Oswald’s iconoclastic cultural

cannibalism project. Both deployed the primitivist avant-garde in their emancipatory
performances. Where Oswald set out to strip Brazilian poetry aesthetic of its
nineteenth century psychological complexity and literary affectation, the Tropicalists
set out to free Brazilian popular music of the crust of nationalistic posturing. Hence
Tropicália can be interpreted as a rearticulation of the modernist stance, ‘that the
esoteric aura surrounding matters of the intellect was an obsolete, antidemocratic fog -
at bottom, a fraud - which should be dissipated.’53 Accordingly, Veloso’s fascination
with those singers rejected or forgotten by the protest song movement - the ‘golden
age’ of Brazilian vocalists, such as Orlando Silva and Carmen Miranda, and
contemporary popular singers including Roberto Carlos and Jorge Ben - reflected his
desire to distance his art from the explicit politics of protest song, and instead focus
on the question of the listening experience and listening pleasure. Likewise, the
Tropicalist reverence shown for João Gilberto was partly due to his ‘value[ing] [of]
restraint as opposed to the excessive emotionalism that had characterized the popular
music of the ‘40s and ‘50s.’54
The Tropicalists produced their own tract, a declaration of the movement’s ethos
entitled ‘Tropicalist Manifesto’:

The present state of development of our music and the discrimination which the nationalists
have proposed would confine us to a role as suppliers of raw material for other countries. It
was the bossa nova that ended all this by creating something which, for the first time, Brazil
could export. Tropicalism is an attempt to unite all possible combinations of elements. It is
also called som universal because it unites the most recent international accomplishments
(Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, the second rock generation). But it also includes choro, Noel Rosa and
música caipira (rural music).55

Distilled in the maxim som livre (free sound), the Tropicalist mission statement
represented Veloso and Gil’s vision of popular music: something in a state of constant
50
Franck Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from
Columbus to Jules Verne (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), pp. 110–111.
51
Budasz, ‘Of Cannibals and the Recycling of Otherness’, p. 1.
52
Carvalho, ‘Tupi or Not Tupi MPB’, p. 159.
53
Schwarz, ‘The Cart, the Tram and the Modernist Poet’, p. 108.
54
Santuza Cambraia Naves, ‘From Bossa Nova to Tropicália: Restraint and Excess in
Popular music’, Imagining Brazil, eds. Jessé Souza and Valter Sinda (Lanham: Lexington,
2005), p. 251.
55
Journal de Música (Rio). Cited in Claus Schriener, Música Brasileira: A History of Popular
Music and the People of Brazil, trans. Mark Weinstein (London: Marion Boyars, 1993), pp. 166–167.
flux, a musical melangé subject to a wide range of internal and external factors rather
than the product of a fixed national formula. It was an aesthetic built around the
premise of uninhibited, far-reaching absorption: a cultural expression orientated
around a dialogue between erudite and popular art forms, and between different
historical epochs. The collision of primitivist tropes and technological advance was
clear in Oiticica’s Tropicália (the installation featured a sandy path, intended to be
walked barefoot, that wound between tropical plants and led the participant to face a
television tuned to regularly scheduled programs).
For Veloso, the Tropicália project was a form of ‘neo-cannibalism’ relevant to the
cultural context of the 1960s.56 He has stated: ‘the idea of cultural cannibalism fits us,
the Tropicalists, like a glove. We were “eating” the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix.’57 Os
Mutantes performed perhaps the most overt cannibalisations, their songs restless
bricolages of church bells, birdsong, military fanfares, sudden applause, Rolling
Stones riffs (‘Mágica’ flagrantly cannibalises ‘Satisfaction’) and Beatles-esque
devices such as backwards guitar solos and false endings. In their version of
Lamartine Babo’s ‘Canção para inglês ver’ (‘Song for the English to see’), itself an
appropriation of the American fox-trot, Os Mutantes light-heartedly rearticulated a
pop hit from 1931 as an ode to their own frantic consumption; Babo’s song was
preoccupied ‘with eating, with its sandwiches, pineapples, bean paste, and other
comestibles’.58
Erasmo Dias’s comment in this chapter’s epitaph reveals the political implications
of hybrid styles and Western fashion trends in Brazilian popular music. The
Tropicalists’ long hair, beards, hippie clothes and macumba beads spoke of
underdevelopment, pleasure and preguiça (indolence). Even the orange turtleneck
sported by Veloso (rather than a dark suit) during the infamous performance of
‘Alegria, alegria’ constituted an anti-discourse to the military regime’s law-and-order
ethic. The Tropicalist collision of styles constituted a double-pronged attack on the
purist, folkloristic view of national culture (embodied by Almirante and the Canção
de Protesto movement) and the wholesale imitation of foreign models (e.g., iê-iê-iê).
Veloso provided a summary of these concerns, stating that Tropicália sought a
saudosismo do futuro (nostalgia for the future). The epitome of this radically unique
Brazilian cultural product was foisted on music festival crowds in 1968, with
Veloso’s performance of ‘É Proibido Proibir’ (‘Prohibiting Prohibited’). Backed again
by Os Mutantes, Veloso was roundly booed before he appeared on stage. The crowd,
predisposed to reject the song for its ‘American’ sound, were further incensed by
Veloso’s carefully assembled outfit:

Juxtaposed on Veloso’s lean, androgynous body was a futuristic suit of black and lime green
plastic, with a necklace of animal teeth, Afro-Brazilian macumba beads and electrical wires, a
style statement that communicated visually the triumph of individual choice and the ‘nostalgia
for the future.’59

This violent departure from the formal attire expected at such events served to anger
and disturb the crowd, its irreverent and kitsch hybridity a deessentialisation of
accepted Brazilian national symbols.

56
Veloso, Balanço da bossa e outras bossas, ed. Augusto de Campos (São Paulo: Perspectiva,
1978), p. 207. Cited in Dunn, Brutality Garden, p. 6.
57
Veloso, Balanço da bossa e outras bossas, pp. 128–129. Cited in Dunn, Brutality Garden, p.
74.
58
McCann, Hello, Hello Brazil, p. 131.
59
Leu, Brazilian Popular Music, pp. 34–35.
 As Ismail Xavier observes, Brazil in the late 1960s constituted a ‘“frontier
situation” in which confrontation increases: It is the key moment of the political,
cultural, and even military struggle that resulted in the consolidation of the
institutional picture sponsoring Brazilian modernization.’60 For Xavier, the period
marked the ‘final stage’ of modernism; Tropicália stood at ‘threshold of the
“postmodern condition” in Brazil’.61 Indeed, by reclaiming the dialogue with foreign
genres, Tropicália created an appetite for the mixture of the regional and international
that would become a permanent dimension of Brazilian popular music expression.

‘Why not?’: the Defiance of Lyrical Convention

In 1967, Gil and Veloso - now leaders of the Tropicália movement - were to meet the
founder of the Brazilian concrete poetry movement, music critic Augusto de Campos.
A rapport had previously been built between the Bahian composers and the poets
known as the ‘Noigandres group’ (Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Décio Pignatari
and Ronaldo Azeredo) after Augusto de Campos praised Veloso’s song, ‘Boa palavra’
(‘Good Word’), in his review of Brazil’s second national Festival of Popular Music in
1966. Veloso and Gil were again singled out for praise by Campos after their
controversial performances of ‘Domingo no Parque’ and ‘Alegria, alegria’ during the
third festival, in 1967. Impressed by the highly creative and inventive qualities of both
songs, particularly their use of montage and fragmentation techniques, Campos
applauded the ‘experimental opening’ they represented. Campos ‘drew parallels
between Veloso’s support of “evolution” in popular music and the aesthetic
“deglutition” of Modernist poet Oswald de Andrade, one of the concrete poets’ prime
inspirations.’62 To the Noigandres group, Veloso and Gil were now associated with
the Brazilian avant-garde, ‘especially with the postulates of Concrete Poetry.’63
On their meeting in 1967, the Campos brothers gave Veloso their translations of
James Joyce, Mayacovsky and Ezra Pound, together with articles by Décio Pignateri
and Haroldo de Campos on the work of Oswald (the Campos brothers were
responsible for the concretist reworking of Oswald’s ideas during the late 1950s).
This meeting also coincided with the debut of de Oswald’s iconoclastic play, ‘O rei da
vela’ (‘The Candle King’); ‘the wild theatrical presentation of this drama profoundly
affected Veloso and gave new direction to his musical composition.’64 Thus it was
with the help of the Noigandres group that the Tropicalists were exposed to the
concepts of artistic anthropophagy, and to the wider artistic avant-garde.
In 1979 Celso Favaretto was to emphasise the affinities between the concrete poets
and the Tropicalists, highlighting the Tropicalists’ pioneering ‘reduced use of
procedures typical of concrete poetry (nondiscursive syntax, verbo-voco-visuality,
verbal consision).’65 The prime example of a concretist compositional approach
manifesting itself in Tropicália is Veloso and Gil’s ‘Batmacumba’, a song which

60
Ismail Xavier, Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and Politics in Modern Brazilian
Cinema (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 27.
61
Ibid., p. 28.
62
Charles A. Perrone, ‘From Noigandres to “Milagre da Alegria”: The Concrete Poets and
Contemporary Brazilian Popular Music’, Latin American Music Review, 6/1 (Spring – Summer, 1985),
p. 61.
63
Augusto de Campos, Balanço da bossa e outras bossas, p. 155. Cited in ibid.
64
Perrone, ‘From Noigandres to “Milagre da Alegria”’, p. 61.
65
Celso Favaretto, Tropicália alegoria alegria (São Paulo: Kairós, 1979), p. 30. Cited in ibid.,
p. 62.
appeared on the initial Tropicália concept album. ‘Batmacumba’ is based on a single
poetic phrase (‘batmacumbaiéié batmacumbaobá’) containing a series of compressed
semantic fragments, referencing: American comic books (Batman), Afro-Brazilian
religion, or voodoo (macumba), Brazilian rock and roll (iê-iê-iê), and everyday words
such as ‘oba’ (a greeting of African origin) and ‘bat’ (bringing to mind both the
English ‘bat’, a common symbol for witchcraft and sorcery, and the Portuguese
‘bate’, to beat or thump, as in striking a voodoo drum). As the song progresses, the
phrase is gradually eroded, emphasising each component in turn, until only ‘bá’
remains. It is then rebuilt in the same fashion. Augusto de Campos later provided a
concretist transcription of ‘Macumba’. Campos’s visual poem suggests the two
triangular wings of a bat in flight:

Batmacumbaiêiê batmacumbaobá
Batmacumbaiêiê batmacumbao
Batmacumbaiêiê batmacumbá
Batmacumbaiêiê batmacum
Batmacumbaiêiê batman
Batmacumbaiêiê bat
Batmacumbaiêiê bá
Batmacumbaiêiê
Batmacumbaiê
Batmacumbá
Batmacum
Batman
Bat
Bá
Bat
Batman
Batmacum
Batmacumbá
Batmacumbaiê
Batmacumbaiêiê
Batmacumbaiêiê bá
Batmacumbaiêiê bat
Batmacumbaiêiê batman
Batmacumbaiêiê batmacum
Batmacumbaiêiê batmacumbá
Batmacumbaiêiê batmacumbao
Batmacumbaiêiê batmacumbaobá 66

‘Macumba’ signified a defiant break away from linear syntax and semantics.
Commenting on the controversial song, Augusto de Campos related its message to
that of Oswald and the modernists: ‘Instead of the nationalist “macumba for tourists”
that Oswald condemned, it seems that the Bahians decided to create a “bat-macumba”
for futurists.’67 The intentional fusing of diverse elements - concretist formal structure,
western pop culture symbols, Brazilian sacred and secular references - renders
‘Macumba’ probably the most hybrid song of the entire Tropicalist repertoire. As
Christopher Dunn observes, the palimpsest aesthetic of ‘Macumba’ suggests that
‘products of the multinational culture industry like Batman and rock have been
“Brazilianized” and, conversely, that Afro-Brazilian religion is central to Brazilian
modernity and not to a folkloristic vestige of a premodern past.’68
66
Augusto de Campos. Reproduced in Charles A. Perrone, Masters of Contemporary Brazilian
Song (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), p. 62.
67
Augusto de Campos, Balanço da bossa, p. 287. Cited in Dunn, Brutality Garden, p. 105.
68
Dunn, Brutality Garden, p. 105.
 The Tropicalist critical attitude - that of the liberation of Brazilian popular music
from a closed system of prejudices, granting it the freedom for experimentation and
research - is revealed lyrically. The refrain of ‘Why not’ in Veloso’s ‘Alegria, alegria’
assumes the nature of a challenge. Basualdo provides an insightful interpretation of
the refrain:

Why not use electric guitars, wear your hair long, dress in an orange turtleneck instead of a
dark suit? Yet also, why not continue along the ‘evolutionary line’ in Brazilian popular music,
represented by the extraordinary work of Antonion Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto, by way of
a dialogue with erudite music, rock’n’roll, the Beatles, and Anton Webern?69

Lyrics again take on a role of real socio-political action in Gilberto Gil’s song
‘Miserere Nobis,’70 the credo of which was designed to awaken the middle class to the
cultural terrorism, poverty, and exploitation suffered by Brazilians under military rule.
In a direct attack on bourgeois well-being, Gil sings: ‘Now the sun is bright … We
have wine on the table-linen, damp with wine and stained with blood.’

69
Basualdo, ‘Tropicália: Avant-Garde, Popular Culture, and the Culture Industry in Brazil’, p.
15.
70
Lyrics by the poet Capinam.
 2. The Authenticity of Tropicália
We Brazilians and Latin Americans constantly experience the artificial, inauthentic
and imitative nature of our cultural life.

Roberto Schwarz71

The origin of cannibalism is the origin of culture.

Marshall Sahlins72

The idea of a national Brazilian popular music, unsullied by foreign elements, is a

construction; Tropicália is no less traditional and no less a product of internationalist
cannibalisation than the hallowed samba or choro. In this chapter I will support these
claims, first by placing Tropicália in a Brazilian tradition of cultural anthropophagy,
my case centering on Tropicália’s accordance with the claim that ‘Brazilian musicians
ritualistically capture other people’s musical traits and incorporate them into their
own music.’73 Second, I will explore the ‘invention of tradition’ in Brazilian popular
music, thus calling into question the arena’s consecrated traditions, and, in turn, the
notion of Tropicália as an illegitimate music. Finally, I will demonstrate that by
shifting the focus of Brazilian popular music away from ‘traditional’ forms and tired
nationalistic ideologies, the Tropicalist aesthetic offered a faithful reflection of
Brazil’s hybrid culture.

The Tradition of Anthropophagy

Brazilian popular music is the product of centuries of cultural melding. According to

Peter Fryer, the genesis of Brazilian popular music was brought about by one key
cannibalisation, as ‘African musical heritage in Brazil played a decisive part in the
creation of a musical culture that is neither African nor Portuguese but distinctively
Brazilian.’74 Soon after the richer Portuguese colonists became involved in the slave
trade, black bands and choirs appeared. As early as 1610, the French adventurer
François Pryard, guest of the Bahian sugar tycoon João Furtado de Mendonça, found
that his host maintained ‘a private orchestra and choir of black slaves, 20- to 30-
strong, supervised by a French musician and “making music day and night”’.75
71
‘Nationalism by Elimination’, p. 1.
72
Cited in Budasz, ‘Of Cannibals and the Recycling of Otherness’, p. 1.
73
Carvalho, ‘Tupi or Not Tupi MPB’, p. 159.
74
Peter Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance: African Musical Heritage in Brazil (London: Pluto,
2000), p. 137.
75
Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance, p. 134.
Acculturating to European instruments such as the clarinet, trumpet and violin, black
slaves reciprocated by creolising the erudite European dances they were forced to
play. This led to the introduction of ‘a degree of syncopation, a “beat” and “swing”
that Portuguese dancers … found greatly to their taste.’76 This was the beginning of
the Brazilian popular music tradition. As Fryer states:
The first and decisive step in the emergence of Brazilian popular music was the widespread
and enthusiastic adoption, first by poor whites but before long by the urban middle class as
well, of the lundu dance, which originated in the Kongo-Angola culture area, and the
emergence of the sung lundu.77

Reciprocation was crucial in the initial stages of Brazilian musical anthropophagy.

From the seventeenth century onwards the cultural interaction between Brazil and
Black Africa was, in the words of Gerhard Kubik, ‘a continuous process of exchange
and not a one-way cultural impact linked to a one-way dislocation of peoples known
as the slave trade.’78 The thriving ports of Lisbon (Portugal), Lagos (Nigeria), Luanda
and Benguela (Angola), and Salvador, Recife and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) formed a
reciprocating triangle of culture: ‘a connected system of musical melting pots - a kind
of super melting pot, in which new dances and new musical styles were transmitted
… within a matter of weeks.’79 This mutual nourishing foreshadowed the
modernist/Tropicalist concern with reciprocity, a system of deglutition where ‘not
only should the source and target texts inform each other, but the receiving text
should also transform the original.’80 The reciprocal nature of anthropophagy is
evident in Haroldo de Campos’s unfettered translation of Goethe’s Faust, in which
Campos ‘transcreated’ the original’s repeated echoes of Shakespeare, replacing them
with echoes of João Cabral de Melo Neto’s Morte e Vida Severina. Inspired by this
project, Veloso ‘“transcreated” five songs from the Beatles’ White Album into
Portuguese for Veja magazine’ in 1968.81
Together with the lundu, the modinha emerged in Brazil’s urban areas in the
eighteenth century. They constitute the earliest traceable forms of Brazilian popular
music. Like the lundu, the modinha ‘owed its origin and its character to the intensive
reciprocal exchange between continent and colonies.’82 The modinha model was lifted
from eighteenth-century Italian and Italianate arias; particularly in early modinhas, the
melodic ornamentations of Giovanni Paesiello (1740–1816), Christoph Willibald von
Gluck (1714–87), Haydn and Mozart are detectable.83 Fryer goes as far as to declare:
‘in the modinha the European aria joined hands with African-Brazilian music.’84
The nineteenth century saw continued Brazilian musical anthropophagy, as
‘European rhythms such as the polka and the waltz were incorporated into the
Brazilian popular music idiom. Another rhythm to have enormous influence was the

76
Ibid., p. 136.
77
Ibid., p. 137.
78
Gerhard Kubik, Angolan Traits in Black Music, Games and Dances of Brazil (Lisbon, 1979),
p. 11. Cited in ibid.
79
Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance, p. 137.
80
Leu, Brazilian Popular Music, p. 87.
81
Ibid.
82
Modinhas luso-Brasileiras, ed. Gerhard Doderer (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gubenkian,
1984), p. viii. Cited in Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance, p. 144.
83
See M. de Araújo, ‘Sigismund Neukomm: Um músico austríaco no Brasil’, Revista
Brasileira de Cultura, I/1 (julho/septembro, 1969), p. 68. Referenced in Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance,
p. 144.
84
Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance, p. 144.
Cuban habanera.’85 These forms would constitute the buildings blocks of MPB.
Carvalho notes that those preoccupied with producing an image of ideal Brazilian
culture (the upper classes and intellectual elite) associated themselves with an erudite
aesthetics that equated musically to the European classical music canon:

Prestige was ascribed both to classical music, seen as a source of techniques and artistic
erudition, and to folk music, viewed as a source of raw material … Thus urban popular music
was evaluated in terms of its degree of proximity either to folk music or classical erudition.
MPB, for instance has high intellectual prestige because it employs sophisticated lyrics and
arrangements.86

Hence the decisions conducted by the elite regarding which traits were worth
emphasizing and which should be dismissed as decadent or inauthentic were informed
heavily by European and North American culture theories. Renato Ortiz agrees: ‘all
nationalistic debates in Brazil have been centered on the identification of the
uniqueness of Brazilian identity vis-á-vis the dominant philosophies in Europe and the
United States.’87
Carvalho points to bossa nova’s cannibalisation of jazz as evidence of the
Brazilian cultural elite being drawn to dominant and prestigious musics. The urban
middle and lower-middle classes also ascribed prestige to extrinsic musics:
‘Brazilians of the middle and lower strata merrily danced lambada without caring
whether it had a strong Caribbean influence or whether it was launched as a
commercial product in France.’88 For Carvalho, Brazilian popular music’s
heterogeneous nature is owing to the ‘mestizo’ Brazilian cognitive framework, a
result of the missionary policy of catechisation of Native Brazilians in the colony. She
notes, ‘we were taught to mix similar musical elements and to emphasize the most
prestigious … This policy … found resonance in the concept of incorporation of
physical and spiritual qualities through ritual cannibalism and of the sixteenth-century
Tupinambá.’89
Brazilian musical anthropophagy’s resonance with Brazilian indigenous cultural
practices is reconfirmed in the anthropologist Anthony Seeger’s study, When Music
Makes History (1993). While living with the Suyá tribe (a Brazilian indigenous group
residing in Brazil’s Xingu National Park) in the 1970s, Seeger found that ‘the Suyá
represent their history as the gradual incorporation of items taken from monstrous
outsiders and used for the benefit of the entire community.’90 Seeger noted such Suyá
myths took up a general pattern:

(1) an individual Suyá (or group of young men) encounters a stranger (animal, human, or
mixture), resulting in (2) a collective male expedition that (3) takes every example of the
desired item, leaving nothing, and (4) distributes it to the entire community.91

Seeger observed Suyá interactions with outsider groups taking on this myth pattern. In
one incident, after trading amicably with the nearby Waurá tribe (specialists in the
construction of large pots), the Suyá performed at least two raids of the Waurá village,
85
Carvalho, ‘Tupi or Not Tupi MPB’, p. 162.
86
Ibid., p. 164.
87
Renato Ortiz, Cultura Brasileira e Identidade Cultural (São Paulo: Brasilense, 1985), p. 7.
Cited in ibid., p. 163.
88
Carvalho, ‘Tupi or Not Tupi MPB’, p. 164.
89
Ibid., p. 174.
90
Anthony Seeger, ‘When Music Makes History’, Ethnomusicology and Modern History, eds.
Stephen Blum, Philip V. Bohlman and Daniel M. Neuman (Urbana: Illini, 1993), p. 29.
91
Ibid.
killing some men and taking not the pots, but the women who produced the pots. Thus
the Waurá tribe members were assimilated into Suyá society, and knowledge of the
pot production process was fully absorbed into the Suyá cultural framework.
The Suyá tribe’s anthropophagy was also musical. Seeger observed, ‘from the
same [pot-producing] women the Suyá also learned, and incorporated into their
repertory, the upper Xingu women’s ceremony, Yamuricumã, which eventually
replaced the earlier Suyá women’s songs.’92 The Suyá tribe’s consumption of foreign
songs was a long-running and far-reaching campaign. As summarised by Rogério
Budasz:

The Suyá learnt many songs from other societies and still sing them, sometimes without
understanding the words. They sing songs from at least ten different societies with whom they
had interacted over the past 200 years of migration and during the last few decades in Xingu
Park.93

The Suyá tribe’s adoption of foreign songs was explained by Seeger: ‘knowledge is
power in much of lowland South America. By taking and performing the songs of
other groups, the Suyá incorporate some of the power and knowledge of those groups
for the benefit of their own community.’94 In an echo of modern Brazil’s search for
cultural origins, the Suyá strategy of incorporating the songs of outsiders parallels the
conceptualisation of their own history. Suyá songs are musical ‘representations of
pastness’ that create both the past and the present.
As well as echoing the Tupinambá enthusiasm for the culture of the stranger, the
Suyá practice of cannibalising cultural products matches Brazilian religious practices,
most notably the hybrid religion Umbanda, that ‘triumph of religious kitsch’, as
Umberto Eco has described it.95 Umbanda is classified as an indigenous Brazilian
religion, although Umbandists recognise ‘the Yoruba orixá divinities, the Catholic
saints, and the Spiritist spirit guides’. Additionally, ‘the mediums of a typical
Umbanda temple will receive the spirits of caboclos (Amerindians), pretos velhos (old
black slaves), exús (Yoruba trickster spirits sometimes syncretized with the devil),
and pomba giras (female counterparts of the exús).’96 Further illustrations of
Umbanda’s variegated doctrine are its practitioners; the typical Umbandan medium is,
in the words of David J. Hess, ‘a kind of walking syncretism.’97 In self-description,
the medium Antônio Alves Teixeira writes:

Being, as I am, born under the sign of Capricorn, I have as the spiritual leader (chefe) of my
head, Oxalá, who, as is known, is assimilated with Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Beyond Oxalá, I also have Xangô, Oxum, Iansã, Abaluaê, Caboclo Guaicuru (de Oxóssi),
‘Sir’ Lucifer, and Old Black João Quizumba.
In Kardecism [Spritism], at the table, I have Dr. Carlos Chagas.98

As Brown and Bick observe, the confrontation between the Catholicism of the all-
powerful Portuguese slaveholders and the African and African-descended slave
religions provided apparently ideal conditions for a triumph of Western civilisation
92
Ibid., p. 30.
93
Budasz, ‘Of Cannibals and the Recycling of Otherness’, p. 14.
94
Seeger, ‘When Music Makes History’, p. 32.
95
Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays (San Diego: Harcourt, 1990), p. 103.
96
David J. Hess, ‘Hierarchy, Heterodoxy, and Religious Therapies’, The Brazilian Puzzle, eds.
Hess and Roberto A. Damatta (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 195.
97
Ibid., p. 196.
98
Antônio Alves Teixeira, Impressionantes Caso de Magia Negra (Rio: Eco, 1970), p. 15.
Cited in ibid.
over indigenous cultural traditions - an outcome that would ‘accord[…] to virtually all
Western models of change.’99 Umbanda’s non-conformity to these expectations again
points to a tradition of Brazilian anthropophagy. The religion incorporates the foreign
and the local, creating a unique, nationalistically appealing indigenous flavour. As
Graham Dann writes, ‘One likely reason for the popularity of Umbanda lies in its
syncretic components which, taken together, allegedly enhance national
consciousness.’100
Like the Tupi and the Suyá, the forerunners of Brazilian popular music, and
Oswald and the Umbandists, the Tropicalists wanted the Europeans because of their
otherness. For Viveiros de Castro, this is a means of self-transfiguration, a ‘symbol of
the reunion of what had been lost in the origin of culture.’101 This points to a broader
historical context of anthropophagy, referred to by Bellei as ‘a certain Brazilian
cultural ethos’. Bellei suggests anthropophagy can be read as a cultural practice aimed
at displacing frontiers: ‘There is in many Brazilian cultural practices an abiding dream
of a world in which frontiers should either be abolished or at least made unstable and
vulnerable to trespassing.’ The motivation for this ‘decentering’, or ‘neutralising [of]
differences’, Bellei continues, is ‘the feeling of dispossession and helplessness of
those who have been forcefully confined to the other side of the frontier by the
powerful cartographic dispositions of centralising cultures.’102 Indeed, just as the
Tropicalists struck a balance between embracing internationalism and preserving
national roots, anthropophagy can be used as a complex strategy to both construct
frontiers and deny them.

The Invention of Tradition

According to Elizabeth Tonkin, the past of historiography is a ‘representation of

pastness’. Tonkin asserts that these representations are constructed in the present in
terms of contemporary preoccupations; they ‘are made by persons in interaction,
situated in real time and space, we can see that however modest the speaker’s aim,
they are purposeful social interactions.’103 Robert Louis Stevenson has provided a
succinct encapsulation of this concept: ‘The past is myself, my own history, the seed
of my present thoughts, the mould of my present disposition.’104 Such distortions of
the past pervade Brazilian musical historiography. As Reily notes:

The authors of histories of Brazilian music have frequently projected their own nationalist
preoccupation into the past, and their narratives represent the past as a continuous and
inevitable process, in which the music produced in Brazil is progressively nationalized. 105

99
Diana de G. Brown, and Mario Brick, ‘Religion, Class, and Context: Continuities and
Discontinuities in Brazilian Umbanda’, American Ethnologist, 14/1 (Feb., 1987), p. 73.
100
Graham N. S. Dann, ‘Religion and Cultural Identity: The Case of Umbanda’, Sociological
Review, 40/3 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 208–209.
101
Viveiros de Castro, A inconstância da alma selvagem, p. 206. Cited in Budasz, ‘Of Cannibals
and the Recycling of Otherness’, p. 14.
102
Bellei, ‘Brazilian Anthropophagy Revisited’, p. 95.
103
Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating our pasts: the social construction of oral history (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 1.
104
R. L. Stevenson. Cited in Ibid.
105
Reily, ‘Introduction: Brazilian musics, Brazilian identities’, pp. 5–6.
Stroud and McCann have labelled the Brazilian nationalist preoccupation with the
musical past a full-scale ‘invention of tradition’. The term, as defined by Eric
Hobsbawm, denotes

a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or
symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition,
which automatically implies continuity with the past.106
Almirante’s exaltation of choro is a case in point. According to Stroud, the
decision to elevate choro over the more obvious choice of samba as a symbol of
national identity was deliberate: ‘it was precisely the fact that the genre had
languished in semi-obscurity since the turn of the century, almost unchanged or
untarnished by international or national success, that marked it out for Almirante’s
“cultural preservation”’.107 Almirante’s choro tradition was a noble but largely
imaginary concoction; as McCann writes, ‘with O Pessoal de Velha Guarda,
Almirante imagined a glorious past for chorinho [choro], one in which the genre was
not only locally but nationally cherished.’108 Choro (‘a Brazilian adaptation of
European polkas, waltzes, and other forms set to an Afro-Brazilian syncopation.’109)
had in fact been reviled as illegitimate twenty years before it was selected for
Almirante’s championing. Ironically, Carinhoso (the choro composition
recommended by Almirante to Brazilian tourists be whistled as a sort of national
anthem) ‘was criticized in Brazil in 1928–29 for being too “Americanized” in
style.’110
Almirante’s nostalgia was brought about by a fear of American mass culture and
musical cross-pollination. He declared, ‘performers of popular music: the greatest
benefit you can give to Brazilian popular music is to sing samba as samba, marcha as
marcha, waltz as waltz … none of this imitating the Bing Crosby’s and Frank
Sinatras.’111 Almirante’s backward-looking stance interpreted change in one direction
only - as a change for the worse. John Tosh’s insight into the nature of nostalgia
provides an encapsulation of Almirante’s condition:

A yearning backward glance offers consolation, an escape in the mind from a harsh reality
[…] It is when the past appears to be slipping away before our eyes that we seek to recreate it
in the imagination.112

Such nostalgic indulgence produces a lopsided view of history; Almirante’s choro

golden age was a comfortable refuge devoid of negative features. The fallacy of
Almirante’s tradition highlights the distortion of ‘authenticity’ engendered during
Brazil’s struggle for cultural autonomy.
Even samba, the foremost symbol of Brazilian culture and nationhood, was at one
time considered illegitimate; until almost 1930 ‘it was looked upon as the stuff of
lowlife rascals, the carol of vagabonds. And the police, in their chief function of
watching over the maintenance of public order, persecuted [samba] without rest.’113

106
Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, The Invention of Tradition, eds.
Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 1.
107
Stroud, The Defence of Tradition, p. 17.
108
McCann, ‘The Invention of Tradition on Brazilian Radio’, p. 478.
109
Ibid., p. 475.
110
Stroud, The Defence of Tradition, p. 17.
111
Almirante. Cited in McCann, ‘The Invention of Tradition on Brazilian Radio’, p. 477.
112
Tosh, The Pursuit of History, p. 17.
113
Jota Efegê, Figura e coisas da música popular brasileira, vol. 2 (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte,
1980), p. 24. Cited in Vianna, The Mystery of Samba, p. 11.
Samba’s leap from violently repressed outcast to (practically official) national
emblem coincided with the emergence of nationalist discourse around the onset of
Getúlio Vargas’s rise to power in 1930. The Vargas agenda focussed on
industrialisation, with the grand aim of integrating the popular classes into Brazil’s
economic and political structures. This populist vision was reflected in Gilberto
Freyre’s classic work, The Masters and the Slaves (1933), in which Freyre argued that
‘the informality of the colonial system and the lack of racial exclusivism of the
Portuguese created a context of benign inter-racial relations, in which whites, blacks
and mestiços worked happily side-by-side toward common goals.’114 Music played a
central role in the Vargas propaganda machine, and samba provided a ready-made
variegated musical form well suited to the nationalist agenda. As Reily writes:

Samba was co-opted and fashioned through censorship to promote ‘Brazilian-ness’. With its
carnivalesque associations, samba could be heralded as the felicitous integration of diverse
cultural and racial groups that had been achieved in the country, and through the radio, this
image was propagated across the entire country.115

In conclusion, the key task for those engaged with the struggle for Brazil’s
political and cultural autonomy during the first half of the twentieth century was to
select (or invent) national traits that most exemplified to ‘patriots’ a unique Brazilian
national identity. In the words of Vianna, ‘authenticity may be necessarily artificial
from an analytical perspective, but the efficacy of such materials as these depends on
a sense that they are natural and authentic.’116 The idea that choro and/or samba had
‘always been so’ was one such invention, designed to mask Brazil’s history of cultural
cross-pollination and foster political and cultural stability in a time of turbulence and
change.

Chaotic Visions of a Chaotic World

In an interview with the magazine Manchete, Veloso defended his decision to ‘go
electric’ at the Festival of Song in 1967:

Some people got hysterical when they heard the song ‘Alegria, alegria’ arranged with electric
guitars. To those people, I have to say that I love electric guitars. Others insist that we should
do folklore … Now I’m Bahian, but Bahia is not just folklore. And Salvador [the state capital]
is a big city. It doesn’t only have acarajé [an Afro-Brazilian dish characteristic of Bahia] but
also lunch counters and hot dogs like all big cities.117

By figuratively bringing together acarajé and hot dogs in his music, Veloso was
projecting an authentic image of his surroundings; the Tropicalists’ modernist lyrics
and hybrid music transformed the everyday reality of the people into an active
element of Brazilian culture.118 In the following section I will expand on these points.

114
Reily, ‘Introduction: Brazilian musics, Brazilian identities’, p. 4.
115
Ibid., p. 5.
116
Vianna, The Mystery of Samba, p. 113.
117
Caetano Veloso, ‘Alegria, Alegria’, Manchete (Rio de Janeiro: Pedra Q Ronca, n.d.), p. 3.
Cited in Vianna, The Mystery of Samba, p. 96.
118
As according to Gilbert and Pearson’s requirements for authenticity, ‘artists must speak the
truth of their (and others’) situations … [the singer’s] fundamental role was to represent the culture
from which he comes.’ Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson, Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and
the Politics of Sound (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 165.
 Whereas Oswald’s Cannibalist Manifesto was an emancipatory performance borne
of identity crisis, Tropicália represented a coming to terms with postmodern
transculturation. As Martinez Corrêa has stated: ‘In order to express a new and
complex reality it was necessary to reinvent forms that captured this reality.’119 The
key to this expression was a ‘non-fusionary’ way of confronting hybridity: a syncretic
collage formed of, in the words of Gilberto Freyre, a ‘precarious equilibrium of
antagonisms,’ in which difference is not completely extinguished.120 This
hybridisation is close to the Tropicalist technique of montage/juxtaposition. As
Veloso has attempted to explain,

The key word in understanding Tropicalism is syncretism. There is no one who is not aware
that this is a dangerous word. And in truth, we, the proponents of Tropicália, pride ourselves
on having inaugurated a point of view that is capable of encouraging the development of
disparate talents such as Rita Lee and Zeca Pagodinho, or Arnaldo Antunes and João Bosco
[Brazilian musicians of very different styles as well as producers of unique sonorous
syncretisms], then we would pride ourselves had we invented a homogenous and mediocre
fusion. We are Bahian.121

Tropicália’s revalorisation of hybridity situated the movement in a rich Latin

American tradition, represented in discourse by Glauba Rocha’s ‘aesthetics of
hunger’, and Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes’s ‘creative incapacity for copying’, and
highlighted in such terms as creolite, diversalite, indianismo, mestizaje and raza
cósmica. As Robert Stam summarises, ‘hybridity has been a perennial feature of art
and cultural discourse in Latin America’.122
The Brazilian cultural traditions of the baroque and of carnival are two expressions
of hybridity that resonate throughout the Tropicalist language, style and theatrics.
Nicolau Sevcenko argues that the baroque - the typical characteristics of which
include ‘the co-existence of difference, [and] an attraction to the irrational’ - ‘marks
the whole of Brazil’s cultural history.’123 Haroldo de Campos also supported the idea
of a persistent baroque tradition in Brazilian culture. Campos considered the baroque
‘a form which is constant of Brazilian sensibility, traversing our cultural space in
various guises or at various moments in our history.’124 For Campos, expression of the
baroque in literature was the ‘art of the counter-Conquest’ (a phrase borrowed from
the Cuban neo-baroque writer, Lezama Lima): a subversion of literary conventions
and classic genre divisions, the liberation of language and the embracing of non-linear
views of history.
This freedom of language and style ultimately stems from the baroque’s initial
function as the culture of transition between old and new in colonial Brazil. In
negotiating the experience of the initial ‘modern age’, Brazilian baroque language was
119
José Celso Martinez Corrêa, ‘Manifesto Oficina’, in Oswald de Andrade, O Rei de Vela (São
Paulo: Globo, 2000), p. 22. Cited in Basualdo, ‘Tropicália: Avant-Garde, Popular Culture, and the
Culture Industry in Brazil’, p. 13.
120
Gilberto Freyre. Cited in Vianna, ‘Tropicália’s Politics’, p. 141.
121
Caetano Veloso, Verdade Tropical (São Paulo: Companhia, 1997), p. 292. Cited in Vianna,
‘Tropicália’s Politics’, p. 141.
122
Robert Stam, ‘Palimpsest Aesthetics: A Meditation on Hybridity and Garbage’, Performing
Hybridity, eds. May Joseph and Jennifer Natalya Fink (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999), p. 60.
123
Nicolau Sevcenko, ‘Entre a ordem e o caos: colonialismo, escravidão e barroco no Brasil’,
Brasil Barroco: entre céu e terra (Paris: Petit Palais, 1999), p. 66. Cited in Leu, Brazilian Popular
Music, p. 13.
124
Haroldo de Campos, ‘Poesia de Barroco’, Brasil Barroco: entre céu e terra (Paris: Petit
Palais, 1999), p. 146. Cited in Leu, Brazilian Popular Music, p. 13.
marked with hybridity, a symptom of the Jesuit’s evangelising mission. Gregório de
Matos, the most significant of the baroque poets, was responsible for radicalising the
Portuguese language. As Leu writes,

[Matos’s] ‘lexical miscegenation’ … produced a Portuguese laced with Hispanicisms,

colloquialisms, neologisms and words taken from indigenous and African languages. It was
developed to express baroque dualisms of religiousness and sensuality, mysticism and
eroticism, the spiritual and the carnal, making for a poetry of the serious and the satirical, the
sublime and the ridiculous.125

Matos’s approach - the adaptation of universal styles to local expression - is a clear

ancestor of the Tropicalist aesthetic. Moreover, Tropicália’s wit and its collision of
the sacred and profane reflect uniquely Brazilian sensibilities that have been
consistently expressed through distortions of the European baroque. Take for example
Brazilian baroque religious art and sculpture, where official iconography is to be
found ‘tropicalised’. In 1937 Mario de Andrade documented his discovery of two
baroque interpretations of the Last Supper in a church in São Paulo:

The detailed engraving of a watermelon opposite Christ, in the last supper, is a raw touch of
delicious ingenuousness. One cannot help smile when faced with this cornucopian national
table. The copier must have been Brazilian, or perhaps Portuguese with an intimate
acquaintance with our national exuberance.126

The heterogeneity of Tropicália is also an echo of the traditional Brazilian carnival,

which Roberto da Matta has called a ‘polysemic parade’ due to the way it brings
together ‘a little bit of everything’, and so ‘refers to various symbolic subuniverses of
Brazilian society.’127 Carnival’s defining aspect is its combination of real and
symbolic elements. By juxtaposing differences in a symbolic system of plural
identities, it offers the chance to transgress the restrictions of daily life. In the words
of Richard Parker, carnival possesses the ‘ability to encode and articulate so many
different, often contradictory meanings, and thus to open itself up to so many
divergent interpretations.’128 It is with such a celebration of confusion and ambiguity
(by way of concretist lyrics, surreal costumes, attacks on the conventional aesthetics
of ‘good taste’, anti-virtuosity, etc.129) that the Tropicalists sought to push and pull at
the seams of Brazilian culture’s hierarchical system of meanings.
Crucially, Tropicália harnessed carnival’s ability to offer ‘temporary liberation
from the prevailing truth and the established order’. Carnival, like Tropicália, ‘marked
the suspension of all hierarchical ranks, norms and prohibitions.’130 By exploiting this
transgressive power, the Tropicalists were able to explore and express the
complexities of their society, question the absoluteness of ‘official’ order, and
rearticulate their desire for social transformation. For example, Veloso evoked
125
Ibid.
126
Mário de Andrade, Cartas de trabalho (1981), p. 82. Cited in Beatriz Resende, ‘Brazilian
Modernism: The Canonised Revolution’, Through the Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in
Latin America (London: Verso, 2000), p. 213.
127
Roberto Da Matta, Carnivals, Rogues and Heroes: An Interpretation of the Brazilian
Dilemma (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), p. 39.
128
Richard Parker, Bodies, Pleasures, and Patterns: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil
(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), p. 182.
129
‘Our guitar playing is bad, our technique is primitive,’ reads a poster produced by Veloso and
Gil in 1970. Reproduced in Dunn, ‘Tropicália, Counterculture, and the Diasporic Imagination in
Brazil’, p. 80.
130
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p.
10.
carnival transvestism in his performance of ‘É Proibido Proibir’ (1968), during which
his androgynous appearance and highly erotic and provocative dancing led to cries of
‘Queer! Queer!’131 By feminising his body and his social world Veloso posed a threat
to the particularly macho, hierarchical culture of the military regime, and to the
regime’s disseminated rhetoric of civic responsibility and family values. As Leu
asserts, ‘the blurring of divisions between the sexes presents a threat to the
reinforcement of positions of patriarchal power and prestige in society.’132
The Tropicalist collage of contextual labels and insignia offered a penetration of
the modern Brazilian reality: the forest of mass culture signs navigated by the narrator
of ‘Alegria, alegria’, the compound of foreign and domestic fragments of
‘Batmacumba’, ‘the looming presence of hip slogans’ that confront the narrator of
Veloso’s ‘Baby’ (1969), etc.133 The socially reflective chaos of collage aesthetics and
‘found sounds’ is evident on Veloso’s song, ‘Araça azul’:

Structured as a mosaic of musical fragments including bossa nova, rock, sonic ‘found objects’
from the streets of São Paulo, duodecophonic arrangements by Rogério Duprat, and Afro-
Bahian samba-de-roda, Araça azul has been aptly described as a ‘cubist album.’ For the
samba recordings, Veloso invited Edith Oliveira, a woman from his hometown, to sing and
play percussion with a knife and porcelain plate.134

This empirical operation is typical of the bricoleur described by Claude Lévi-Strauss,

‘a kind of maker who defines himself by his incorporative way of proceeding, always
resorting to instruments already available, in contrast with the engineer, who
subordinates each specific task “to the acquisition of the raw materials and tolls
conceived and sought while the plan is being carried out.”’135 Lévi-Strauss’s vivid
images of the kaleidoscope and of collage help illustrate Brazilian culture’s path to
modernity. As Santuza Cambraia Naves points out, the Tropicalist resort to bricolage
is a well-trodden path:

Brazilian musicians and poets share[…] a vision of Brazil as an inexhaustible universe of

cultural information, ranging from the archaic to the contemporary, from the regional to the
universal. Such a view of a bountiful cultural universe naturally … [leads] artists to … attempt
to incorporate this cultural wealth into their works.136

Naves’s depiction of a bricolage-friendly Brazilian culture, an entanglement of

cultural references balanced between alterity and universality, equates to what Néstor
García Canclini calls ‘the multitemporal heterogeneity of modern culture’.137 Hence
Brazilian popular music draws from the past and present, incorporating the remnants
of indigenous musics and lyric traditions, as well as those from Africa, and the
influence of music from Europe and the rest of Latin America.
The political ideas behind Tropicália are concurrent with those put forward by
Roberto Schwarz in his seminal essay, ‘Misplaced Ideas’ (1973). Schwarz saw
131
Upon his return from exile in 1972, Veloso appeared on stage dressed and dancing like
Carmen Miranda, thus cemented his status as an icon for gay men in Brazil and internationally. The
fetishisation of Miranda’s accessories in gay culture followed.
132
Leu, Brazilian Popular Music, p. 17.
133
McCann, Hello, Hello Brazil, p. 132..
134
Dunn, Brutality Garden, p. 168.
135
Santuza Cambraia Naves, ‘From Bossa Nova to Tropicália: Restraint and Excess in Popular
music’, Imagining Brazil, eds. Jessé Souza and Valter Sinda (Lanham: Lexington, 2005), p. 253.
136
Naves, ‘From Bossa Nova to Tropicália’, pp. 253–254.
137
Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad
(Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1989), p. 67. Cited in Leu, Brazilian Popular Music, pp. 87–88.
romantic nationalist schemes as having shaped the history of Brazilian culture,
‘portraying it as the progressive self-discovery of a nation oppressed under a web of
“imported” categories, alien to local reality.’138 Schwarz aimed to refute ‘dualistic’
approaches that deemed peripheral cultures (e.g., Brazilian culture) vestiges of the
precapitalist world, destined to disappear. His thoughts echo the Tropicalist concern
with replacing old binary dualisms - the clear lines drawn by 1960s nationalist
discourse between First World and Third World, the oppressor and the oppressed. As
Veloso has declared:

By using electric guitars in melodic compositions with elements of Argentine tango and
African things from Bahia, we assumed a posture of ‘being-in-the-world’ - we rejected the
role of the Third World country living in the shadow of the more developed countries. 139

In order to achieve this, the Tropicalists conformed to the trend in Latin American
cultural discourse of revalorising by inversion what has formerly been seen as a
negative.140 Hence the self-mocking adoption of sacred symbols: the
primitivist/cannibalist identity, the evocation of macumba, connotations of sorcery,
etc. In other words, through postmodern juxtaposition the Tropicalists positioned
themselves in a modern, secular, anthropocentric society. Schwarz deftly summarises
the Tropicalist effort to reflect a modern Brazil:

The basic effect of tropicalism depends precisely on its subjection of such anachronisms, at
first sight grotesque, but on second thoughts inevitable, to the white light of ultra-modernity,
so that the result is transformed into an allegory of Brazil. 141

In this sense, Tropicália constitutes what Robert Stam calls a ‘palimpsest

aesthetic’: a ‘chaotically plural and contradictory’ neologistic discourse, ‘seen as an
aggregate of historically dated styles randomly reassembled in the present.’142 For
Stam, such discourses mark the recoding of hybridity as ‘a symptom of the
postmodern, postcolonial, post-nationalist moment.’143 Hence the music of the
Tropicália movement reflected ‘a more subtle spectrum of nuanced differentiations, in
a new global regime where First World and Third World are mutually imbricated’ - a
statement that echoes the Tropicálist pledge to unite all possible combinations of
elements.144
Schwarz recognised that around the time of Brazil’s military coup, both the
political left and right were concerned with the elimination of anything that was not
indigenous. ‘The residue’, he observed, ‘would be the essence of Brazil.’145 Like the
Tropicalists, it was Schwarz’s ultimate goal to refute the belief that it was enough for
Latin Americans to get rid of their ‘foreign garments’ (a set of ideas and categories,
imported from the Europe and North America and obediently repeated by the local,
138
Elías José Palti, ‘The Problem of “Misplaced Ideas” Revisited: Beyond the “History of Ideas”
in Latin America’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 67/1 (Jan., 2006), p. 151.
139
Veloso, quoted in Christopher Dunn, ‘Tropicália, Counterculture, and the Diasporic
Imagination in
Brazil’, Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization, eds. Perrone and Dunn (London:
Routledge, 2002), p. 75.
140
Such as Julio García Espinosa’s ‘Cine Imperfecto’ and Rogerio Sganzerla’s ‘Aesthetics of
Garbage’. See Stam, ‘Palimpsest Aesthetics’.
141
Schwarz, ‘Culture and Politics in Brazil 1964–1969’, p. 140.
142
Stam, ‘Palimpsest Aesthetics’, p. 61.
143
Ibid, p. 60.
144
Ibid.
145
Schwarz, ‘Nationalism by Elimination’, p. 4.
Western-minded elite) to find their ‘true, inner essence’. Key to the case for
Tropicália’s Brazilianness is Schwarz’s notion that the periphery is not only the result
of the expansion of the centre, but also constitutes an integral part of it. ‘In aesthetics,
like in politics,’ Schwarz writes, ‘the Third World is an organic part of the
contemporary scene.’146 Schwarz saw the potential contained in the tenets of
dependency theory. Rather than viewing ‘peripheral’ cultures as replicating the linear
development of central cultures, Schwarz postulated the existence of ‘a complex
dynamic between the center and the periphery, the two representing instances
inherent in capitalist development, thus forming a single, interconnected system.’147 In
short, Schwarz’s argument is that there is no such thing as ‘Brazilian national culture’
preceding Western culture. He agrees that the adoption of foreign concepts generates
serious distortions of local reality in Latin America; his point is that this process is
unavoidable and, crucially, the specificity of Brazilian culture resides in such
Tropicalist twistings of reality - ‘unmanagable contrasts, disproportions, nonsense,
anachronisms, outrageous compromises and the like’. Such idiosyncrasies ‘are
recognizably Brazilian in their peculiar distortion.’148

146
Schwarz, ‘Existe uma estetica do terceiro mundo?’, (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras,
1997), p. 28. Cited in Palti, ‘The Problem of “Misplaced Ideas” Revisited’, p. 153.
147
Palti, ‘The Problem of “Misplaced Ideas” Revisited’, p. 151.
148
Schwarz, ‘Misplaced Ideas’, p. 25.
 Conclusion
As I have intended to demonstrate, the aesthetic value attached to Brazilian popular
music is seldom based on musical criteria alone, but accords to the social origins of
the music’s genre and its constituency. The endless search for national origins
characteristic of popular music discourse in Brazil has led to the pervasion of what
Tosh would call a ‘generational regret’: Brazilian popular music is perpetually
mourned as having been diluted or tarnished, in the same way that ‘older people
habitually claim that nowadays the young are unruly, or that the country is “going to
the dogs”’ - ‘complaints that have been documented over a very long period.’149 The
critical response to Tropicália was coloured by such nostalgic regret and ideological
considerations of ‘purity’ and ‘authenticity’. Tropicália was a victim of the Brazilian
nationalist preoccupation with separating the ‘good’ music from the ‘bad’. Not only
did it appear to violate folklore, the only aspect of popular culture the nationalists held
as truly valid, Tropicália exhibited ‘the potentially “harmful” effects of two evils,
avant-garde experimentalism and the commercial market.’150
The thrust of my argument has been that Tropicália expressed its Brazilianness
through the cultural traditions of anthropophagy and heterogeneity, thus upholding
traditional standards rather than violating them. In an acknowledgment of the
importance of nourishing popular music’s ‘evolutionary line’, Tropicália’s
multitemporal cacophony reflected the Brazilian national identity crisis, a condition
where, as Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes writes,

we are neither Europeans nor North Americans. Lacking an original culture, nothing is foreign
to us because everything is. The painful construction of ourselves develops within the rarefied
dialectic of not being and being someone else.151

The strange, distorted world of Tropicália represents the Brazilian condition of

‘otherness’, exemplified in the country’s colonial past and the Portuguese language,
factors that have engendered a cultural web resistant to notions of musical and lyrical
purity. Brazil does not share this condition with the rest of Latin American society.
I have also attempted to stress that the nationalist search for the essential
characteristics of Brazilianness has thrown up unsatisfactorily static images of
national identity. Efforts (such as those of Mário de Andrade and Almirante) to
promote the evolution of Brazilian popular music exclusively through internal
nourishment were to prove misguided and fruitless. In their endless search for
national origins, Brazil’s musical nationalists overlooked the fact that popular music

149
Tosh, The Pursuit of History, p. 17.
150
Stroud, The Defence of Tradition, p. 13.
151
Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, ‘Cinema: A Trajectory within Underdevelopment’, New Latin
American Cinema, vol. 1, ed. Michael T. Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), p. 263.
reflects the ongoing flux of national identity. As Simon Frith puts it, ‘identity is not a
thing but a process.’ Frith adds:

My point is not that a social group has beliefs which it then articulates into music, but that
music, an aesthetic practice, articulates in itself an understanding of both group relations and
individuality on the basis of which ethical codes and social ideologies are understood. 152
Tropicália was a feast of renewal, a monument to the fluidity of identity. This feature
is highlighted in Tropicália’s evocation of the baroque and carnival - something, in
the words of Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.’153
Tropicália is testament to the notion that a multitemporal, evolving idiom of
popular music best represents the society of which it is a product. This notion has
been articulated elegantly by Antoine Hennion:

Imaginary identities, sentimental adventures, a taste of what reality represses: pop songs open
the doors to dream, lend a voice to what is left unmentioned by ordinary discourse. But pop is
not only a dream-machine: perhaps, like witchcraft in another age, it is the unofficial chronicle
of its times, a history of desires existing in the margins of official history, which, except at
rare moments of rupture, do not speak but act. In setting out a history of today, popular culture
etches the contours of a history of tomorrow in that it ‘feels’ a social atmosphere in its earliest,
unformulated stages; pop music senses the current and projects a first image of it, long before
the politicians have grasped its real nature or had the time to quell it, before words have been
found to express it or to betray it.154

To conclude, Tropicália has taught us that any attempts to divert the path of popular
music’s evolutionary line are futile. Evolution requires mutation, and mutation is
inevitable.

152
Simon Frith, ‘Music and Identity’, Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. Stuart Hall and Paul du
Gay (London: Sage, 2005), pp. 110–111.
153
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 10.
154
Antoine Hennion, ‘The Production of Success: An Anti-Musicology of the Pop Song’,
Popular Music, vol. 3 (1983), p. 192.
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 Discography
Ben, Jorge, Jorge Ben, rec. 1969, compact disc, Philips 518119 (1993)
Costa, Gal, Gal Costa, rec. 1969, compact disc, Philips 514993 (1993)
––––––. Gal a todo vapour, rec. 1971, compact disc, Philips, 514991 (1993)
Duprat, Rogério, A banda tropicalista do Duprat, LP, Philips 765048 (1968)
Getz, Stan, and João Gilberto, Getz/Gilberto, rec. 1964, compact disc, Verve
314521414-2 (1997)
Gil, Gilberto, Louvação, rec. 1967, compact disc, Philips 824681 (1998)
––––––. Gilberto Gil, rec. 1968, compact disc, Philips 518121 (1998)
––––––. Gilberto Gil, rec. 1969, compact disc, Philips 518122 (1998)
––––––. Gilberto Gil, rec. 1971, compact disc, Philips 518123 (1998)
––––––. Expresso 2222, rec. 1972, compact disc, Philips 848939 (1998)
Gilberto, João, The Legendary João Gilberto, compact disc, World Pacific 93891
(1990)
Mutanes, Os, Os Mutantes, rec. 1968, compact disc, Philips 829498 (n.d.)
––––––. Mutantes, rec. 1969, compact disc, Philips 835886 (n.d.)
––––––. The Best of Os Mutantes: Everything is Possible!, compact disc, Luaka
Bop/Warner Bros. 947251 (1999)
Regina, Elis, Elis Regina no Fino da Bossa, compact disc, Velas II–V030, vols. 1–3
(1994)
Torpicália Essentials, compact disc, Hip-O/Universal 3145469322 (1999)
Tropicália ou panis et circensis, rec. 1968, compact disc, Philips 512089 (1993)
Veloso, Caetano, Caetano Veloso, rec. 1968, compact disc, Philips 838557 (1990)
––––––. Caetano Veloso, rec. 1969, compact disc, Philips 838556 (1990)
––––––. Caetano Veloso, rec. 1971, compact disc, Philips 838561 (1990)
––––––. Transa, rec. 1972, compact disc, Philips 838511 (1989)
––––––. Araça azul, rec. 1972, compact disc, Philips 824691 (n.d.)
Veloso, Caetano, and Chico Buarque, Caetano e Chico juntos e ao vivo, rec. 1972,
compact disc, Philips 8125222 (1993)
Veloso, Caetano, and Gal Costa, Domingo, rec. 1967, compact disc, Philips 838555
(1990)
Zé, Tom, Tom Zé, rec. 1968, compact disc, Sony 495712 (2000)
––––––. Tom Zé, rec. 1970, compact disc, RGE 3476007 (1994)