The 1960s: The Decade that Never Ended

Brazilian Popular Music, Poetry, and Politics

Alvaro Neder – conferência Universidade Brown, 2005

1. Introduction

In 1964, the democratically elected president of Brazil João Goulart was deposed
by a right-wing military coup. There followed twenty-one years of censorship, human
rights abuses, kidnappings, torture and assassinations. The arts and culture became sites
of reflection about the political impasse. As a consequence, the study of Brazilian popular
music offers a key avenue to understand the political struggles of that period.
This same decade, and in particular the year 1968, was characterized by liberating
and counter-cultural movements in several Western countries. As a result, the traditional
politics of the leftist parties came under criticism, and the category of politics came to
embrace issues like the body, sexuality, the rights of minorities, pacifism and counter-
culture. All of these problems reverberated almost immediately in Brazil and,
consequently, in that country’s music and poetry. This paper’s title is a paraphrase of
Zuenir Ventura’s book and addresses the lasting influence in Brazil of the changes
brought by the decade of 1960 (Ventura, 1988).
Brazil’s marginal position in relation to the developed countries had been
examined since the 19th Century through artistic and intellectual reflection. The Brazilian
modernist movement, Modernismo, was launched in 1922 with that same central concern.
Modernismo tried to develop a distinctively Brazilian art informed by cultural and
political debates vis-à-vis the center-periphery situation. The two most influential
thinkers of Modernismo, Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade, had opposing
esthetic-political projects for the development of Brazilian art and culture in regards to
these relationships between central and peripheric countries. Whereas Mário de Andrade
could be described as a “nationalist,” Oswald de Andrade would be more aptly

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understood as a “cosmopolitan” (more about that later). The same opposition existed in
the cultural landscape of the 1960s.
In this decade the discussion about nationalism acquired dramatic prominence in
the face of economic contradictions and mounting evidence that the military dictatorship
was being supported by First World countries. As a result, a dichotomy was established
between the popular nationalism and the followers of a cosmopolitan vanguard stance
represented by the Tropicalistas. Thus I argue that Brazilian culture in the first phase of
Modernismo and during the 1960s share enough similarities for the two periods to be
considered in terms of the opposition between nationalism and cosmopolitanism.
Additionally, I suggest that this opposition can be understood in the terms of another: that
between modern and postmodern theories of culture. Through an examination of
Brazilian Popular Music, this paper will map the social and cultural struggles in Brazil
during the Sixties. I will consider two major intellectual and cultural strains already
suggested by Modernismo and fully in play in the 1960s: hope in historical progression
and disillusionment with any utopic ideal.
The importance of music and literature transcends all contents these cultural
productions may eventually convey, such as politics. Songs of both strains achieved a
considerable depth of imagination and have left behind the memory of rare solidarity,
passion, love and ethics. But more than a memory, they have left a lasting influence in
Brazilian culture. Among other things, we inherited a way of reflecting about Brazil in
the form of a genre known as MPB, or Brazilian Popular Music, born in the 1960s and
still popular today.

2. Modernismo (1922)
1. Mário de Andrade

Mário de Andrade has been a broadly influential reference for the studies of
Brazilian folklore and nationalism. This writer, poet and theoretician of the music and
culture bequeathed a fundamental body of work that remains an obligatory source for
Brazilian studies. Notwithstanding, Enlightenment ideas are part of the theoretical
developments generated by virtually all intellectuals of that period. Additionally, Mário

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de Andrade’s work was heavily influenced by nationalism, induced by the period of
consolidation of the nation-state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Due to such
ideologies, de Andrade’s work needs to be historicized. Given his profound sense of
ethics, probably he would be the first to do so if he could know as much as we do
nowadays, due to historic detachment.
His project of development implied a firm belief in the essence of the Brazilian
people, which he thought was kept in the folk traditions. But this nationalist project was
in no way xenophobic and prescribed the absorption of international influences. Mario
conceived a utopia: the evolution of the Brazilian people from a state of
underdevelopment to civilization. This process would be conducted by the tutorship of
artists and intellectuals, presided by European norms. A teleological narrative oriented
by enlightenment ideas: a modernist project.
Mário prescribed the passage of the music invented and performed by people to
accompany religious rituals, feast and work, to the stage of “disinterested music”,
meaning art music. This historic stage, according to Middleton, was connected to the
constitution of the bourgeois class (1990, p. 107). For Middleton, this class instituted
social control through music by making it an essentially mental activity (as opposed to a
bodily one, like dance). It prescribed that the act of listening must be individual and
contemplative, and music’s collective bonds with religion, work and feast are cut. This
terminology (“disinterested art”) would hint at Kant’s philosophy. According to
Middleton, idealism would have been appropriated by the ideologues of the nascent
bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century in their drive toward rationalization.
Under Mario de Andrade’s inspiration, the Brazilian national-popular composers
of the 1960s turned to the folk genres of the rural areas and of the periphery of the cities,
in search for authenticity. According to their strategy, these genres, manipulated through
the concert music techniques and even through those made available by hybrid genres
like jazz, would give birth to a new music. This music would end up affirming the
Brazilian identity vis-à-vis the other nations, at the same time awakening the ideological
conscience of the people.

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2. Oswald de Andrade and Postmodern theories

Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagite Manifesto, brought to the public in 1928,

is an effort to change the balance of forces between center and periphery. The manifesto
revolves around the practices of the cannibals of the Brazilian land at the times of its
“discovery” in 1500. Oswald de Andrade established a satirical parallel between those
practices and the necessary attitude in face of the cultural and economic colonization of
modern Brazil by the developed nations. The appropriation of foreign cultural goods
ceases to be a brand of inferiority. On the contrary, Anthropophagy fosters the
understanding that the differences in the stages of development result from economic and
historic factors. As we will see, the similarities between Anthropophagy and postmodern
theories are striking enough to justify an approximation.

3. The song lyrics and poetry: convergences

Reviewing the panorama of the Brazilian popular song, Wisnik postulates that a
new form of the gaya scienza was constituted in Brazil (2001, p. 185). He defines gaya
scienza as “a poetic-musical knowledge which implies a refined sentimental education
(as that one so designed by the Toulouse troubadours in the sixteenth Century,
remembering the great Provençal tradition of the 12th Century); but also, in Nietzsche’s
words in the preface of The Gay Science, ‘a more dangerous second innocence, [joyful],
more childlike, and at the same time a hundred times subtler than one had ever been
before.’”1
For Wisnik, the acuteness of Brazilian intellectual thought, founded in the
country’s Baroque colonial formation and renewed in contact with this “joyful
innocence”, came from the culture of Carnaval, the ancient, medieval popular
manifestation that became distinctive of Brazil. Carnaval celebrates in the existential
plane the erotic and the Dionysiac in the Nietzschean sense, and practices in the political
plane the overthrow and reversal of hierarchies, in the Bakhtinian sense. This
carnivalized culture forged the irreverence of the Brazilian character in the face of all

1
Wisnik is quoting Nietzsche, 2001, p. 7.

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kinds of authoritarianism. Since the beginning of the 20 th Century, a long tradition of
political, economic and cultural satire and parody in Brazilian popular music in general
and in Carnaval music in particular attest to that. During Getúlio Vargas’ dictatorship
(1937-1945) this tradition was already fully at play, and the samba is a good example of
it. The renewal of intellectual thought as it came in contact with this “dangerous
innocence in joyfulness” would give birth to a new form of gaya scienza, popular song,
which has been a sophisticated and sensitive reflection about Brazil.
Since the 1970’s, the lyrics of the Brazilian popular songs, by their imagistic
richness, by their subtleness of imagination, by their careful manipulation of sound
effects, by their sophistication in the use of metaphor and symbolization, and by their
depth in the elaboration of the social, emotional and psychological perception, became a
part of the curricula of the Literature programs in Brazil. Since then they have been
studied side by side with the canons of Brazilian and international literature, through the
current methods of this field. As the best lyricists of popular song came to be considered
some of the best living poets at that time, the lyrics came to be regarded as poetry. But
clearly a song is not a poem, just as it is not pure music. We are dealing with a third kind
of cultural production, subject to specialized methods of analysis, in which the
examination of the musical sounds in their specificity should not be overlooked.
The complexity implied by a kind of music which is at the same time cultivated
and popular indicates the collapse of these categories. In the Brazilian case, at least since
Villa-Lobos, or since the third decade of the 20 th Century, the dividing lines between
“popular” and “art music” have been systematically erased. The music to be discussed
here was mainly made by and for university students or intellectuals, but dominated
virtually all mass media and became widely popular, even if the majority of the
population seemed to continue to consume other kinds of music.
In the following analysis, I will first examine the national-popular production in
the context of the work of Mário de Andrade and of the Modernist concepts. Next, we
will approach the Tropicalist production through the concepts of Oswald de Andrade and
of postmodern theory.

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4. The 1950’s: euphoria

To understand the musical debates of the 60s it is necessary for us to go back to

the fifties and glimpse the economic developments that led to the dictatorship in 1964.
The period of intense industrialization experienced by Brazil in the 1950s was indebted to
the entrance, in the economy, of foreign capital in joint ventures with national enterprises.
At the international level, this movement corresponded to a new phase of monopolist
capitalism (Hollanda, 1982, p. 19). Known as the “developmentalist” period, this was a
very euphoric time that began in the 1930’s and reached its apex in President Juscelino
Kubitschek’s government (1956-1961). At that point Brazil ceased to be an exclusively
agrarian society and was quickly industrialized. With the slogan “fifty years in five”,
Kubitschek convinced the country that it had finally found the path of development. With
the soundtrack of bossa nova rolling in the background, Brazil was hitting international
headlines because of soccer and the monumental architectural achievement represented
by the building of the new capital of the country, Brasília, in the distant heart of Brazil.

5. The 1950’s: dysphoria

In spite of the euphoric evaluations of the country’s situation by the mass media
and the middle class, the industrialization taking place excluded large sectors of the
population. The industries were based in strategic locations, namely, the states of Rio de
Janeiro and São Paulo, while the rest of the country’s economy remained agrarian. There
was unemployment and the dependency on foreign capital led the central government to
lose control of the economy.

6. The Crisis: Apex

“Developmentalism” proved to be unsustainable and led to a serious political and

economic crisis that reached its apex during João Goulart’s presidency (1961-1964). His
“interclasses pact” was an attempt to articulate the expectancies of financiers and the
needs of the industries at the same time incorporating the masses into the political

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system. Notwithstanding, the development of a dynamic of dependency would yield, on
the one hand, to a deepening of social exclusion, and on the other, to the discontent of the
Brazilian industrial groups excluded by the growing monopolization. With the rupture of
the interclasses pact the government lost the support of the financiers at the same time
that popular dissatisfaction came to a peak. Having done a poor job at articulating
organized popular movements of resistance, Goulart opened the flank to the right-wing
military hardliners. Pressed by national and international capitalists, the military took
power against the wishes of the larger population, under the pretext of managing a
momentary crisis, and kept control of the country for 21 years.

7. The Fifties: Bossa Nova

The departure point for the study of MPB, or post-sixties’ modern Brazilian
popular music, is bossa nova, which represented a major dividing line since its
beginnings in 1958. It was from a dissension within the bossa nova that gave birth to the
parallel movement of bossa nova participante that the national-popular musical
movement was formed. With bossa nova, for the first time Brazilian popular music was
launched internationally not as an exotic product but as a sophisticated new development.
Bossa nova influenced forever the way of making and performing the songs of certain
classes in Brazil. However, since its inception bossa nova endured political attacks by
some artists and intellectuals, concerned with the economic dependency. Nationalists
criticized the music as being merely a product of American jazz, a colonizer’s
manifestation. At the same time, the lyrics were condemned by leftist sectors for limiting
themselves to the themes of romantic love, of feminine beauty and of landscape ecstasy.
Additionally, the sophistication of bossa nova was rejected by large segments of the
population, which identified with a less restrained sensibility. Taking into account these
three criticisms, the nationalists sought to make a new kind of music. In their estimation,
this new music could faithfully represent the Brazilian reality, and serve the purpose of
building popular awareness. Those composers partook of a broader political and
intellectual orientation known as the national-popular.

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8. The National-Popular

National-popular ideology is characterized by faith in the utopia of freedom and

social justice. According to Gramsci, who created the category, the overcoming of the
stage of oppression and injustice would demand that people developed an ideological
consciousness which could lead them to emancipate the nation from imperialism (1987).
As the people didn’t possess it, it was left to the artists and intellectuals’ responsibility to
articulate this national awareness. As it assumed the role of guidance of the people in the
resistance to dictatorship, the national-popular movement fell in the trap of didacticism
and paternalism. The protest song represented the maximum concretization of this
historic misjudgement. The new music that the nationalist composers wanted to create as
a reformulation of bossa nova, as we saw in the previous section, was idealized according
to the national-popular agenda: bossa nova participante.

9. The Early Sixties: Bossa Nova Participante

Thus, the year 1961 saw the appearance of bossa nova participante, with the
release of Quem Quiser Encontrar o Amor (Carlos Lyra/Geraldo Vandré). Bossa nova
participante is a genre of protest song derived from bossa nova. Both bossa nova
participante and Brazilian protest song in general derived from the national-popular
ideology. Quem Quiser Encontrar o Amor represents a rupture with bossa nova’s
conception of “love”, understood as a natural expression of the being. Here, love is a
conquest, and it has to be deserved by suffering and struggle (Napolitano, 2001, p. 33).
The repeated reference to “waiting” would be a distinctive trait of the emerging Brazilian
protest song: some glorious day in the horizon of future would bring the social
revolution, and with it freedom and social justice. Thus the rhetoric of the “day that will
come” is a convention of this kind of production. According to Walnice Nogueira
Galvão, this easy resolution of the historical conflicts relieved the social actors of
concrete political responsibilities. Believing that their function was that of guidance, they
could be satisfied by just producing and consuming such messages in all kinds of cultural
manifestations (Galvão, 1976).

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 Musically, this song also represents a transition between bossa nova and the
national-popular styles which would emerge soon afterwards in MPB. Some general
characteristics of bossa nova were kept in this song, such as rhythm, harmony and
orchestration; on the other hand, the melody, as opposed to that of bossa nova, is rather
simplistic, while the discreet rimshot accompaniment introduced by bossa nova was
replaced by a return of the traditional samba percussion instrumentation. Moreover, the
vocal and instrumental delivery becomes more potent and incisive.

10. 1965: MPB, the National-Popular and Mário de Andrade

MPB is the genre that was formed after a transformation of bossa nova
participante in the mid-Sixties. The national-popular movement oriented the formulation
of both bossa nova participante and MPB. Having influenced all three, Mário de
Andrade’s project made it possible that none had prejudices against transnational genres
and were in no way xenophobic, even if retaining its didactic and evolutive character.
“Arrastão” (Edu Lobo/Vinicius de Moraes, 1965) produced a huge impact and is
considered the initial milestone of MPB. The music is inspired by Dorival Caymmi’s “sea
songs” or canções praieiras. The influence of bossa nova is evident in the harmonies and
in the vocal delivery, but the rhythm of most of the song has nothing to do with it. The
lyrics, epic in character, search for inspiration in the common people of a small Bahian
village of fishermen. They would be the ones who, together with other underprivileged
Brazilians from the rural areas, could retain the essence of Brazilianness. The urban
subject of bossa nova wouldn’t be as suitable. This subject was taken to be deprived of
purity through the contact with international culture mediated by the Cultural Industry.
As we saw, according to Mário de Andrade’s project, such mediation should be taken by
the hands of the enlightened intellectual or artist.
The narrative focuses on the quotidian struggle for survival, captured by the
moment in which the fishermen throw their net into the sea. With rare virtuosity, the lyric
succeeds in communicating the subjective dimension of a certain João. At the same time
it describes the objective conditions of his existence in an agile play of inner/outer
framings that suggests a cinematographic technique.

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 At first he is immersed in passivity (Ê, tem jangada no mar/Ê, ie, êi, hoje tem
arrastão). João is then awakened by the call to collective responsibility by an
authoritarive member of his circle (Ê, todo mundo pescar/Chega de sombra
João/J’ouviu). Overheard dialogues between the village dwellers describe the daily ritual
of net-pulling. At the same time, they refer to the popular faith in the yoruba orisha
Iemanja, the Queen of the Sea, the Goddess of Abundance (Olha o arrastão entrando no
mar sem fim/Ê meu irmão me traz Iemanjá pra mim). In a quick cut, the lyric turns itself
to João’s interiority. He is appealing to the Catholic saint to bless his romantic project,
through the bringing of the fish needed for the collective sustenance (Minha Santa
Bárbara/Me abençoai/Quero me casar com Janaína). Saint Barbara is syncretically
connected to Iansã, the goddess of sensuality, and Janaína is another name for Iemanjá.
Meanwhile, the music, in a perfect synchrony with the lyric, interprets contrastively this
change of the external to the internal plane. Its suavity expresses João’s inner feelings
through a rhetoric of tenderness. Lyric and music then turn themselves to the external
level again (Ê, puxa bem devagar/Ê, ie, êi, já vem vindo o arrastão). João has a vision of
Iemanjá (Ê, é a Rainha do Mar). Iemanjá calls João (Vem, vem na rede João/Pra mim),
an evidence that she’s responded to his prayers. Never rivaled abundance then comes to
that village (Valha-me Deus Nosso Senhor do Bonfim/Nunca jamais se viu tanto peixe
assim). The mystical atmosphere also makes reference to the two biblical allegories about
the miraculous plentifulness of fish.
The content of this symbolization points to the necessary solidarity of the
collective body to overcome the challenges of survival. At the same time, it establishes
the Brazilian popular identity through the syncretic religiosity. Having the praxical
objective of awakening the people’s consciousness for the struggle for freedom and
justice, the message is clear: with the help of God, of the Catholic saints and of the
Orishas, the popular collective solidarity will win against adversity.
Edu Lobo’s version is almost entirely faithful to Mário de Andrade’s project. The
music follows a teleological plane that sets out from the “pure” Bahian folk samba, and
arrives at the urban samba of Rio de Janeiro. It also employs a vocal and instrumental
delicacy which moves away from the popular sensibility towards more ellaborated and
subtle esthetics. The delivery develops that way during most of the song, presented in a

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restrained manner by a lead vocalist. The latter suggests the enlightened artist devoted to
his didactic and redemptive task. In the ending section of the song, the collective chant
joins the artist’s―that’s the popular support symbolically represented. In an apotheotic
and triumphant tone, this section is repeated several times. The folk genre is replaced by
a fusion of bossa nova with the urban Carioca samba, a popular manifestation delivered
with loudness and expressivity. We are being exposed to the musical staging of the
historical dialectics such as conceived by Edu Lobo’s popular nationalism.
On the other hand, Elis Regina’s rendition breaks away from bossa nova’s
standard of intimacy and control moving toward a more “popular” sensibility. Not only
due to the greater vocal loudness but also because of her straightforwardly dramatic
performance, radically opposed to bossa nova’s understatement. The accompaniment
follows the same feel, but doesn’t fail in incorporating the harmonic sophistication
brought by bossa nova. Thus, musically, this is another instance of the fusions between
the carioca urban samba with bossa nova under the national-popular project. The vocal
delivery is triumphalist, and the vigorously didactic attitude implies a certain disbelief in
the capacity of the masses to comprehend a subtler approach.
A third stream of expression of the national-popular project in MPB is that
developed by Vinicius de Moraes and Baden Powell in 1962. In that year they started a
series of compositions inspired in the Afro-Brazilian candomblé rituals of Bahia, titled
the “afro-sambas”. In the whole series, Vinicius’ lyrics use the same folk matrix, at the
same time construing a collective identity. This identity aims at reflecting the values of
the people in their purity. Among them, courage, action, the will to fight, spirituality, the
pride of being black, love, musicality. His intention seems evident: that of searching for a
mythic origin of the Brazilian people, which all of the nation could identify with.
Musically, Baden also followed a line of creation defined by Mário de Andrade’s project,
just like Edu Lobo. The influence of European concert music is manifest in his work, for
which he wrote all arrangements and naturally played all the guitar parts. Marked
resonances here are Villa-Lobos and Bach, especially in melody and in the contrapuntal
accompaniment. Baden sought a synthesis of the Bahian folk samba, the samba de roda,
with candomblé music and the urban samba styles modernized by bossa nova. In regards
to rhythm, the bossa nova beat is present in Baden’s guitar playing, but it isn’t soft as in

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João Gilberto’s. It’s more percussive and metallic, whereas Gilberto’s is always velvety
and subdued. Clearly, these differences in playing styles relate to different constructions
of national identity.

11. 1967: Tropicália (1967) Oswald de Andrade (1928)

Postmodernism

According to Sovik, the Tropicalistas witnessed

the rupture of the political utopias, the end of the hope in the historic progress brought by a
democratic or revolutionary regime, and its substitution by the values of consumerism. The
discourse of the end of progress, implicit in the juxtaposition of the archaic and the modern
[in the lyrics and music of the Tropicalista songs], is an ironization of the idea of material
progress, built upon the ruins of the deconstruction of Brazil as the other of the West . . .
Tropicália opposed itself to the military state, but also broke apart from its reflex, the
national-popular resistance; it was fertile ground for the expression of that which cannot be
manipulated, of the Other who resists to the ideology of progress. In the richness of its
symbolic production and in the absence of an instrumental political intention, it critically
reveals the [violent and predatory] desires, archaic and modern, that Reason denied (1994,
p. 134-5).

A literary influence which soon was appropriated by the nascent movement was
that of Oswald de Andrade, with his concept of Anthropophagy. and his . One of the two
most influential leaders of the Brazilian Modernism launched in 1922, his
Anthropophagite Manifesto, brought to the public in 1928, sought to sketch a satirical
parallel between the practices of the cannibals of the Brazilian land at the times of its
“discovery” in fifteen hundred, and the necessary attitude in face of the cultural and
economic colonization of modern Brazil by the developed nations. The appropriation of
foreign cultural goods ceases to be a brand of inferiority. On the contrary,
Anthropophagy fosters the understanding that the differences in the stages of
development result from economic and historic factors. Thus, while the traditional left
accused Tropicália of being an alienated movement, colonized by the international
imperialism, the Tropicalistas would take international pop music and brand it with the
seal of irony, printing this seal in the national imaginary. In the same move they
denounced the Brazilian backwardness and social injustice, which in the materialist
dialectics seemed to be automatically solved with the progression of the march of history.

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12. Anthropophagy/Postmodern Theory

The viable approximations between Oswald’s Anthropophagy and postmodern theory

are several. But the limitations of these approximations are also to be noticed. According
to Favaretto (1979, p. 36), Oswald idealized technical progress and the relationship
between the human being and the Earth, considered to be instinctive. On the contrary,
Tropicália was extremely pessimistic in regards to any hopes in progress, at the same
time rejecting all faith in an essence of Brazilianness. Oswald’s understanding of art as a
critical vanguard in charge of the resolution of the cultural conflicts was also challenged
by Tropicália, which didn’t commit itself to resolve them, but to denounce them.
According to Favaretto,

The cultural contradictions are exposed by the juxtaposition of the archaic and the modern,
according to an artistic treatment that makes shine the historic indeterminations, highlights
the social repressions and the cultural syncretism, staging a phantasmagoric scene all made
of shards (p.37).

As says Sovik (op. cit., p. 133): “In this the Tropicalistas would be with Jean
Baudrillard, for, for them, it is not true that there was an escape before and now it doesn’t
exist anymore. By quoting the archaic, they affirm that progress is, and always has been,
illusory.”
Even noticing these differences, Oswald’s visionary approach to the cultural and
national debate must be brought to light, in view of what would only be construed as
postmodern theory many decades later.

13. Traditional Left’s criticisms against Tropicália:

Because of its pessimism, Tropicália was harshly criticized by some leftist

intellectuals, like Schwarz (1978). For him, the direction taken by Tropicália was
irrational, being not susceptible of resolution through the Hegelian scheme, therefore
nearing right-wing fascisms.

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 Responding to Schwarz, Vasconcelos (1977) and Santiago (1978) proposed the
inoperativeness of the rational categories to understand Tropicália―and consequently,
Brazil. The seed was launched for the search of theoretical alternatives for the
understanding of both. For Sovik (op. cit., p. 115), Tropicália was one of the first
manifestations of postmodernism, only not preceding the American ones.

Brazil was fertile ground for the new perception of the end of a dream of homogenization
of society towards a higher [step in the stairway of history]. Thus, with unequal economic
growth aggravated by developmentalism, in the 1960’s the frailty of the sense of
advancement became visible (p. 132).

According to this author, who elaborated on Hassan’s list of eleven typical aspects of
the postmodern work (1984), Tropicália shares its esthetic characteristics. Sovik then
suggests an script to illustrate each of these aspects, that I reproduce here, with comments
and adaptations by myself. But I find it necessary to say that the facts don’t seem to
suggest that Tropicália was really a postmodern manifestation; there are several historic
and cultural components that doesn’t match for such characterization. To compare
Tropicália to postmodern productions is much more justified as an exercise of
approximation between some striking similarities that can be traced back to Oswald de
Andrade to promote an alternative way of understanding of Brazilian culture.
The album/manifesto Tropicália, ou Panis et Circensis, launched in 1968, was a
collective project signed by composers/lyricists Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Torquato
Neto, Capinam and Tom Zé; arranger Rogério Duprat; and also performing, Nara Leão,
Gal Costa and Os Mutantes. The entire album is the most wild collage of the most
discrepant quotations from the high and low cultures, the national and the international,
the archaiac and the modern and so on and so forth. A couple of other songs used to
illustrate Hassan categories were taken from Caetano’s solo album of 1968 and will be
mentioned specifically.
1. Indeterminacy:
In the lyrics this aspect presents itself by the juxtaposition of images of
development to images of death and mutilation, as in “Lindonéia”. This song depicts a
twenty-something girl from the lower classes, dweller of the periphery of Rio de Janeiro.
Musically the song plays with conventions of the sentimental genres, opposing them to

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both bossa nova and iê-iê-iê, the Brazilian translation of the Anglo-American rock of the
1960’s which was taken to be an uncritical emulation of postcolonialist music. The music
accompaniment changes to iê-iê-iê exactly when the singer mentions the “hit parades”.
The ironic use of the romantic “unsophisticated” cliché about “loneliness killing myself
of pain” is also conspicuous in this song.
There is no explicit denounce of the violence, nor any proposition of cause-effect
mechanism, neither in the lyrics nor in the music. Nara Leão’s absolutely colloquial and
bossanovistic rendition breaks apart from any dramaticism. The same can be said of the
musical sounds as a whole, remitting the listener to the protagonist’s social condition and
alienation through an outdated bolero. The critical intention emerges from the decoding
of the song by the listener in the context of the conventions of the genres utilized.

2. Fragmentation:
The most superficial listening of this LP shows a most furious collage of
incongruent references, both in the musical aspect and in the lyrics. Focusing the
attention only in the music, in this small fragment of 30 seconds of “Geléia Geral” we
listen to a fragmêntary and pessimistic portraiture of Brazil, in which the “authentic”
confounds itself ironically with the “inauthentic”: we can be everything because we are
nothing. All the possibilities are opened and at the same time all potentialities remain
unrealized. By any angle that one approaches the country from the point of view of this
song totalization is impossible. We listen to the instrumentation of The Beatles’ Sargeant
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, playing something that is reminiscent of a nostalgic
march typical of small town bandstands in pre-industrial Brazil of the nineteenth Century,
but which is in fact the socialist march The Internationale; and then come, sequentially, Il
Guarany, a nineteenth Century opera by Carlos Gomes, a reference to the times of the
romantic nationalism, when the idealized figure of the Brazilian Indian, Montaigne’s
Noble Savage, dominated national art; then, All the Way, which reminds us of Frank
Sinatra and comments on the planetary insertion of the American pop music through
mass culture and media; next, a Carioca batucada and a northeastern baião give the last
strokes in the portrait. The whole points to a Brazilianness built “of shards”, as was said,

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“which protest song ignores or tries to instrumentalize and monumentalize under the
aegis of a kind of epic realism” (Sovik, op. cit., 116).

3. Decanonization.
Regarding the authorial work, the form of the Tropicália LP is that of a collective
album: no individual author imposes her or himself. We already mentioned the collapse
of the rational categories, therefore of logocentrism. Ethnocentrism, understood as
populist nationalism, is morbidly ironized, for instance, through the decontextualization
of the civic and epic hymn "Hino ao Senhor de Bonfim". As to phalocentrism, in
Paisagem Útil, or Useful Landscape, Veloso parodied the male discourse of love
expressed in bossa nova, in which the active word is retained by the man who depicts the
passive and idealized woman. Inútil Paisagem, by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Aloysio de
Oliveira, means Useless Landscape in Portuguese. In this song, the lyric I describes an
idyllic landscape by regretting its waste in face of the beloved woman’s absence. Veloso
mixes the old and sentimental marcha-rancho genre with bossa nova in this song. Here,
the landscape becomes “useful” for profiting, by consisting of “dead moons” and “cold
palm trees of cement”. The song has its crowning moment with the romantic cliché of the
lovers’ moon sung with the diction of an old-fashioned singer of the 1940’s.

4. The erasure of the I.

In Tropicália, the I who is subject to erasing is the optimistic image of Brazil and
Brazilianness. Differently than Bossa Nova, that proposes a passionate, self-assured,
sincere I; and in response to protest song, in which the national I is rationally
understandable, protagonist, the Brazil of Tropicália exists in the interstices of the
language games. Regarding the erasure of the I, "Superbacana", from Veloso’s solo
album of 1968, offers an explicit contrast between the heroic I and his erasure. The song
ironizes the official hero, impotent in the face of the dollar and of the American military
power.

5. The unpresentable:

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 In response to protest song, Tropicália presents an anti-mimetic program. Now the
sublime, in Lyotard’s terms, is in the words of "Tropicália", also from Veloso’s solo
album of 1968.

6. Irony:
The difficult thing is to isolate the irony, for as we have seen it is intertwined with
the other characteristics of Tropicália throughout the entire Tropicalista production.

7. Hybridization:
As was said, the concept of hybridization was already proposed by Oswald de
Andrade under the name of Anthropophagy. Two among the many hybridizations
undertook by Tropicália are the recoveries of proscribed themes by the dominant
definitions of “good taste” or by the traditional left: for instance, the music considered of
“bad taste” like the bolero Lindonéia, the Anglo-American-inspired [“colonized”] genre
of iê-iê-iê, the enthusiastic participation in the mass culture, etc.

8. Carnavalization:
It was already mentioned that since the beginning of the twentieth Century the
Carnaval was already valorized as part of the Brazilian originality becoming in the
Sixties a fundamental part of each Tropicalista song. In its symbolic function, it
transgressively reverses the hierarchies, regenerates and destroys at the same time,
provokes a return of the repressed: the unconscious, sex and death come to exist while the
I is erased. According to Favaretto (op. cit., pp. 93-5), the carnivalesque element of
Tropicália is found in the patchwork language of the songs:

made of ambivalences, absence of a subject, integration of the grotesque, tragicomic laugh,

opposition between open and closed space, between time of waiting and movement,
mixture of popular rhythms and cultivated forms of music, esthetic refinement in the
construction of the text and use of parnassian clichés. In the anthropophagic pot everything
refers to everything, and the outcome is a joyous relativization of the conflicting values and
a continuous degradation of the information. Kitsch, the Tropicalista scene excites laughter
and generates an emptiness which derives from the corrosion of the officialism that
controls the values of culture . . . In Tropicalismo, the party doesn’t have a regenerating
value; the emptiness remains empty, being then filled by desire and violence (p.95).

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9. Performance:
Both Tropicália and the American postmodernism in their prime valorized the
idea of vanguard in opposition to that of collective and participative performance.
Nevertheless, Tropicália explored intensely the resources of performance not only in the
rendition of songs but also in the use of clothing and in the stage attitude with semantic
intention.
The famous presentation of É Proibido Proibir in the major festival of 1968 is an
example of the Tropicalista performance. The title and the lyric of this song were inspired
in the events of May 1968 in France: “É Proibido Proibir” means “It is Forbidden to
Forbid”, which is the translation of the French student’s slogan. Discontented with what
seemed to them an alienated attitude, the student following of the national-popular left
received "É Proibido Proibir" with a strident and prolonged booing. In response to that,
Veloso transformed what should be a musical presentation with predetermined roles for
the artists and the public in a happening, an indetermined and participative artistic genre.
As a praxical consequence, the alleged opposers to repression were confronted with the
repressor who dwells inside everyone. Here only snippets were selected from a long
speech-song of five minutes.

10. Constructionism:
By juxtaposing fictions taken as established truths, Tropicália demystifies them. A
largely utilized mechanism by the movement, here it is exemplified in Três Caravelas.
The song develops in Spanish and Portuguese. The Spanish part (sung by Caetano) is an
uncritical, overoptimistic and celebratory homage to Cuba, and the Portuguese one (sung
by Gil) is the same in regards to Brazil. Through the juxtaposition of the naïve tributes to
both revolutionary Cuba and to Brazil, addressed as “the best”, both ideologies are
emptied.

11. Immanence: According to Favaretto, the Tropicália LP is a dialogical production, in

the Bakhtinian sense: each song parodies certain images, giving a glimpse of all others in
a system of interferences and relations. The listening is doubly oriented: it captures the
utterance of a represented subject which aims at another (the listener), who, by her or his

18
turn, is required to decode the references. Thus the integration of the several different
levels is realized: that of the music, that of the parodied texts and that of the context. (op.
cit., pp. 57-58)

14. Conclusions

In this paper, the two most important artistic/intellectual popular music strains of
the decade of 1960 were analyzed through their relationships with the propositions of two
fundamental theorists of the Brazilian thought; in the same argument, the discussions in
regards to modernism and postmodernism supplied another angle of understanding about
what was happening in that decade in Brazil, without implying that postmodernism was
really happening at that time in Brazil.
This exposition was oriented by the stance that the cultural productions are a
preferential arena for the discussion of the human condition historically situated. This is
an ethical position, therefore a matter of principles. Notwithstanding, more important
than the ideas mediated by the artistic expression seems to be the power of imagination.
The artistic expression happens in this imaginative plane, in this utopia literally speaking,
in this place that is a no-place, which generously opens its doors to creators and
enjoyers―for enjoyment, as we have seen, is also a form of creation. As we participate in
this alternative plane, each of us comes to perceive the world as susceptible of change.
On the other hand, to those deprived of creativity and imagination, it is only left a
perception of the world as a complex and ununderstandable machinery, in face of which
all possible action is reduced to submission. Therefore, the ethic consciousness must be a
presupposition of the artistic production, criticism and enjoyment; but more important
than the ideas mediated by cultural productions, the most destabilizing power is the
capacity of imagining and creating. This is maybe the only irreducible condition of art,
and in this sense, in all times in which the human being comes to be part of, it suggests
that it will always be possible to speak of depth or shallowness of imagination―if
preferred, depth or shallowness of desire. And to speak of depth of desire is to speak of
superficiality in the Nietzschean sense. In his own words, “...to worship appearance, to

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believe in shapes, tones, words―in the whole Olympus of appearance!” (Nietzsche,
2001, p. 8).
In a final note about our reflection regarding the Brazilian complexity, we may
remember the words of Roger Bastide, who taught for many years in Brazil and was a
profound knower of the country:

The sociologist who studies Brazil does not know what conceptual system to use. None of
the notions taught in Europe and North America are valid here, where old and new mix
together and historical epochs become entangled . . . It would be necessary to discover, in
place of rigid concepts, ones that are somewhat liquid and able to describe phenomena
characterized by fusion, ebullition, and interpenetration―notions modeled in a living
reality in perpetual transformation. The sociologist who wants to understand Brazil must
often become a poet (quoted by Vianna, 1999: 117-8).

Nowadays, we Brazilians are skeptical about the poetry of being Brazilian. But as
long as we keep the potency of imagination, we feel that there’s hope.

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