Tropicália: Brazilian Music and Culture of the 1960s

Curated by Christopher Dunn
Winter-Spring 2002

Tropicália was a cultural phenomenon that emerged in the late 1960s in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro as Brazil was entering the most repressive phase of military rule. It was manifest in several areas of cultural production, including film, theater, visual arts, and literature, but only coalesced as a formal movement in the realm of popular music.

The tropicalist movement was led by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, two young singer-songwriters from Salvador, Bahia, a city on the northeastern coast noted for its vibrant Afro-Brazilian expressive cultures. In the mid-1960s, they migrated south to Rio de Janeiro along with fellow Bahian musicians, Gal Costa, Maria Bethânia, and Tom Zé. By 1967, the "Bahian Group" had moved to São Paulo, the largest and most industrialized city of South America where they came into contact with the poetic and musical vanguards of the city. Through their friendship with the concrete poet Augusto de Campos, the Bahian group met future collaborators including the innovative psychedelic rock band Os Mutantes (The Mutants) and Rogério Duprat, an avantgarde composer-arranger associated with the Música Nova group. This alliance between the Bahians and the São Paulo vanguard would revolutionize Brazilian popular music.

The tropicalists did not propose a new style or genre. Their music involved, instead, a pastiche of diverse styles, both new and old, national and international. Tropicalist music might be understood as a rereading of the tradition of Brazilian popular song in light of international pop music and vanguard experimentation. In Brazil, the tropicalists elicited comparisons with their internationally famous contemporaries, the Beatles, a group that also created pop music in dialogue with art music as well as with local popular traditions. Tropicália was an exemplary instance of cultural hybridity that dismantled binary distinctions between high and low, traditional and modern, national and international cultural production.

They were criticized by segments of the left-wing which doubted their political sympathies in the struggle against the dictatorship. Yet their anarchic and irreverant "happenings" also alarmed the military authorities who eventually arrested Gil and Veloso and exiled them to London in 1969. Ultimately, the tropicalists would give impetus to emerging countercultural attitudes, styles, and discourses concerning race, gender, sexuality, and personal freedom.

Christopher Dunn is the author of:
Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture (University of North Carolina Press, 2001)
Call Number: Latin American Library Stacks ML 3487.B7 D86 2001