Brazilian Popular Music: Caetano Veloso and the Regeneration of Tradition (review)

In her compact study about Caetano Veloso, Brazil's most celebrated and polemical singer-songwriter, Lorraine Leu takes as a point of departure an observation he made in an interview with the author: "What has characterized my performance over the years, has been an interest in always reviving the value of rupture, whenever rupture is actually necessary and appropriate, because of its capacity to regenerate what is vital within a tradition" (10). The genius of Caetano Veloso lies in his deep, highly intellectualized knowledge of Brazilian song, his obsessive interest in reflecting meta-critically on this tradition, and his occasional gestures of rupture and critique that seek to redefine it. His first and most consequential gesture of rupture came in the late 1960s as Brazil entered the most repressive phase of military rule. Veloso emerged as a leading articulator of Tropicália, which was manifest in nearly all realms of artistic production, but only coalesced as a movement in popular music.

At a very early stage in his artistic career, Veloso proposed the notion of linha evolutiva as a way of approaching the question of tradition and modernity within an increasingly internationalized context. Although he was a devoted enthusiast of bossa nova, Veloso believed that the only way to advance Brazilian popular music was to advance dialectically toward what he once called the avesso da bossa, a move that led him to embrace Anglo-American rock and electric instruments. Whereas bossa nova was the supreme expression of high modernist style, musical tropicalism reveled in postmodern pastiche, hybridity, citation, and sampling. Leu provides sensitive close readings to several key tropicalist songs, including "Alegria, alegria" and "Tropicália," but devotes special attention to performance, sartorial style, and the politics of the body in the tropicalist movement. She argues that "Veloso's feminisation of his body and of his social world, within the particularly macho and hierarchical culture of a military regime, was perceived as a threat to the organisation of social power and to the rhetoric of civic responsibility and family values disseminated by the regime" (17). Following the work of Richard Parker, Nicolau Sevcenko, Silviano Santiago and Roberto DaMatta she reads Veloso in relation to baroque expression and the tradition of carnival, oriented toward bodily excess, playful contradiction, heightened sensuality, and social inversion. Leu has a nose for interesting archival material, such as the testimony of gay writer Caio Fernando Abreu who was deeply impressed by seeing a tropicalist performance: "That same week, I bought some Amazon-green satin trousers, some umbanda necklaces in Cathedral Square. I let me hair grow, smoked my first joint. And I went in search of Brazil" (42).

The most innovative chapters of Leu's study focus on Veloso's unique approach to voice and language. Taking the lead from paulista musician and critic Luiz Tatit, who has studied the unique "dictions" or vocal styles (involving the play between word, melody, and intonation) of Brazilian performers, Leu provides useful background into the trajectory of modern Brazilian vocalists from the Golden Age of samba through bossa nova. She suggests that Veloso proposed a "new cult of the voice" (62) that reinvented vocal intimacy of earlier singers, but also introduced unconventional and even consciously "ugly" vocalizations (70) to produce a distancing effect. Leu offers an insightful close reading of Jóia and Qualquer coisa, two studio albums released in 1975 that she analyzes as interrelated companion pieces that explore the interplay between sound and text. The compact lyrics on Jóia tend to reflect Veloso's abiding interest in the formal experiments of concrete poetry, whereas Qualquer Coisa is decidedly more colloquial and "wordy," but both reflect on the articulation and slippage of meaning produced through language.

Leu's book is generally well written, but in places her narrative meanders through historical or theoretical explanations that seem better suited for the endnote section. The fifth chapter on the love song tradition in Brazil would have worked better as a stand-alone...