Tropicália: gêneros, identidades, repertórios e linguagens (review)

The Tropicalia cultural movement of the 1960s has provided both artists and scholars with a wealth of material for trying to shape Brazilian culture in the past 40 years. The cultural movement’s short duration and small output belie the influence that Tropicália has exerted over Brazilian culture, and the interest that scholars both in Brazil and abroad have displayed in the movement. Great names of the Tropicália movement like Gilberto Gil, CaetanoVeloso, and Gal Costa continue to have an active role in Brazil’s popular music. While less active currently, the psychedelic rock band Os Mutantes has also gained a cult following around the world. It is safe to say that the creative blaze that Tropicália ignited in the late 1960s still burns in the world of popular music. Nevertheless, it is important for those who study Brazilian popular culture to remember that Tropicália was a movement that also included the visual arts, cinema, and to a lesser extent, literature. Furthermore, as much as Tropicália’s repercussions are still present in today’s world, the political, cultural, and social contexts of the movement should not be forgotten while studying the phenomenon. What made Tropicália such a unique outflowing of culture was its position in both Brazilian and global popular culture trends of the late 1960s. While much study has been dedicated to history of the movement within a Brazilian context, it is also important to recognize the ways in which Tropicália displays global trends.

A recent volume edited by Ana Mery Sehbe de Carli and Flávia Brocchetto Ramos, Tropicália: gêneros, identidades, repertórios e linguagens, presents a fresh collection of thirteen essays about Tropicália that were inspired by a semester-long colloquium on the movement held at the Universidade de Caxias do Sul in 2007. These essays look at the cultural phenomenon from a variety of angles. Some, such as Carlos Calado’s “Tropicália: o avesso da bossa nova” and Erinton Aver Moraes’s “Arquitetura e contracultura nos anos 60” examine Tropicália as a cohesive whole in light of other cultural phenomena during the era. Others look at more specific elements of the movement and at its future ramifications, such as Luca Bacchini’s “Refazendo tudo: Gilberto Gil e o nonsense utópico da nação” and Flávia Brochetto Ramos’s “Sem receita para ler e viver!” These essays and their varied topics indicate that Tropicália remains a rich field of study for those interested in music, the arts, and the function of popular culture, not to mention Brazilian history.

Carlos Calado’s article places Tropicália within the timeline of Brazilian popular music, contextualizing it with bossa nova, the equally revolutionary change in musical style that preceded it by a decade. His title is taken from a quotation of Caetano Veloso’s, “Tudo que a Bossa Nova rejeitou para poder erigir-se como estilo próprio, o Tropicalismo abraçou, então a Tropicália foi o avesso da Bossa Nova” (36). His article details the much documented rivalry between tropicalistas and the MPB artists of the period, and also stresses that, in comparison to bossa nova, Tropicália was less of a musical genre and more of an attitude. This attitude demanded that Brazilian music be open to both foreign influences and its own mass culture that had often been dismissed as kitsch (44). Calado’s article is interesting, but its topic has been recently explored by a variety of writers such as Christopher Dunn in books about Tropicália in the past decade. Nevertheless, this contextualization continues to be useful for the scholar of Brazilian music.

The use of kitsch by the Tropicalists that Calado explores briefly in his article is the main topic of Nivaldo Pereira’s article, “Luz tropicalista sobre o maugosto,” in which he focuses on Caetano Veloso’s...