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

Reflection is an action involving the efforts and desires of individuals caught equally in the fictions and histories of their respective epochs. The mindful imaginations responsible for innovative, creative culture, while existing in the socio-historical world, can seem distanced from collective tradition and the ideologies shaping "reality," though these worlds, of artistic intentions and values, of expression via symbolic play, and of technical innovation, remain clearly linked to experience. Author Lorraine Leu foregrounds music, performance, and expression, searching for relationships among them, and meanings between them and popular Brazilian musical tradition as culture and as a set of social values. In seeking artistic meaning in popular song she has focused on the worthy and aesthetically rich profile of Brazilian cultural icon Caetano Veloso and in doing so places this prolific, often controversial singer, songwriter, and author as a recognizable player in the regeneration of tradition. Leu does an admirable job of linking Veloso's reflections, explosive innovations, and provocations in the popular music world with the epoch that enveloped his early career, and the ocean of twentieth-century Brazilian musical tradition. The hybrid nature of Veloso's output, though, requires one to realize that he was a primary member of bossa nova's second generation, an exemplary composer, performer, and interpreter of the genre, while repeatedly positing himself as a sort of carnivalesque chameleon provocateur whose aim was often to confuse and stir up needed debate with his musical high jinks. Leu champions all of this throughout her search for meaning.

This approach is for the most part fair and fitting since in his immense talent and high profile, Veloso, now sixty-four, has often assumed the role of a national spokesperson of sorts while simultaneously articulating his own place in, and perspectives on, the highly touted and complex world of Brazilian popular music's social history. Veloso, also a celebrity, is an author of several works, including 1997's Verdade Tropical, a controversial memoir which some say recasts our hero's role in the 1960s revolution in an amplified fashion (published in English as Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil, translated by Isabel de Sena, edited by Barbara Einzig [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002]). This "tropical truth" also poses familiar dialogue concerning brasilidade, or "Brazilianness" and a swath of identity issues hovering about intellectuality and nationality within popular culture. Leu's subject is also a superstar poet who cares about the meaning of being Brazilian, and fighting all of the necessary battles whether initiated in recorded song, in live performance, or on the written page. It is this side of Veloso too, as well as the sheer popularity of his recorded oeuvre, that readers should remember when Leu projects her subject onto broader plateaus and deeper contexts.

In six, quick and effective chapters and a brief conclusion, Leu's Brazilian Popular Music: Caetano Veloso and the Regeneration of Tradition tackles a set of problematized topics including cultural and political change in the Brazilian 1960s, gender and musical style as configured in that era's influential Tropicália movement, the meanings inherent in Veloso's powerfully expressive vocal techniques, and the cultural values deeply located in various aspects of songwriting traditions. These are all important areas of discourse for a country of such tragic social contrasts, but one also with a grand cache of a wisdom-laden popular music heritage. Leu foregoes much emphasis on social concern other than the catastrophe that was the Brazilian military dictatorship, yet is able to conjure an adequate socio-cultural background to convey contexts for interpreting song and aspects of the Brazilian experience. Her fine work focuses mostly on recorded output dating from 1968 to 1972, a period gripped by the particularly awful political fist of a right-wing military machine of real oppression. Again, readers must pay attention to the whole story: Veloso's poignant career was being shaped, as the...