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  • Tropicália Rex: Música popular e cultura brasileira by Liv Sovik
  • Elisabeth Blin
liv sovik. Tropicália Rex: Música popular e cultura brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Mauad, 2018. ISBN: 978-85-7478-923-1. 168 pp.

Tropicália Rex is a collection of nine pieces on one of the most seminal episodes of Brazilian culture: the Tropicália movement. Written between 1998 and 2018 by Liv Sovik, professor of communications at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, its seven essays and two interviews trace the historical impact of Tropicália, with a special emphasis given to Caetano Veloso (b. 1944), one of its founders and an icon of Brazilian popular music since 1967.

Sovik also uses Tropicália as an avenue for understanding Brazil's political and musical culture from the 1960s to the 1990s and onward into the twenty-first century: Tropicália was not only an important event in cultural history; it continues to be a lens through which to examine Brazil. A social scientist who carries out close readings of elements of pop music history, she explains the movement's influence on a large scale by placing Tropicália at the center of a postcolonial and postmodern reevaluation that starts with the question: "Why Tropicália again?" The answer comes at the very beginning of the book: because "Tropicália is a monument, a sacred cow, a dinosaur of the 1960s which has been useful to understand culture and power in contemporary society" (11).

The title Tropicália Rex is also an unexpected reference (in the Tropicália style) to T. Rex, or Tyrannosaurus Rex, the British rock band of the 1970s. Sovik demonstrates here a taste for mixing academic analysis and popular mass-culture references, and her intellectual analysis can be read as an attentive appraisal of the "pains and joys of sung Brazilianness," writes Eneida Leal Cunha in the preface. Four of the nine essays focus on Caetano Veloso's compositions (in particular, on Recanto, recorded with Gal Costa in 2011) and on his presence in Brazilian culture, which Sovik has been monitoring for the past three decades. For Cunha, her interest in Veloso is not that of a specialist (or even, exactly, a fan); rather, it arises from the fact that Veloso belongs to the "noble lineage of the sensitive heirs to the mansion house," like Joaquim Nabuco and Gilberto Freyre, who are also present in these essays, white men who share the sensibility nurtured in the historic and urban slave quarters of Brazil, or in Sovik's terms, "who negotiate their whiteness with the cultural authority of 'the people,' of the poor and Black majority" (9).

Quoting artists and thinkers as eclectic as French actress Isabelle Huppert, Brazilian musician and critic José Miguel Wisnik, and Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall, Liv Sovik draws here a postcolonial and postmodern portrait of Tropicália in its relevance to past and recent Brazilian political context and global cultural economy, its ironic tone, and the durability of its interpretation of Brazil. She refers, for example, to the [End Page 125] impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and to a political climate that has been compared by Brazil's left wing and students to the military putsch of 1964 and the dictatorship that followed.

This pleasant and deceptively small book, 165 pages of in-depth commentaries and astute analytical views, will bring poetic delight to Tropicália fans and neophytes of Brazilian music alike, with a rich combination of historical and philosophical references. Sovik gives us an intimate view on the special link between Gal and Caetano, Tropicália and bossa nova, and also the relationships, both personal and cultural, that build legendary art movements.

Elisabeth Blin
University of Arizona
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