Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Every cultural complex has specific forms of consecration and adulation for its artistic luminaries. For Brazilian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso, perhaps the supreme moment of popularand official canonization came on February 20, 1998, as he surveyed a crowd of five thousand carnival celebrants in Salvador, Bahia,while hewas perched on top of a trio elétrico, a moving soundstage that transports electric dance bands through the city’s streets. Since the early 1970s, he has made annual guest appearances on trios elétricos on the morning of AshWednesday to perform his songs that have become standards of the Bahian carnival repertoire. This time, however, Veloso was there to receive the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the Federal University of Bahia for the ‘‘grandiosity of his oeuvre and his renowned wisdom.’’1 In the past, the university had awarded the title to famous Bahian artists like novelist Jorge Amado, composer Dorival Caymmi, and filmmaker Glauber Rocha, but this was the first time the title had been conferred in the streets during carnival. For the rector of the university, it was a democratic gesture: ‘‘We want to integrate the university intosociety.ForthisreasonweoptedtopayhomagetoCaetanointhestreets, together with the people celebrating carnival.’’ Despite some editorial grumbling that the ceremony made the university look ridiculous, the event was a public relations success for the institution and its honored guest, an artist who has been at the forefront of musical innovation and cultural transformation since the late 1960s. As the carnival ceremony would suggest, Veloso is an artist who enjoys mass popularity as well as critical acclaim among intellectuals . Veloso came to national attention together with Gilberto Gil, his friend and colleague from the Universityof Bahia, as leading figures of Tropicália, a short-lived but high-impact cultural movement that coalesced in 1968. They worked collectively with other artists from Salvador, including vocalist Gal Costa, singer-songwriter Tom Zé, and poets Torquato Neto and José Carlos Capinan.Theso-calledgrupobaiano(Bahiangroup)hadmigratedtoSãoPaulo, where they forged a dynamic artistic relationship with several composers of the vanguard music scene, most notably Rogério Duprat and the innovative rock band Os Mutantes (The Mutants).This alliance between musicians from Bahia, a primary locus of Afro-Brazilian expressive culture, and from São Paulo, the largest, most industrialized Brazilian city, proved to be a potent combinationandhashadalastingeffectonBrazilianpopularmusicandother arts.AlthoughTropicáliacoalescedasaformalmovementonlyintherealmof popular music, it was a cultural phenomenon manifest in film, theater,visual arts, and literature. The dialogic impulse behind Tropicália would generate an extraordinary flourish of artistic innovation during a period of political and cultural conflict in Brazil. The year of 1968 has special historic resonance for several nations around theworld. Of course, significant events occurred on both sides of 1968, but in several national contexts the year serves as a generational watershed. In the United States, 1968 marked a public turning point against the Vietnam War, widespread antiwar student protests, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the emergence of the Black Power movement . In France, radical Maoist students and workers forged a brief and ultimately failed alliance against the postwar Gaullist State.The Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, putting an end to the democratic and liberationist aspirationsofthePragueSpringmovement .InMexicoCity,studentprotestsagainst highunemploymentandrepressionofpoliticaldissentendedwhenhundreds of unarmed demonstrators were massacred byarmyand police detachments. The symbolic densityof 1968 is particularlyevident in Brazil, especially for artists, intellectuals, students,workers, civilian politicians, and activists who opposed a right-wing military regime that had seized power in 1964. In 1968, broad sectors of civil society coalesced in opposition to the regime. Factory workers in São Paulo and Minas Gerais carried out the first strikes since the inceptionofmilitaryrule.Leftiststudentsengagedinpitchedbattleswiththe military police and ultrarightist allies in the universities. Meanwhile, more radicalized groups of the opposition went underground and initiated armed struggle against the regime. The government responded to civil protest and incipient armed resistance with a decree known as the Fifth Institutional Act (ai-5), which outlawed political opposition, purged and temporarily closed congress, suspended habeas corpus, established blanket censorship over the press, and effectively ended the protest movement.Thereafter, opposition to the regime would be expressed primarily through disparate movements of armed resistance, which were ultimately liquidated. The generation reach2 introduction ing adulthood at that time would subsequently be called the ‘‘geração ai-5,’’ an emblematic reference to this draconian decree that initiated a period of intense repression.2 Cultural conflicts also came to...