Tropic�lia

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For the song, see Tropicalia (song).
Tropic�lia
Stylistic origins Musical
Psychedelic rockpsychedelic popbossa novasambabai�oafox�frevofadobaroque pop
Art
Manifesto Antrop�fagopop artBrazilian concrete movement
Cultural origins Late 1960s, Southeast Region, Brazil
Derivative forms MPB,[1] p�s-tropicalismo
Other topics
Jovem Guardasamba rock
Tropic�lia (Portuguese pronunciation: [t?opi'ka??, t??pi'kalj?]), also known as
Tropicalismo ([t?opik?'lizmu, t??pika'-]), was a Brazilian artistic movement that
arose in the late 1960s. It encompassed art forms such as theatre, poetry, and
music. The movement was characterized by a combination of the popular and the
avant-garde, as well as a fusion of traditional Brazilian culture with foreign
influences.

Today, Tropic�lia is chiefly associated with the musical faction of the movement,
which merged Brazilian and African rhythms with pop-rock. Musicians who were part
of the movement include Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes, Gal Costa, Tom
Z�, and the poet/lyricist Torquato Neto, all of whom participated in the 1968 album
Tropic�lia: ou Panis et Circencis, which served as a musical manifesto.

Contents
1 Background
2 Musical movement
3 Influence
4 See also
5 Further reading
6 References
7 External links
Background
A dominant principle of Tropic�lia was antropofagia, a type of cultural cannibalism
that encouraged the conflation of disparate influences, out of which could be
created something unique. The idea was originally put forth by poet Oswald de
Andrade in his Manifesto Antrop�fago, published in 1928, and was developed further
by the tropicalistas in the 1960s.

Musical movement

Caetano Veloso performing at the third Popular Music Festival, October 21, 1967.
Brazilian National Archives.
The 1968 album Tropic�lia: ou Panis et Circencis is regarded as the musical
manifesto of the Tropic�lia movement. Although it was a collaborative project, the
main creative forces behind the album were Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. The
album experimented with unusual time signatures and unorthodox song structures, and
also mixed tradition with innovation. Politically, the album expressed criticism of
the coup d'�tat of 1964. Key artists of the movement include Os Mutantes, Gilberto
Gil, Gal Costa and Caetano Veloso.[citation needed] According to Maya Jaggi, "Gil
was partly inspired by Jorge Ben Jor, a Rio musician on the fringes of the
movement, who mixed urban samba and bossa nova with rhythm and blues, soul and
funk."[2]

The anarchistic, anti-authoritarian musical and lyrical expressions of the

Tropicalistas soon made them a target of censorship and repression by the military
junta that ruled Brazil in this period, as did the fact some of the collective,
including Veloso and Gil, also actively participated in anti-government
demonstrations. The Tropicalistas' passionate interest in the new wave of American
and British psychedelic music of the period - most notably the work of The Beatles
- also put them at odds with Marxist-influenced students on Brazil's left, whose
aesthetic agenda was strongly nationalistic, and oriented towards 'traditional'
Brazilian musical forms. This leftist faction vigorously rejected anything -
especially Tropicalismo - which they perceived as being tainted by the corrupting
influences of Western capitalist popular culture. The politico-artistic tensions
between leftist students and the Tropicalistas reached a climax in September 1968,
with Caetano Veloso's watershed performances at the third International Song
Festival, held in the auditorium of Rio's Catholic University, where the audience
not surprisingly included a large contingent of left-wing students.

Gal Costa in 1969. Brazilian National Archives.

Veloso had won a major song prize at the previous year's Festival, when he was
backed by an Argentinian rock band, and although his unconventional performance
caused some initial consternation, he managed to win over the crowd and was feted
as a new star of Brazilian popular music. By late 1968, however, Veloso was fully
immersed in the Tropicalia experiment, and his performances, which were expressly
intended as provocative art "happenings", caused a near-riot. In the first round of
the competition on 12 September, Veloso was initially greeted by enthusiastic
applause, but the mood quickly changed when the music started. Veloso came on
dressed in a bright green plastic tunic, festooned with electrical wires and
necklaces strung with animal teeth, and his backing band Os Mutantes were also
dressed in similarly outlandish attire. The ensemble launched into a barrage of
psychedelic music, played at high volume, and Veloso further outraged the students
with his overtly sexual stage movements. The crowd reacted angrily, shouting abuse
at the performers and booing loudly, and their fury was only exacerbated by the
surprise appearance of an American pop singer, John Dandurand, who joined Veloso on
stage and grunted incoherently into the microphone.

Os Mutantes, 1972. Brazilian National Archives.

After such a powerful negative reaction, Veloso was unsure whether to appear in the
second round on 15 September, but his manager convinced him to go on, and this
chaotic performance was recorded live and later released as a single. The students
in the audience began hissing as soon as Veloso's name was announced, even before
he had even taken the stage. Wearing the same green costume (minus the wires and
necklaces), Veloso came on with Os Mutantes amid a storm of catcalls, and the group
launched into a provocative new song Veloso had written for the occasion, "�
Proibido Proibir" ("It is Forbidden to Forbid"), the title of which he had taken
from a photo of a Parisian protest poster, which he had seen reproduced in a local
magazine. The booing and jeering was soon so loud that Veloso struggled to be heard
over the din, and he again deliberately taunted the leftists with his sexualised
stage actions. Within a short time the performers were being pelted with fruit,
vegetables, eggs and a rain of paper balls, and a section of the audience expressed
their disapproval by standing up and turning their backs to the performers,
prompting Os Mutantes to respond in kind by turning their backs on the audience.
Infuriated by the students' reaction, Veloso stopped singing and launched into a
furious improvised monologue, haranguing the students for their behaviour and
denouncing what he saw as their cultural conservatism. He was then joined by
Gilberto Gil, who came on stage to show his support for Veloso, and as the tumult
reached a crescendo, Veloso announced he was withdrawing from the competition, and
after deliberately finishing the song out of tune, the Tropicalistas defiantly
walked offstage, arm-in-arm.[3]

In February 1969, Veloso and Gil were arrested and imprisoned by the military
government over the political content of their work. After two months, the two were
released and subsequently forced to seek exile in London, where they lived and
resumed their musical careers until they were able to return to Brazil in 1972.

In 1993, Veloso and Gil released the album Tropic�lia 2, celebrating 25 years of
the movement and commemorating their earlier musical experiments.[4]

Influence

Carmen Miranda in 1950

The singer and actress Carmen Miranda ended up exposing to the world a caricature
and stereotyped vision of Brazil at the height of the good-neighbor policy between
the United States and South America.[5] Critics claimed that Miranda was only a
ridiculous and malicious vision of Brazilian culture.[6]

Otherwise the singer Clara Nunes was more representative about real tropicalism
that happened in Brazil. She made tour in Japan, Midem Festival (Cannes), Portugal,
Germany.[7]. Clara Nunes was a real brazilian syncretism woman artist in
tropicalism era. Her songs was based in historical brazil, slavery, the ordinary
life that was not simple but fill of complex detail that searching the beauty from
of unknown. Clara Nunes, was a result of tropcalism moviment (1967 - 1969). Somehow
post tropicalism helped create the social archetype to arise artists as Clara
Nunes.

Tropicalismo has been cited as an influence by rock musicians such as David Byrne,
Beck, The Bird and the Bee, Arto Lindsay, Devendra Banhart, El Guincho, Of
Montreal, and Nelly Furtado. In 1998, Beck released Mutations, the title of which
is a tribute to Os Mutantes. Its hit single, "Tropicalia", reached number 21 on the
Billboard Modern Rock singles chart.

In 2002 Caetano Veloso published an account of the Tropic�lia movement, Tropical

Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil. The 1999 compilation Tropic�lia
Essentials, featuring songs by Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Tom Z�, and
Os Mutantes, is an introduction to the style. Other compilations include The
Tropicalia Style (1996), Tropic�lia 30 Anos (1997), Tropicalia: Millennium (1999),
Tropicalia: Gold (2002), and Novo Millennium: Tropicalia (2005). Yet another
compilation, Tropicalia: A Brazilian Revolution In Sound, was released to acclaim
in 2006.[8]

A 2012 documentary film, Tropic�lia, was made on the subject and artists in
general; directed by Brazilian filmmaker Marcelo Machado, where Fernando Meirelles
served as one of its executive producers.[9]

See also
Lusotropicalism
Exoticism
Further reading
Paula, Jos� Agrippino. "PanAm�rica". 2001. Papagaio.
McGowan, Chris and Pessanha, Ricardo. "The Brazilian Sound: Samba, Bossa Nova and
the Popular Music of Brazil." Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998 ISBN 1-
56639-545-3
Dunn, Christopher. Brutality Garden: Tropic�lia and the Emergence of a Brazilian
Counterculture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8078-
4976-6
(in Italian) Mei, Giancarlo. Canto Latino: Origine, Evoluzione e Protagonisti della
Musica Popolare del Brasile. 2004. Stampa Alternativa-Nuovi Equilibri. Preface by
Sergio Bardotti and postface by Milton Nascimento.
References
Gildo De Stefano, Il popolo del samba. La vicenda e i protagonisti della storia
della brazilian popular music, Pr�face by Chico Buarque de Holanda, Introduction by
Gianni Min�, RAI Television Editions, Rome 2005, ISBN 8839713484
"Tropicalia". AllMusic. All Media Network. Retrieved November 7, 2015.
Jaggi, Maya (13 May 2006). "Blood on the Ground". The Guardian. Retrieved 16
October 2018.
Victoria Langland, "Il est Interdit d�Interdire: The Transnational Experience of
1968 in Brazil", Estudios Interdisciplinarios de Am�rica Latina y el Caribe, Vol.
17, No. 1 (2006)
B�hague, Gerard, Gerard. (Spring�Summer 2006). "Rap, Reggae, Rock, or Samba: The
Local and the Global in Brazilian Popular Music (1985�95)". Latin American Music
Review. 27 (1): 79�90. doi:10.1353/lat.2006.0021.
Carmen Miranda - Tropic�lia
[1] CARMEN MIRANDA: RIPE FOR IMITATION Indiana University
[2] Video Clara Nunes in Japan
Staff. "Tropicalia: A Brazilian Revolution In Sound". Metacritic. Retrieved 2008-
05-16.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1497880/
External links
The Best Tropicalia Albums
OBJETO SEMI-IDENTIFICADO NO PAIS DO FUTURO: Tropic�lia and post-tropicalismo in
Brasil (1967-1976) at R�dio Web MACBA
Leila Miccolis Brazilian Alternative Press Collection at the Special Collections
Division at