Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil

Caetano Veloso (New York: Alfred Knopf, $26)

Marcus Boon

(This review originally appeared in The Wire)

Tropical Truth is the long awaited translation of Brazilian Música Popular Brasiliera (MPB) singer Caetano Veloso’s autobiography – although Veloso himself resists this word, noting that the real subject of his book is the history of tropicália, the late sixties explosion of Brazilian avant rock by figures like Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes and Tom Ze.  The time of tropicália, 1967-1972, also spans a key period of Veloso’s own career, from his self-titled 1967 LP, which featured songs like “Tropicália” and “Superbacana”, to his marvelous, still under-appreciated 1972 record Araça Azul, with its extraordinary mix of musique concrète, Brazilian regional folk-song, heavy metal and sweet, surrealist pop. 

Tropicália, which was basically ignored outside of Brazil at the time, became internationally known in the 1990s, through a series of Brazilian CD reissues distributed by outlets such as Chicago’s Dusty Groove, and through the endorsement of musicians like Beck and Tortoise (who supported Tom Ze on his recent American tours), seeking a way out of alt-rock’s narcissistic fixation on replaying the history of Anglo-American rock.  With the publication of Veloso’s book and Christopher Dunn’s dense but rewarding Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture (2001), Anglo readers and listeners are now able to get a picture of the extraordinary musical renaissance that took place in Sao Paolo, Rio and Salvador in the late 1960s.

Veloso gives a blow by blow account of the evolution of tropicália, whose origin he situates in bossa nova rather than rock.  Veloso’s account of bossa nova (which should be read alongside Ruy Castro’s chatty but excellent Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World, published in translation last year) is in itself fascinating, and a salutary slap in the face to those who continue to see bossa as international lounge music, or a commercial dilution of regional Brazilian music.  In his homage to the godlike Joao Gilberto, he locates bossa nova as an intensification of certain rhythmic and melodic elements within samba that expose the core of the music in a novel way.  At the same time, tropicália emerges out of a complex negotiation of American popular music within a Brazilian context – rock’n’roll was at times something to be resisted in the name of certain admirable elements of Brazilian musical culture, at other times it is to be used against other less desirable elements in this same culture. 

What is striking is how – paralleling the Velvet Underground at Warhol’s soirées in New York, or the Grateful Dead at Kesey’s acid tests in San Francisco, or for that matter, early Pink Floyd gigs in the UK – tropicália evolved out of a multimedia experience in which music was only one element.  Cinema, in particular Jean-Luc Goddard’s critical exploration of Hollywood b-movies, and Cinema Novo giant Glauber Rocher (whose Land in Anguish announced for Veloso “the death of populism” as a cultural and political force for the Brazilian left) emerges as key to the tropicália style.  The word tropicália itself came from an art installation by Brazilian visual artist Hélio Oiticica.  Many of the tropicalistas moves were initially rehearsed as part of theater performances or for television shows.  Brazilian TV in the mid-1960s sounds like some kind of strange utopia, with its flurry of bossa nova shows, song contests, and dadaist pop shows regularly featuring people like Veloso, his sister Maria Bethania, the wonderful chanteuse Nara Leao, Gil, Elis Regina, and just about anyone else in MPB that is interesting.

Then there’s literature, notably Brazilian concrète poets such as Augusto de Campos, and the classical music avant-garde, from Ives to Webern and Scelsi, who are also namechecked.  The movement’s glory days in 1968-9 are chronicled, followed by its brutal repression by the Brazilian military dictatorship, Gil and Veloso’s imprisonment and Veloso’s exile, followed by his return in the 1970s to a very different Brazil.  Veloso ponders the disappointing fate of tropicália’s brief rapprochement between avant and popular culture in the 1960s: a return for the most part to MPBusiness as usual: “producing banal songs to compete in the market.”  Veloso sees a connection between the tropicalistas and the techno generation, who (according to his friend Arto Lindsay) listen to nothing but avant sounds, seeing in them an “embryonic minority” who may be able to overcome “unpopular music’s failure with the public at large.” The danger is that in doing this, they risk turning it into a series of banalities.  Veloso himself says he prefers the old school avant garde, although interestingly, the Brazilian examples of the new school avant garde he praises, Arnaldo Antunes, Carlinhos Brown and Chico Science, are precisely the kind of avant-pop mutants, who, wonderful as they are, could easily end up in a car or liquor ad next year.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that has seen Veloso perform live, or has spent some time going through his lyrics, that Tropical Truth is one of the most eloquent books written by a popular musician.  Veloso’s style may be a bit much for Anglo readers for whom the heart and intellect must remain eternally at war.  Sometimes reading Tropical Truth I felt that I was eavesdropping on a private conversation.  Key figures like Gilberto Gil get no real introduction, even in terms of anecdotes of first meetings, and opinions and judgments are made on a cast of characters and subjects that most Anglo readers will know nothing about.  This makes for difficult reading at times.  Veloso casts himself as a reluctant but necessary ambassador, not for Brazil itself, but for certain currents in Brazilian culture that he treasures.  But in this sense, Tropical Truth is an extremely generous book – a message in a bottle concerning a musical movement that, however rooted in a specifically Brazilian context, remains big news for the rest of us.

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