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Rating: Year: 2006 - Genre: Tropicalismo
“There are many ways to make Brazilian music: I prefer them all!” Gilberto Gil during the time of “Tropicalia 2” in 1993.
Gilberto Gil, current Minister of Culture of the Brazilian government, in 1968, after two months in prison and a concert whose proceeds were used to pay for travel expenses, together with Caetano Veloso, was escorted to the airport by police authorities.
Destination: London. Destination: exile.
What crime had they committed?
GUILTY OF TROPICALISMO!
“Tropicalia,” recently released by Soul Jazz, accompanied by a booklet rich in information and images, can be considered an extract of the charges: 20 tracks, resounding and unequivocal, spread at the time with many others, which contributed to pinning the authors to their responsibilities: treason against traditional music, contamination damaging its purity, contagious euphoria, sound distortion.
What was termed Tropicalismo was a movement that gathered intellectuals, artists, musicians in the direction of openness to the stimuli that in those years arrived from the world, effectively representing a challenge to the dictatorial regime established in 1964 with a military coup. The collective album “Tropicália ou panis et circenses“ (1968) can be considered the musical manifesto of that movement, and the songs "Alegria, Alegria" by Veloso and "Domingo no Parque" by Gil, performed at the Sao Paulo music festival, are considered milestones.
The collection I recommend carefully draws from the incriminated repertoire of the main protagonists: Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes, Tom Zè, with a track by Jorge Ben.
And the first few minutes are enough to understand the nature of the crime: the sitar that rages in the opening track (Bat Macumba) performed by Gil and Veloso leaves no doubt about the authors' intentions in terms of contamination. Like the fuzzy guitars that appear in “Minha Menina,” a beat by Os Mutantes, complete with little choirs and hand clapping. And so on: isn't that an oud punctuating Gal Costa's “Tuareg,” treacherously immersed in an Arab scenario? And the limping advance of Alf8mega, with its funky bass and sudden bursts of little screams around the voice of a young and amused Veloso?
It's pop, after all. A Brazilian version of the attitudes that elsewhere, with other outcomes, musicians of various extractions and latitudes exhibited in those years. This is how unorthodox tonal combinations, unusual compositional solutions, and small sonic roughness are placed in these songs, with psychedelic marrying African suggestions, in a joyful and seemingly natural hybridization.
Thus, condemnation seems inevitable, while the evidence of such a complex crime is presented. I was not aware, for instance, of the atrocities of Os Mutantes, the trio composed of the Baptista brothers and vocalist Rita Lee: yet in the six songs present, these are evident. Like in “Ave Genghis Khan,” acidic and dreamy, a beat seasoned with lysergic keyboards and distorted guitars, over which the chorus blows its soft ode. And that Tom Zè, recently brought to greater visibility by David Byrne's Luaka Bop, isn't free of guilt either: is that a way to arrange a song, the way he does in “Jimmy, Renda-Se”? And the sequence of wrongdoings continues, with different and kaleidoscopic outcomes, without signs of repentance.
PROIBIDO PROIBIR
If the sentence of guilt turns out, following the gathered evidence, to be unappealable, equally indisputable is the coherence of the elements at our disposal with what sounds like a password (or disorder?) also reported on the CD cover: Proibido proibir.
Throughout the 20 tracks that comprise it, the spirit it evidently manifests snakes through the record. Refusing to repress the excessive inclination to unite in a single melting pot so many souls, (so distant) so many sounds (so incompatible) so much bubbling vastness of approaches and inspirations, the defendants acted in the awareness of committing a wrongdoing, applying their quixotic slogan to their music.
I listen to the song that closes the collection, the version of “Bat Macuba” by Os Mutantes, which begins in Africa and progresses into sonic pranks. And I am still unable to grasp how such fresh and fun music could have become, within one of the many black holes scattered throughout history (too often forgotten or unknown), the object of repression. A symbol of an unbridgeable gap between the arrogance of power and the need for freedom of a generation, not only of “artists”.
And I am also surprised to have used two words that I generally employ with great caution.
But these days, who knows why, power and freedom don't “sound” so rhetorical to me.
Happy... spring?
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