Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture

by Christopher Dunn

Overview

In the late 1960s, Brazilian artists forged a watershed cultural movement known as Tropicália. Music inspired by that movement is today enjoying considerable attention at home and abroad. Few new listeners, however, make the connection between this music and the circumstances surrounding its creation, the most violent and repressive days of the military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. With key manifestations in theater, cinema, visual arts, literature, and especially popular music, Tropicália dynamically articulated the conflicts and aspirations of a generation of young, urban Brazilians.

Focusing on a group of musicians from Bahia, an impoverished state in northeastern Brazil noted for its vibrant Afro-Brazilian culture, Christopher Dunn reveals how artists including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Tom Zé created this movement together with the musical and poetic vanguards of São Paulo, Brazil’s most modern and industrialized city. He shows how the tropicalists selectively appropriated and parodied cultural practices from Brazil and abroad in order to expose the fissure between their nation’s idealized image as a peaceful tropical “garden” and the daily brutality visited upon its citizens.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807849767
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	10/15/2001
Edition description:	1
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Christopher Dunn is associate professor of Brazilian literary and cultural studies at Tulane University. He is coeditor of Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization.

Read an Excerpt

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 popular and official canonization came on February 20, 1998, as he surveyed a crowd of five thousand carnival celebrants in Salvador, Bahia, while he was perched on top of a trio el‚trico, 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 el‚tricos on the morning of Ash Wednesday 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 into society. For this reason we opted to pay homage to Caetano in the streets, 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 University of Bahia, as leading figures of Tropic lia, 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 Z‚, and poets Torquato Neto and Jos‚ Carlos Capinan. The so-called grupo baiano (Bahian group) had migrated to Sao Paulo, where they forged a dynamic artistic relationship with several composers of the vanguard music scene, most notably Rog‚rio 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 Sao Paulo, the largest, most industrialized Brazilian city, proved to be a potent combination and has had a lasting effect on Brazilian popular music and other arts. Although Tropic lia coalesced as a formal movement only in the realm of popular music, it was a cultural phenomenon manifest in film, theater, visual arts, and literature. The dialogic impulse behind Tropic lia 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 the world. 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 aspirations of the Prague Spring movement. In Mexico City, student protests against high unemployment and repression of political dissent ended when hundreds of unarmed demonstrators were massacred by army and police detachments.

The symbolic density of 1968 is particularly evident 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 Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais carried out the first strikes since the inception of military rule. Leftist students engaged in pitched battles with the 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 reaching adulthood at that time would subsequently be called the "gera‡ao AI-5," an emblematic reference to this draconian decree that initiated a period of intense repression.[2]

Cultural conflicts also came to a head in 1968, primarily within a largely middle-class urban milieu that opposed military rule. Artists and intellectuals began to reevaluate the failures of earlier political and cultural projects that sought to transform Brazil into an equitable, just, and economically sovereign nation. Tropic lia was both a mournful critique of these defeats as well as an exuberant, if often ironic, celebration of Brazilian culture and its continuous permutations. As its name suggests, the movement referenced Brazil's tropical climate, which throughout history has been exalted for generating lush abundance or lamented for impeding economic development along the line of societies located in temperate climates. The tropicalists purposefully invoked stereotypical images of Brazil as a tropical paradise only to subvert them with pointed references to political violence and social misery. The juxtaposition of tropical plenitude and state repression is best captured in the phrase that serves as the title for this book, "brutality garden," which was taken from a key tropicalist song discussed in Chapter 3.

The musical manifestations of Tropic lia did not propose a new style or genre. Tropicalist music involved, instead, a pastiche of diverse styles, both new and old, national and international. On one level, tropicalist music might be understood as a rereading of the tradition of Brazilian popular song in light of international pop music and vanguard experimentation. In Brazil, the tropicalists elicited comparisons with their internationally famous contemporaries, the Beatles, a group that also created pop music in dialogue with art music as well as with local popular traditions. The tropicalists contributed decisively to the erosion of barriers between m£sica erudita, for a restricted audience of elite patrons, and m£sica popular, for the general public. Tropic lia was an exemplary instance of cultural hybridity that dismantled binaries that maintained neat distinctions between high and low, traditional and modern, national and international cultural production.[3]

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Abbreviations	xiii
	Introduction	1
Chapter 1	Poetry for Export: Modernity, Nationality, and Internationalism in Brazilian Culture	12
Chapter 2	Participation, Pop Music, and the Universal Sound	37
Chapter 3	The Tropicalist Moment	73
Chapter 4	In the Adverse Hour: Tropicalia Performed and Proscribed	122
Chapter 5	Tropicalia, Counterculture, and Afro-Diasporic Connections	160
Chapter 6	Traces of Tropicalia	188
	Notes	215
	Bibliography	235
	Discography	247
	Index	249

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“An impressive and thorough look at Brazil’s all too brief Tropicália movement that is also one of the best books on music to come out in years. Neither unconditionally devoted nor coldly analytical, the genius of Dunn’s text is that it is essentially a history of Brazil’s relationship with globalisation. . . . [Dunn’s] book captures both the beauty and insight of the movement itself.” — The Wire

“Brutality Garden is an exhaustive and exquisitely researched history of the tropicália movement. He links superbly the social, political, economic, and cultural debates in Brazil to the movement, situating the music in larger, intersecting spheres of intellectual, artistic, and governmental activity.” — Ethnomusicology

“Christopher Dunn has produced an enlightening and thorough account that should become a standard work on Brazilian culture in the second half of the twentieth century. . . . A provocative and significant book.” — Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe

“Intriguing. . . . [Dunn’s] translations of songs, as well as [his] descriptions of the political and cultural landscape of Brazil during these tumultuous times are especially vivid.” — Down Beat

“Dunn’s attractively produced book takes the reader through the history of Brazil’s cultural movement — known as Tropicália. . . . Born out of Brazil’s own domestic vicissitudes, popular music is perhaps its most successful and widely known international intervention.” — Foreign Affairs

“Dunn does a good job of minimizing postmodern terminology and maximizing delivery of the facts, clarifying the Tropicálists' goal of shattering Brazil’s self-propagated image as a 'garden.'” — Library Journal

“From a northern perspective, this book is a window opening an alternative version of our own past, a cultural history of a parallel and magical universe — a universe fully equal to our own, although with the heat turned way up. The creativity, danger, humor, politics and weirdness mirror and match our own ’60s and ’70s, but it’s all just a little different. The feeling is that of encountering one’s own history for the very first time — it’s all familiar and yet completely strange. The issues this movement dealt with — race, identity, high vs. low culture, North vs. South — are all issues we ourselves deal with every day. Here are clues to the puzzle that is our own identity — clues picked up in an alternative universe and brought back and decoded.” — David Byrne

“Brutality Garden is a wonderfully synthetic and knowledgeable account of one of the world’s most profoundly innovative (yet little-known) cultural movements — Tropicália.” — Robert Stam, New York University

Editorial Reviews

"Brutality Garden" is a wonderfully synthetic and knowledgeable account of one of the world's most profoundly innovative (yet little-known) cultural movements--Tropic lia. (Robert Stam, New York University)

Dunn does a good job of minimizing postmodern terminology and maximizing delivery of the facts, clarifying the Tropic lists' goal of shattering Brazil's self-propagated image as a 'garden.' ("Library Journal")

From a northern perspective, this book is a window opening an alternative version of our own past, a cultural history of a parallel and magical universe--a universe fully equal to our own, although with the heat turned way up. (David Byrne)

"Brutality Garden is a wonderfully synthetic and knowledgeable account of one of the world's most profoundly innovative (yet little-known) cultural movements--Tropiclia. (Robert Stam, New York University)

From the Publisher

Brutality Garden is a wonderfully synthetic and knowledgeable account of one of the world's most profoundly innovative (yet little-known) cultural movements—Tropicália.

Robert Stam

From a northern perspective, this book is a window opening an alternative version of our own past, a cultural history of a parallel and magical universe—a universe fully equal to our own, although with the heat turned way up.

David Byrne