Tropicália

For the song, see Tropicalia (Beck song).

Tropicália, also known as Tropicalismo, is a Brazilian art movement that arose in the late 1960s and encompassed theatre, poetry, and music, among other forms. Came under the influence of avant-garde artistic trends and pop culture and foreign (such as pop-rock and concreteness); mixed traditional manifestations of Brazilian culture to radical aesthetic innovations. Tropicália was influenced by poesia concreta (concrete poetry), a genre of Brazilian avant-garde poetry embodied in the works of Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, among a few others. However, Tropicália is associated almost exclusively with the musical expression movement, both in Brazil and internationally, which arose from the fusion of several musical genres, like Brazilian and African rhythms and rock and roll. The movement is mainly expressed in music (whose greatest representatives were Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Torquato Neto, Os Mutantes and Tom Zé); artistic events as diverse as the arts (emphasis on the figure of Hélio Oiticica), film (the movement has been influenced and influenced the new film by Glauber Rocha) and the Brazilian theater (especially in lawless parts of José Celso Martinez Corrêa). One of the greatest examples of the Tropicalia movement was one of the songs by Caetano Veloso, called exactly "Tropicalia."

History

Tropicália was not only a hippie movement at its inception. It also took form in the visual arts scene of 1960s Brazil, by the hands of the artists Hélio Oiticica, Emerson Adriano Catarina, Lygia Clark, Rogério Duprat, and Antonio Dias. The name Tropicália came from a Hélio Oiticica art installation of the same name. It is important to note that one of the cultural constructs of the Tropicália movement was antropofagia, or the cultural and musical cannibalism of all societies, taking in influences from all genres and concocting something unique. The concept of antropofagia, as embraced by the Tropicália movement, was created by poet Oswald de Andrade in his Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto), published in 1928.

Owing its roots to hippie tolerance and innovation, the arrival of Tropicália on the Brazilian music scene began in the 1960s. The 1968 collaboration album Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis is largely considered the musical manifesto of the movement, initially led by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. The two, along with other artists commonly associated with the movement, experimented with unusual time signatures and other means of unorthodox song structures. Politically, the album expressed revolt against the coup of 1964. Indeed, politically engaged lyrics and artistic forms of activism drove much of the movement following the coup of 1964, much like its contemporary Brazilian film movement, Cinema Novo.

Despite its success, the movement lasted few years; its influence on Brazilian music, however, was broad and far-reaching. Its initial leaders, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, were incarcerated by the military government over the political content of their work. After two months, Veloso and Gil were released and exiled to London by the military government, where they lived until 1972. "Others in the Tropicalismo movement were less fortunate; several underwent torture or were forced into 'psychiatric care'. One tropicalista, the lyricist and poet Torquato Neto, committed suicide after such treatment". Although Gil and Veloso were exiled from Brazil for four years, they were eventually able to continue their careers in Europe.

Despite being short-lived, the Tropicália movement would be honored later in 1985 when its 20 year legacy and Brazil's return to a democratic government coincided. In 1993, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, released the CD Tropicália 2 for celebrating 25 years of the movement and its importance to the Brazilian history, as sort of nostalgic remembrance of their earlier experiments. Actually, many years since its inception, Tropicália and its pioneers continue to be cited by musicians of the whole world as sources of musical creativity and inspiration. Irreverent, Tropicalia transformed the prevailing canon of taste, not only about the music and politics, but morals and behavior, body, gender and clothing. The hippie counterculture was assimilated with the adoption of the mode of long curly hair and outrageously colored clothes.

The movement, libertarian par excellence, lasted just over a year and ended up being repressed by the military government. His end began with the arrest of Gil and Caetano, in December 1968. The culture of Brazil, however, was marked forever by the discovery of modernity and the tropics. Both historians that it is normal Latin American Spanish, saying that Tropicalia is the Nueva Cancion in Brazil and Portugal.

influences

The influences of Tropicalism emerged in the context both intellectual and pop, becoming like a mixture of songs and poetry, fine arts and paintings, movies and TV shows. These include:

concrete poetry

Literary avant-garde movement that emerged in Brazil in the second half of the 50s. In 1958, the poet Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos and Decio Pignatari launched at number four Noigandres the journal, the manifesto entitled "Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry." The proposal was to question the traditional form of poetry in rhyme and metrics structured, decreeing the end of verse and suggested replacing it with new structures based on spatial arrangement of words in geometric alignments. Seeking a new way to convey the poetic expression, the Concrete will focus their concerns on the materiality of the word in its broadest sound (music) and graphic (visual). Concrete poetry rescues and radical proposals earlier formalists who traveled diffusely the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. The motto of Concrete is the badge of the Russian poet of the early twentieth century, Mayakovsky: "Without revolutionary form there is no revolutionary art." His main influences: Mallarmé, James Joyce, Mayakovsky, Souzândrade, Ezra Pound, ee cummings, João Cabral de Melo Neto and Oswald de Andrade.

young guard

The Young Guard, also known as the style and own group of singers and composers who made the program came at a time when music was struggling Brazilian bossa nova from a more conservative and protest songs. Acting as a translator national rock and roll, the Young Guard will win the general public, becoming the first mass phenomenon of pop culture in Brazil. His songs and electric guitars attract the attention of tropicalistas, strategically using their irreverence. The acceptance of "national pop" by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil - from a tip from Maria Bethania - was decisive for the movement.

Bossa nova

Initially influenced by jazz, bebop and cool jazz, Bossa Nova, with its international explosion in the early 60s, is the influential American music, asserting itself as a modern and universal national product. The beat was born in the sea is in Copacabana is thus a typical case of "cultural cannibalism" thought cannibalism by Oswald de Andrade.

0 comentáriosE is with eyes fixed on the Bossa Nova and the ear to the voice and guitar of Joao Gilberto, Caetano Veloso proposes that, in May 1966, the "resumption of the evolutionary line" of Brazilian music. The resumption of this evolutionary line made ​​by the young composer Baiano desaguaria, soon after, in Tropicalismo.

Influences

Tropicalismo been cited as an influence by rock musicians such as David Byrne, Beck, The Bird and the Bee, Kurt Cobain, Arto Lindsay, Devendra Banhart, El Guincho, Of Montreal and Nelly Furtado. In 1998, Beck released Mutations, the title of which is a tribute to one of Tropicalismo pioneers, 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 Tropicália movement, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil. The 1999 compilation Tropicália Essentials, featuring songs by Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Tom Zé, and Os Mutantes, is an introduction to the style. Other compilations include 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.

Further reading

• Paula, José Agrippino. "PanAmérica". 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: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture." Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8078-4976-6
• (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.

External links

• Article from PBS NewsHour on the impact of Tropicalismo and Caetano Veloso
• Perrone, Charles: From Noigandres to "Milagre da Alegria": The Concrete Poets and Contemporary Brazilian Popular Music, Latin American Music Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring - Summer, 1985), pp. 58–79. (clic on "Request Ticket" and then on "download").
• The Best Tropicalia Albums
• "Brazil, The Tropicalist Revolution" 2001 Documentary 52'
• OBJETO SEMI-IDENTIFICADO NO PAIS DO FUTURO: Tropicália and post-tropicalismo in Brasil (1967-1976) at Ràdio Web MACBA
• Leila Miccolis Brazilian Alternative Press Collection at the Special Collections Division at The University of Miami