Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil - Hardcover

Caetano Veloso

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037540788X ISBN 13: 9780375407888

Publisher: Knopf, 2002

Synopsis

Inadequately described as the John Lennon or the Bob Dylan of his country, Caetano Veloso has virtually personified Brazilian music for thirty-five years. Now, in his long-awaited memoir, he tells the heroic story of how, in the late sixties, he and a group of friends from the Northeastern state of Bahia created tropicalismo, the movement that shook Brazilian culture--and civic order--to its foundations and pushed a nation then on the margins of world politics and economics into the pop avant-garde.

Tropical Truth begins with a childhood in the Bahian hinterland, where Caetano (as Brazilians of all ages now call him) first heard not only the musical traditions of his own country and her Latin neighbors, but also the giants of postwar American song: Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Chet Baker, to name but a few. While teenagers in America would soon be enthralled by the primal (and commercial) beat of rock’n’roll, in Brazil it was bossa nova, that sublimely sophisticated music, that was to become the soundtrack of a generation. Inspired above all by bossa nova’s supreme master, João Gilberto, Caetano and his crew would set about creating a totally new sound. Tropicalismo would aim to “cannibalize” the extraordinary beauty and richness of Brazil’s musical past but at the same time to assimilate eclectically the most original elements of Anglo-American pop, an influence many rejected as yet another form of imperialism corrupting Brazil’s “authentic” character.

The birth of tropicalismo coincided with the wave of counterculture sweeping Western nations, but in Brazil that wave would hit the breakwaters of a brutal military junta. While supporting resistance to right-wing oppression (and the terrible social inequities it perpetuated) the tropicalistas nevertheless rejected the automatic connection to the Left and its unreflective nationalism, then the politics de rigueur of the artistic class. Their third way foresaw a Brazil open to free markets but likewise free in itself. It was a vision so subversive of both the political and musical status quo that before long Caetano faced imprisonment and was then forced into exile until the early seventies. But when he returned, it was in triumph: Brazil, no less than the state of her popular music, would never be the same.

Rich with the satisfactions of a novel, weaving the story of a country with that of its most idealistic generation, Tropical Truth recounts the odyssey of a brilliant constellation of artists: Caetano and his sister Maria Bethânia, the queen of Brazilian song; the black musical genius Gilberto Gil, Caetano's closest collaborator, with whom he was jailed and then banished; the great diva Gal Costa; the revolutionary filmmaker Glauber Rocha; the brothers de Campos, those luminaries of concrete poetry, who were among the tropicalistas’ learned mentors. Here is an unparalleled confluence of highbrow and pop, and with it the genesis of what has become one of the most wildly successful cultural exports ever produced by a nation other than the United States.
By turns erudite and playful, dreamlike and confessional, Tropical Truth is an utterly unexpected revelation of Brazil's most famous artist, one of the greatest popular composers of the past century.

About this title

About the Author

Caetano Veloso was born in 1942 in Santo Amaro da Purificaçâo, Bahia, Brazil. He lives in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro.

Reviews

The Brazilian singer/songwriter most highly regarded by the First World intelligentsia, Veloso makes his U.S. publishing debut with a rambling, extremely erudite memoir focusing on his role in the late-1960s musical happening known as Tropic lia. While on the surface, Tropic lia and Veloso (often compared to Bob Dylan) paralleled the U.S. counterculture of the 1960s, the author explains the multilayered context of Brazilian politics and art that made the movement unique. From the innocence of his middle-class youth in the northern state of Bahia, to his stays in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Veloso vividly re-creates his formative years, which were immersed in French new wave cinema, progressive English rock and Brazilian letters, particularly concrete poetry. "What we wanted to do would be... closer to Godard's films," he muses. "Masculin-feminin [sic], with... its adolescent sexuality-I saw it as one more moment in our daily lives in Sao Paulo." That Veloso is well-read is not in question-he cites everyone from Wittgenstein and Proust to Deleuze and Andrew Sullivan, while at the same time introducing non-Brazilian readers to an unknown canon of authors such as poet Augusto de Campos and essayist Oswald de Andrade. If there is any complaint with the book, it is that Veloso can get caught up in a maze of sometimes unconnected ideas that obscure his lucid descriptions of the intricacies of Brazilian music and its often equally literate stars. However, this is a must for Brazilian music fans, as well as anyone interested in how the modernist age played out in South America.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In the eyes of the world, Veloso defines, symbolizes, and spearheads contemporary Brazilian music, which continues to grow in popularity in the U.S and elsewhere. Many listeners of international pop music have only recently gotten acquainted with his work, but the truth is, he certainly is not new on the scene. Veloso's career began in the 1960s, and he is credited as one of the founders and shapers of tropicalismo, the Brazilian musical form that succeeded bossa nova. His book is not, strictly speaking, an autobiography but more a personal history of tropicalismo. Hailing from the Brazilian state of Bahia, Veloso had an arts inclination from childhood; even as he began to make a mark as a singer-songwriter, he maintained interests in writing and filmmaking. His account is important in understanding--from the inside--the socioeconomic and political as well as musical threads woven into tropicalismo. Unfortunately, Veloso's wordy and indirect prose style will limit the book's appeal to only the most devoted of his fans. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Singer/songwriter Veloso has virtually defined Brazilian music for the past 35 years. In his autobiography, first published in his native country, he exhibits a rare, vibrant erudition while tracing how in the 1960s he and his friends developed a post-bossa nova music and movement called tropicalismo (Tropic…lia in English). Inspired by an impressive range of Brazilian political and cultural figures, as well as Ezra Pound, John Cage, Anton Webern, and e.e. cummings, Veloso aimed to blend his country's traditions with the best foreign influences (including Anglo-American pop) to produce a whole new sound. Paralleling this aesthetic was his opposition to political oppression from the Left or Right, and Veloso's railing against the junta led to imprisonment and a brief exile. Although the book truly fascinates, especially in its thoughtful explanation of his music in relation to Brazilian culture and politics, the English edition curiously excludes much of Veloso's activity since the mid-1970s. While this is probably because his work over the past 25 years is best known to Brazilians, American readers would have benefited from the information. That shortcoming aside, Tropical Truth is highly recommended, though Veloso's relative obscurity here probably dictates that larger academic and public libraries will find it most useful. Christopher Dunn's recent Brutality Garden: Tropic…lia and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture covers much the same material, albeit in a more scholarly voice. [This book's publication coincides with the release of Veloso's new studio album, Livro, and a two-CD collection, Live in Bahia.-Ed.]-James E. Perone, Mount Union Coll., Alliance, O.
--James E. Perone, Mount Union Coll., Alliance, OH
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

In the year 2000, Brazil commemorated not only the passing of the century and the millennium but also the five hundred years since her discovery. To this date, then, is attached an accumulation of meaning not shared with any other country in the world. And the flood of omens let loose at this juncture is closely allied with the psychology of Brazil-a failed nation ashamed of having once been called "the country of the future." In fact, those past expectations have today taken the form of a resignation that underlies new frustrations, but the magnitude of Brazil's disillusionment reveals that-fortunately or not-we remain very far from a sensible realism.

As children we learned that Brazil was discovered by the Portuguese navigator Pedro Álvarez Cabral on April 22, 1500. All other American nations consider it enough to have been discovered all together by Christopher Columbus in 1492. It was only Brazil that had to be discovered later, separately. From the earliest age, as a child in Santo Amaro de Purificão in Bahia, I had to ask: "Why?"

They could have said, for example, that Columbus did not sail farther than the Caribbean islands and that the continent proper was only arrived at by the Portuguese eight years later; they could have told us that what Cabral discovered was the existence of South America, of which the Spaniards had not the slightest idea. But no: they say Brazil appeared as an independent continent, a huge island in the middle of the South Atlantic, a surprise for those Lusitanian sailors who, aiming to follow the coast of Africa to reach the Indies, sailed too far west. That such a vaguely defined event should be situated so precisely in the middle of the second millennium serves to force upon Brazilians a sense of themselves as a nation both unsubstantiated and exaggerated. The United States is a country without a name: America is the name of the continent where, among others, the states that were once English colonies united. Brazil is a name without a country. The English seem to have stolen the name of the continent and given it to the country they founded. The Portuguese seem not to have really founded a country, but managed to suggest that they landed in a part of America that was absolutely Other, and they called it Brazil.

The parallel with the United States is inevitable. If all the countries in the world today must measure themselves against "America," position themselves in relation to the American Empire, and if the other countries in America have to do so in an even more direct way–comparing their respective histories to that of their stronger and more fortunate brother–Brazil's case is even more acute, since the mirror image is more evident and the alienation more radical. Brazil is America's other giant, the other melting pot of races and cultures, the other promised land to European and Asian immigrants, the Other. The double, the shadow, the negative image of the great adventure of the New World. The sobriquet "sleeping giant," which was applied to the United States by Admiral Yamamoto, will be taken by any Brazilian as a reference to Brazil, and confused with the seemingly ominous words of the national anthem, "forever lying in a splendid cradle."

The papal bull that created the Treaty of Tordesillas, stipulating that lands yet to be discovered to the east of the agreed-upon meridian would belong to Portugal, leaving those to the west for Spain, explains the need for a new "discovery" and its being Portuguese. But in school we learn-and Pero Vaz de Caminha's beautiful letter reporting to the king about the voyage reassures us-that chance impelled Cabral's fleet on to the Brazilian coast. And that is how we came to have this immense floating world, the namesake of a utopian island imagined in the European Middle Ages, and perhaps less unreal than the latter, this enormous no-place with the burning name. (Brazil is usually assumed to be derived from "braza," burning coal or ember.)

In 1995, the Brazilian daily Folha de Sao Paulo bore this headline: "World Bank Report Indicates Brazil Is the Country with the Greatest Social and Economic Disparity in the World." The article reports that 51.3 percent of Brazilian income is concentrated in 10 percent of the population. The wealthiest 20 percent own 67.5 percent of Brazil, while the 20 percent who are poorest have only 2.1 percent. It was that way when I was a boy, and it is still that way. As we reached adolescence, my generation dreamed of inverting this brutal legacy.

In 1964, the military took power, motivated by the need to perpetuate those disparities that have proven to be the only way to make the Brazilian economy work (badly, needless to say) and, in the international arena, to defend the free market from the threat of the communist bloc (another American front of the Cold War). Students were either leftist or they would keep their mouths shut. Within the family or among one's circle of friends, there was no possibility of anyone's sanely disagreeing with a socialist ideology. The Right existed only to serve vested or unspeakable interests. Thus, the rallies "With God and for Freedom" organized by the "Catholic ladies" in support of the military coup appeared to us as the cynical, hypocritical gestures of evil people.

The coup, carried out in the name of the war against international communism, had put in power a man called Marshal Castelo Branco, a military officer of the so-called American line of thinking, meaning that he, unlike those called "Prussians" (who yearned to be centralizing nationalists), wanted to wipe out the Left and corruption in Brazil in order to turn it over to the modernity of the free market. Almost all of us were unaware of those nuances back then, and even if we had been, it would have changed nothing; we saw the coup simply as a decision to halt the redress of the horrible social inequities in Brazil and, simultaneously, to sustain North American supremacy in the hemisphere. The trend toward establishing a political art, sketched out in 1963 by the Centros Populares de Cultura (Centers for Popular Culture) of UNE (the National Students' Union) became widespread in all conventional artistic production, and, in spite of repression at the universities and censorship of the media, show business fell under the hegemony of the Left. In a highly politicized student environment, MPB (Mœsica Popular Brasileira) functioned as an arena for important decisions concerning Brazilian culture and even national sovereignty-and the media covered it accordingly. And it was at MPB's huge televised festivals that the world of the students interacted with that of the wide masses of TV spectators. (The latter were naturally much more numerous than the record buyers.) At these events, one could encounter the more or less conscious illusion that this was where the problems of national affirmation, social justice, and advances in modernization were to be resolved. Market questions, often the only decisive ones, did not seem noble enough to be included in heated discussions. Of course girls would scream "beautiful!" when Chico Buarque came onstage (and, with far less reason, started screaming the same at me), but the conversations and hostilities between the groups would focus as much on an artist's political attitude and his fidelity to national characteristics as on his harmonic or rhythmic daring. That it should be so was a luxury. As silly as this state of things could be, we were living in an exceptionally stimulating period for composers, singers, and musicians. And one thing rang true: the recognition of MPB's power among us. Everything was heightened by the instinctive rejection of the military dictatorship, which seemed to unify the whole of the artistic class around a common objective: to oppose it.

Elizabeth Bishop, the American poet who lived in Brazil between 1952 and 1970, praised the rallies organized in support of the military, explaining in letters to her friends in the United States that while those demonstrations had "originally been organized as anticommunist parades," they "were becoming victory marches-more than one million people marching in the rain!" And she concludes: "It was totally spontaneous, they could not all be rich and right-wing reactionaries." Today, when I read those words, I am even more astonished by the distortion of my own point of view at the time than by the author's (though, to be sure, hers was no less distorted). To discover her version of the coup d'état causes me some unease, but it is one more lesson, in these times when private virtues must be taken as the causes of public evils, to come to the realization that back then someone-a woman poet at that!-might thus sum up the military coup that sent to jail some of my finest schoolmates and professors: "A few brave generals and the governors of three important states got together and, after a difficult forty-eight hours, it was all over. The (favorable) reactions have been really popular, thank God." Apparently there was such a thing as right-wing good intentions.

In 1964 the Left consisted of every Brazilian who deserved to be one, and all human beings worthy of the name. Antônio Risério points out, in his essay about Bahia during the pre-1964 democratic period, that when the Austrian intellectual Otto Maria Carpeaux arrived in Brazil to escape Hitler, he had already noticed that here "almost everyone" was a leftist. My intention in this book is to tell and interpret the adventure of a creative impulse that emerged within Brazilian pop music in the second half of the sixties, whose protagonists-among them the narrator-wanted the freedom to move beyond the automatic ties with the Left and at the same time to account for the visceral rebellion against the abysmal disparities that tear a people asunder, even as that people remains singular an...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 037540788X
• ISBN 13: 9780375407888
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368
• Editor: Barbara Einzig