Tropicália Truths: Interview with Christopher Dunn

Christopher Dunn: I first wish to thank all readers of BrazilMax who sent in these challenging and insightful questions about my recent book about the Tropicália.

BrazilMax reader: The contemporary state of Bahia seems to have a cultural policy reminiscent of that of the Getúlio Vargas regime. What was/is the relationship between the ACM apparatus [of politician Antonio Carlos Magalhães] and the leading figures of Tropicália?

Christopher Dunn: The leading figures of Tropicália in the musical realm have followed different trajectories in relation to local, regional, and national politics. Tom Zé, for example, has always maintained a resolutely critical stance in relation to the conservative political establishment, including the apparatus of Antonio Carlos Magalhães (ACM) in Bahia. Of all of the tropicalists, he has been the most supportive of the leftist Workers' Party (PT). Gal Costa, on the other hand, has publicly supported ACM, most notably during his recent political troubles. Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil are generally more centrist in terms of party politics and their relationship with ACM has been more ambiguous. Liv Sovik, whose work on Tropicália and Brazilian culture is very insightful, has an essay titled "Globalizing Caetano Veloso" published in “Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization,” an edited volume that I organized with Charles Perrone. In this essay she refers to one of Caetano's classic statements to the effect that ACM is the "Caymmi do mal." In other words, ACM might be regarded as a sort of evil twin of Caymmi. As she explains in an endnote, Dorival Caymmi is the great "bard of a now classical vision of Bahian folk culture" forged primarily in the forties and fifties. ACM is the leader of a powerful political machine built during the years of authoritarian rule in Brazil who has frequently appropriated Bahian cultural manifestations to promote an idyllic, non-conflictual vision of regional culture. She also notes that ACM bears a certain resemblance to Caymmi as a white-haired eminence. In this statement, Caetano is clearly critiquing ACM as a paternalist autocrat, yet also links him in ironic fashion to a beloved and consecrated cultural figure who evokes the Bahia of yore. In the sixties, the tropicalists had little patience for this idyllic view of Bahian folk culture, although they loved and admired the work of Caymmi. As Sovik notes, Caetano has gained considerable cultural power in the intervening years and is frequently associated in the Brazilian press with the cultural and political status quo, including the political machine of ACM, which, by the way, has begun to disintegrate. Earlier this year, however, Caetano denounced ACM, arguing that any association between the two was "offensive."

BrazilMax reader: Caetano Veloso seems to have become a sort of Brazilian Chairman Mao. No matter what, somebody offers a readymade Caetano quote. If one isn't available, some journalist goes out to interview Caetano about the latest events. Isn't Caetano overexposed? Does he really have that much to say? Shouldn't Brazil be looking further afield for incisive opinion makers?

Christopher Dunn: In recent years the most trenchant critic of Caetano Veloso is Gilberto Vasconcellos, who wrote a devastating critique of Veloso's memoirs, “Verdade Tropical”, for the Folha de São Paulo. In this article he accuses Veloso of advancing a self-serving and politically conservative cultural agenda that is allied with the neo-liberal politics of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. He sarcastically quips that Caetano wrote his memoirs "with an eye on a place in the Brazilian Academy of Letters." Vasconcellos would likely subscribe to your characterization of Caetano as a "sort of Brazilian Chairman Mao." He does have considerable cultural capital, but that he is not as powerful as you suggest. Brazil has a broad range of opinion makers, many of whom have taken Caetano to task on a variety of issues. That being said, I also think that Caetano has interesting and important things to say about Brazil even though I don't always agree with him. Since writing this book, I have become interested in understanding Caetano Veloso as a public intellectual. By this I don't mean to suggest that his statements are always incisive and on-the-mark, but rather, that he has participated over many years in a broad range of debates relating to Brazilian culture and society, his opinions are often informed, and vast numbers of people care about what he says. As a citizen and resident of the United States, whose opinion-makers are so often technocratic "experts" (i.e. policy wonks, talking heads, and outright war-mongers), I rather admire that an artist like Caetano Veloso been able to consistently intervene in public debates. This would be nearly impossible in the United States where the public forum is so segmented that it inevitably privileges the specific knowledge of the expert who knows one tree to the very core but is incapable of seeing the forest.

BrazilMax reader: Foreigners sometimes seem more enthralled with Tom Zé than Brazilians. Besides the David Byrne connection, what's up?

Christopher Dunn: In 1968, Tom Zé enjoyed considerable popular success and acclaim in Brazil as the composer and performer of the hit song "São São Paulo" which received first prize at the Festival of Brazilian Popular Music of TV Record. He subsequently had a hit with "Jeitinho dela" in 1970 while Veloso and Gil were in exile. In the following years, however, he pursued the more experimental dimensions of the tropicalist project culminating in the brilliant album “Estudando o Samba” from 1975. Over the years, his unique penchant for fusing of northeastern popular tradition, vanguardist experimentation, and pop sensibility produced extremely inventive and original music, but also restricted his audience to a rarified group of fellow artists, intellectuals, and cognoscente primarily within the university circuit. He lost a mass audience but continued to inspire and influence an emerging generation of São Paulo-based artists such as Itamar Assumpção and Arrigo Barnabé. He also developed a productive relationship with the Concrete poets, especially Augusto de Campos, and composers of the Brazilian avantgarde music scene. By the 1980s, however, the kind of experimental pop that he was producing was not in vogue. He went through a period in which he even contemplated giving up music altogether and moving back to his hometown of Irará, Bahia to work in a family-run business. Enter David Byrne in 1986 who found by chance his record “Estudando o Samba” and recognized a kindred spirit. Byrne later produced a highly acclaimed compilation of Tom Zé's work from the 1970s for his Luaka Bop label and Tom Zé's career was revived. In the last decade Tom Zé has gone on to produce the most extraordinary work of his career. Anyone who has witnessed a Tom Zé concert can attest to his performative energy, startling creativity, and sheer brilliance. His last two recordings, Com “Defeito de Fabricação” and “Jogos de Armar” are beautiful, inventive, and politically astute. In the U.S. his influence goes beyond the David Byrne connection. In 1999 he toured with the band Tortoise. Several groups associated with the "post-rock" trend recorded remixes of songs from Defeito. His stature in Brazil has also grown considerably in the last ten years. In 1999 he energized an audience of ten thousand youths at the Recife Pro-Rock Festival who didn't even associate him with the tropicalist movement of the 1960s. He is currently more active than ever in Brazil.

BrazilMax reader: Could Tropicália have happened without the Mutantes? What do you think of the belated Mutantes wave in the United States in the 1990s?

Christopher Dunn: I think that Tropicália would have still happened without the Mutantes, but perhaps it wouldn't have been as interesting and inventive musically. There were other good rock groups and session artists who were active during that time. In fact, Caetano's and Tom Zé's solo albums actually feature other rock groups like Os Brazões, Os Versáteis, and the Argentine band Os Beat Boys who backed up Veloso on his famous anthem "Alegria, alegria." Still, the Mutantes records from ‘68, ‘69, and ‘70 are gems that far exceeded the kind of rock being produced in Brazil at that time. In this sense, their contribution was fundamental to the entire project of rethinking Brazilian popular music in relation to the emerging international rock scene. I was fascinated by the recent Mutantes vogue in the States. These Brazilian "waves" always have a flavor-of-the-month quality to them, but I still think that some musicians and listeners in the U.S. really engaged the Mutantes. The vogue has passed but I think that they have been established within the larger canon of international rock. John Harvey has a wonderful essay about the Mutantes phenomenon in the U.S. called "Cannibals, Mutants, and Hipsters," which is also featured in Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization. In this article, Harvey notes that the Mutantes "played with the Third World time-lag stereotype" in their humorous and ironic cannibalization of sixties rock and pop. With the commercialization of the "alternative" rock scene in the 1990s, some of the more adventurous musicians - the "hipsters" - began to appropriate, cite, and sample sounds from other traditions. Artists such as Beck were drawn to the sort of de-centered, lo-fi pastiches and parodies produced by the Mutantes in the late sixties. The Brazilian critic Hermano Vianna also wrote an interesting article for the Folha de São Paulo about the Tropicália phenomenon in the U.S. He suggested that Tropicália has not been received abroad as an exotic curio of world music. Instead, as Vianna notes, it was "celebrated as if it were a vanguard school within the long history of rock or international pop music." Of course, some of the most interesting aspects of Tropicália got lost in translation, but I would endorse Vianna's suggestion that the belated Tropicalist vogue abroad represented an admittedly limited, but still significant transformation in the way that Brazilian music is received in the U.S. By the way, there is an excellent book by Carlos Calado called “A Divina Comédia dos Mutantes,” which is slated for publication in English sometime next year.

BrazilMax reader: How important was João Gilberto to Tropicália?

Christopher Dunn: The short answer is that he was extremely important. A longer answer can be found in Augusto de Campos's “Balanço da Bossa,” Veloso's “Verdade Tropical” and in the first and second chapters of my book. I'll attempt something more modest here. The Bahian musicians who would later lead the tropicalist movement were teenagers in the late 1950s when the bossa nova emerged as an expression of a new Brazilian modernity related in many ways to the develomentalist logic of the democratic-populist government of Juscelino Kubitschek. The federal capital Brasília stands today as a monument to this optimistic period of high modernism. The Bahian group reached adulthood in the early sixties as bossa nova was achieving critical acclaim and popularity abroad. The Carnegie Hall concert of 1962 and João Gilberto's massively popular collaboration with Stan Getz released in 1964 are emblematic of this moment. Jobim's "Girl from Ipanema," recorded by João Gilberto's wife, Astrud, soared to the top of the Billboard pop charts. Yet at the same time, some young middle-class artists who had been inspired by bossa nova worried that it was too bourgeois and disconnected from the social reality of the Brazilian people. Of course, the military coup of ‘64 contributed to this sense of urgency regarding the role of culture in progressive politics. These artists began to explore rural folk music and roots samba while also advancing a critique of social inequality. David Treece has a great article with the witty title "Guns and Roses" (Popular Music, 1997) about bossa nova's trajectory from the late fifties to the late sixties. At the same time singers like Elis Regina and combos like the Zimbo Trio were developing a jazz-bossa sound that departed from the quite intimacy of João Gilberto's early bossa nova. Caetano admired the work of his musical colleagues but ultimately felt that it was mediocre in comparison with João Gilberto's music. His first album with Gal Costa “Domingo” was almost a throwback to the late fifties bossa nova sound. The early work of Gilberto Gil, on the other hand, was much more in line with the post-bossa music of social protest. For Caetano Veloso, João Gilberto was the supreme example of an artist who had deeply engaged the tradition of Brazilian song yet also embraced "musical modernity" - especially West Coast Jazz - to create something entirely new. In a famous roundtable discussion from 1966, Veloso argued that it was necessary to return to the "linha evolutiva" of Brazilian popular music. In other words, MPB needed to evolve and be open to new trends, instead of closing in on itself for the sake of some narrow understanding of cultural authenticity. For Veloso, this "retaking of the evolutionary line" would ultimately lead to Tropicália, which sounded like the antithesis of early bossa nova, but was actually deeply informed by its attitude toward international musical modernity.

BrazilMax reader: Who are today's "herdeiros" of Tropicália?

Christopher Dunn: Many contemporary Brazilian artists claim the legacy of Tropicália, yet are also intent on establishing their independence from it, which is healthy and necessary. I argue in the last chapter of my book that the real "herdeiros" of Tropicália are the artists associated with the mangue beat movement in Recife during the 1990s. I am thinking particularly of Chico Science & Nação Zumbi, whose combination of sonic experimentation, pop appeal, and deep engagement with local musical cultures recalled the tropicalist project of the late sixties. The band's successful fusing of maracatú, ciranda, and embolada with funk, heavy metal, and drum 'n' bass has clear affinities with the tropicalists hybrid musical aesthetic. CS&NZ were also at the center of a self-reflexive "movement" complete with a manifesto that suggested affinities with Tropicália, the counterculture, and Afro-Diasporic cultures.

BrazilMax reader: People sometimes suggest that Glauber Rocha ran parallel to Tropicália in cinema. What do you think? Are there any figures in the visual arts that you can cite as Tropicália fellow travelers?

Christopher Dunn: Tropicália was a dialogic phenomenon in the sense that it involved fruitful cultural and theoretical exchanges among artists working in several different fields, even though it only came together as a formal movement in popular music. In my book I dedicate about ten pages exploring what I call "tropicalist convergences." The very term "Tropicália" first appeared as the name of an installation created by the conceptual artist Hélio Oiticica in 1967. At the suggestion of filmmaker Luiz Carlos Barreto, Caetano Veloso later used the term to name the song-manifesto of the tropicalist movement. During this period, Veloso also composed a song titled "Lindonéia" which was directly inspired by a painting by Rubens Gerchman. These pieces are reproduced in color plates in my book. Glauber Rocha's “Terra em transe” (1967), a startling allegory of the ascension of authoritarianism and the crisis of the left-wing intelligentsia, had a profound impact on the musicians that would go on to lead the tropicalist movement. Caetano Veloso has even claimed that "all of that Tropicália thing was formulated inside me on the day that I saw ‘Terra em transe.’" I wouldn't call it a tropicalist film, however, since its aesthetic and sensibility are so typical of the high-minded seriousness and anti-commercialism of Cinema Novo. Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's “Macunaíma” and Rogério Sganzerla's “Bandido da luz vermelha,” both from 1969, are much closer to the tropicalist aesthetic. In theater, the tropicalist sensibility was manifest in Teatro Oficina's pathbreaking staging of “O rei da vela,” Oswald de Andrade's farce written in 1933. There was even a novel written by José Agrippino de Paula in 1967 called “Panamérica,” which is sometimes understood as a "tropicalist novel."

BrazilMax reader: Was there a formal link or kindred relationship between Bahia-rooted Tropicália and things that were happening elsewhere like the Teatro Opinião, Chico Buarque, etc.?

Christopher Dunn: The Teatro Opinião was associated with Augusto Boal, Oduvaldo Vianna Filho, Gianfrancesco Guarnieri and other dramatists of the left-wing "nationalist-participant" current in Brazilian culture during the 1960s. The Opinião Show was opened in late 1964 and is often cited as the first organized cultural response to the military coup. In 1965 Caetano Veloso's sister Maria Bethânia was invited to replace Nara Leão in the Show Opinião. At the time, the Bahian group (Veloso, Gil, Gal Costa, Tom Zé) were sympathetic to the Opinião project, yet their divergences with Boal would become patently clear by the end of the decade. In the realm of theater, the tropicalists were more allied with José Celso Martinez Corrêa and his Teatro Oficina. The tropicalists' relationship with Chico Buarque was much more complex. They all greatly admired Chico, but generally regarded his music as too tradition-bound and well behaved. Like many other left-wing nationalist artists of MPB, Chico was dismayed by the noisy and anarchic project of the tropicalists. In the early seventies, after they all returned from exile, Chico and the tropicalists would make amends and even composed and performed together. To this day, Veloso still likes to say that their conflict with Chico in the late sixties was largely a product of media hype. I would still argue that there were indeed serious differences in their respective musical projects. This was a period of intense political and cultural conflicts within the left itself and for a while Chico and the tropicalists were definitely at odds.

BrazilMax reader: Was there anything akin to Tropicália anywhere in Spanish-speaking Latin America? If so, was there any dialogue with the Brazilians?

Christopher Dunn: As far as I know there was no comparable cultural movement in Spanish America during that time. The Brazilian artists of this period were generally more engaged in developments in the U.S. and Europe than in ongoing developments in Latin America. However, as Roberto Schwarz has noted, they were indeed interested in the continental implications of their project and occasionally employed the discourse of 'latinoamericanidad'. The best example of this is the song "Soy loco por tí, América" (Capinan-Gil) with lyrics in both Spanish and Portuguese.

BrazilMax reader: What's your favorite line from a Tropicália song?

Christopher Dunn: My favorite line is "brutalidade jardim" which is why I chose it for the title of my book! The line appears at the end of a spoken interlude in the song-manifesto "Geléia Geral” recorded by Gilberto Gil. The lyricist of the song, Torquato Neto took the phrase from the vanguardist novel, Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar (1924) by Oswald de Andrade, who was something of a patron saint for the tropicalists. The phrase telegraphically captures the essential ambiguity of Tropicália, which often expressed fascination with the discourse of Brazil-as-tropical-paradise, but also dismantled it with great irony and insight.