Tropicália: like the sex of angels

Tropicália has become quite kewl among the smart folks in the US. Twenty-five years ago I brought some Gil, Caetano and Os Mutantes to give away. The tapes were never heard until first Caetano, then Gil, and now Os Mutantes made it big time. I can't quite understand how hip music gets popular in Brazil first.

I get a little bugged by how Americans fall in love with the notion they have of Brazil and other exoticcountries. Brazil is no paradise. There is poverty, there is racism! The country is 80% black, in some US statistics. Don't dare say that to a Brazilian. Color is relative, but even blacks talk baloney about blacks. This is a very complex country in all of its controversial, some times contrary notions stuck together like Siamese twins.

I'll be coming back to Tropicália. Not today, after fighting some health problemas. I don't want to take more that a minute of your reading time.

The motivation for this attempt to explain Tropicália within its context stems from the popularity of Tropicália now in the USA, and the apparent ignorance of talking heads of the dictatorships popping in South America during the 60s. I was watching a Bill Maher program, you know the really smart guy who is both Jewish and Catholic, the one whose humor has a mean strike overtone?

How funny. Bill Maher, Susan Sarandon, Noam Chomsky, my :wub: and a few other of the folks who were going to leave if the Idiot won in 2000 were talking about the US foreign policy. Not one mentioned a country in South America. In Brazil we found out about the plan to come by sea help the armed forces in case they could't force the vice-president out. When? In the 70s a journalist, Marcos de Sá Corrêa dug the information out at U of T in Austin.

Why do American people fall into any trap and believe anything the powers that be say? Was it World War II, was it the Red Scare, was it the brain washing of "Better dead than Red or the school drills, the Kennedy assassinations; what is it that makes American voters so apathetic? The bills, the commute, I know, I live in Santa Monica, California, where almost everything is really expensive.

Americans don't really get informed. They would rather wait to see if something happens or pay someone to get their opinion formed. In the age fo googling, this is idiotic.

Part one: Tropicália

Some bullet points:

--Tropicália is a blend or revisit of several musical genres, not necessarily Brazilian but representative of the taste of Brazilians of an era.

--many tropicalistas, like Gil and Caetano, Torquato and Tom Zé, Capinan were quite learned. It was their choice to dig inside the taste of the common folk, or adopt the sound of electric instruments than to follow the rules and regs of bossa-nova.

--The extreme left at the time Tropicália leaders were still in Brazil, 1967-68, weren't that crazy about the movement's aesthetic choices. These students and intellectuals detested anything that would make them seem to like something made in the USA. Amusingly enough, some hip kids still think "Yankee Go Home" is cute. The Mutantes, and Gil and Caetano got booed by these jerk-os. there is a recording of when caetano coldn't sing over the booing and he rants for over ten minute, I think, "Is this the youth who say the want to be in charge of the power?" "If you are in olitics the way yo uare in aesthetics, we're done in," he concludes, in one more of his tirades.

The movement which happened in 1968 in so many countries, including this one here, the USA, is for sociologists and all these other folk-"ists" to write 389-page dissertations about.

--The same way there were so many conquests in 1968, it seems it all ended sadly. The escalation of war here in the USA, the PCF calling its working-class members off the strike so students would fail. In Brazil, a dictatorship since March 31, 1964 ( but it was on April Fool's really) on December 13, 1968 the military intituted the Ato Institucional Número 5, better known as the AI 5.

--The AI 5 was an almost complete deprivation of the rights of free association, free speech, free anything. In a few months after the AI 5, Caetano and Gil left for England. Later Chico Buarque, in a genre Chico Buarque, went to Italy. He was persecuted by the censors for many years after the AI 5.

--Tropicália was a political option. The military weren't wrong. Those in Tropicália and those who loved it and loved rock and samba, those were the people who would act in the future.

--When I say Chacrinha, in his TV program, rather tacky, was a tropicalista, look closely at the best copy I could get of the program. The song is Língua , by Caetano.

Please come back tomorrow for more!

Tropicália
Os Mutantes
Panis et Circensis
2001
The Redeemer 1964-85
student movement
Brazil South America
oblivious US citizens