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PERFORMING COMMUNITY
São Paulo, 1968 By the 1960s, São Paulo had grown into the largest city in the Americas with one of the largest urban economies in the world. The city had long been home to a rich blend of immigrants, including the largest Arab, Italian and Japanese Diasporas found anywhere, with large Jewish, Portuguese, and other communities added into the mix. Migrants from across Brazil poured into the city intent on grabbing a share of its wealth. Local elites had leveraged wealth from coffee production to build a powerful manufacturing sector. Financial and other service industries followed together with international corporations. Major universities thrived as did a vibrant performing arts scene. By many indicators, São Paulo seemed poised to join the ranks of the world’s most successful cities. Unfortunately, the city and country’s political systems were unprepared to make such a leap. Caught between weak democratic institutions and a penchant among the country’s military officers to run everything on their own, Brazil lurched from one political crisis to another, always on the threshold of the darkest excesses of military rule. During the late 1960s, students, writers and musicians from across Brazil gathered in São Paulo. As they interacted with one another and explored the larger world of international pop music, many came to embrace Oswald de Andrade’s
1928 Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto). According to Oswald, Brazil is at its most creative when it takes in and cannibalizes other cultures, creating a new blend of music, art and literature that represents a uniquely Brazilian improvement on the original. Brazilian — and global — popular music was about to change. Several young musicians began circulating in the same community, performing on their own and together, blending popular Brazilian rhythms with Western pop and rock. Some of the most talented — Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil Tom Zé — had moved from Bahia. Others, such as arranger Rogerio Dupat and the members of Os Mutantes, were Paulistas from birth. Accompanying poetry became an essential element in the mix, producing songs which spoke of political discontent accompanied by infectious Brazilian rhythms. In keeping with Oswald’s notions of musical cannibalization, these Tropicálistas combined the musical legacies they brought with them. Veloso, Gil and Zé were steeped from birth in Bahia’s deep African musicality; Dupat trained in Paris with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. Os Mutantes’ founding brothers Arnaldo Baptista and Sérgio Dias Baptista instilled their psychedelic sound with a profoundly Paulista urban vibe. Together
