São Paulo, 1968

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 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

they launched a cultural movement, Tropicália, defining the essence of Paulista sensibility. Collectively, they influenced music, art, literature and popular fashion.

Their landmark collaborative album Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis (Tropicália: or Bread and Circuses) (1968) offered the movement’s manifesto. Recorded by Os Mutantes, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa and Tom Zé with arrangements by Rogerio Duprat and lyrics by Torquato Neto, the rebellious message is visible on the album cover before a single track has been played. Holding the cover in hand, eyes fall on musicians sitting in carnivalesque grandeur. The cover seems to pay a mimicking tribute to the album jacket for the Beetles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that had been issued just a few months before. Track after track expands on the movement’s anarchistic vision. After a half-century, the album remains widely considered among one of the greatest Brazilian albums of all time, with several tracks consistently earning similar rankings among Brazilian songs.

American rock critic Richard Gehr, writing June 19, 2017 for the Pitchfork website, vividly describes the album’s charmed journey:

The title announces the provocation of this art-pop masterpiece: “Panis et Circencis” (“bread and circuses”) is presented here as the boring alternative to the promise of joy and rebellion embodied in the Tropicália movement. And so, after some churchy organ chords and a few rings of a bicycle bell, we’re off on one of pop’s great magical mystery manifestos. Ringmasters Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil’s title track, performed by Os Mutantes, mocks bourgeois modes of consumption, with arranger Rogério Duprat importing George Martin’s psychedelic bridges and “Penny Lane” trumpetry. Where Tom Zé’s “Parque Industrial” (“Industrial Park”) lampoons the Anglo-Americanization of Brazilian tradition, Veloso and Gal Costa’s sublime “Baby” embraces its consumerist fantasies just as warmly. It’s an album powered by pastiche, parody, and ye olde poptimism— though the powers of darkness, namely Brazil’s military dictatorship, loom in the background. Are those screams of joy or pain at the end of the hip hymn ‘Hino do Senhor do Bonfim’? Are those bombshells theirs or ours? 20

The generals who seized power in a 1964 coup d’etat were less charmed. Following the increased radicalization of the Tropicália sound, the soldiers moved to crush the movement. Pro-regime nationalist supporters began disrupting Tropicália concerts, providing an excuse to shut them down. The military arrested Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil and sent them into exile in London. Other performers faced punishment, sometimes going to jail, other times fading into obscurity.

The Tropicálistas would have the last laugh. Rock musicians in North America and Europe discovered and celebrated the urban sounds coming from Brazil. Veloso and Gil gained instant notoriety and popularity from their perch in London. They returned to Bahia in 1972 and reentered Brazilian cultural life. Gil eventually went into politics, ultimately serving as Minister of Culture between 2003 and 2008. Others enjoyed long and successful careers in the years to follow.

With democratization in the 1990s, the Tropicália sound—and Tropicálista musicians—enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in Brazil and abroad. Their success validated Oswald’s cultural cannibalism as the herald for a wave of postmodernism in all Brazilian arts as well as internationally flowing into a broad global anti-authoritarian counterculture.

São Paulo, like other megacities, feels like a planet unto itself. The city is a post-modernist palimpsest that becomes whatever one wants it to. Writing in his study of Japanese Brazilians, A Discontented Diaspora (2007), historian Jeffrey Lesser observes that São Paulo is a city where “identities did not just repeat and move, they simultaneously sprinted and ponderously ran the marathon.” Such contradictions are the mark of unbounded creativity, as the Tropicálistas demonstrated so well.