Tropicalia: Thirty Years Too Early

by Brianne Slade

Sifting through the world music bin of your local Soho record store has never been so hip. A few months ago everyone was screaming about The Buena Vista Social Club, a bunch of 90-year-old Cuban guys who somehow went multi-platinum and twisted State Department arms for a sellout evening at Carnegie Hall. This mysterious trend continued with the release of The New Sound of the Venezluan Gozadera by Los Amigos Invisibles which received heavy college air play. Can college kids even say “Gozadera?” Why would they? Finally, you have Beck, the man who will probably be remembered as the cleverest artist of this decade, releasing a single named after a movement in, yup, Brazilian music over 30 years ago. It's the same thing that everybody's now talking about: Tropicalia.

So why is the world of popular music and its eternally yipping lapdogs (see this month's Spin) suddenly infatuated with a bunch of Brazilians who recorded the main body of their work three decades ago and then, in some cases, fell off the face of the Earth?

Well, as it turned out, the 60's hit Brazil too, though nobody seemed to really notice at the time. Fueled by The Beatles and a wash of fuzzy basses and distorted vocals that followed, a group of Brazilian natives began to churn out psychedelic Portuguese rock that everybody just realized is really quite good.

To describe the music is difficult, the roots of Tropicalia is more the material for an ethno-musicology thesis than a brief summation (at least one book on the topic is already on the way for those who can't wait). Stemming from the rituals of the Bahia section of Northern Brazil, an area known for its African ancestry, singers like Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veleso took local rhythms to the cities, where they were mixed with a funk bass and wah guitar. It has the polyrhythmic structure of Afro-pop, a Dylan-esque lyrical complexity, the hyper-arrangements of Frank Zappa, and in the end is completely psychedelic without being dippy. It can be dance music, it can be drinking music, you can even sit yourself in a chair and just listen to it for a while.

If there is one person to be thanked for all this, it is probably David Byrne. The former Talking Heads singer was sifting through a record store in Brazil in the 80's, and offhandedly bought a few of the records with weirder covers. In 1989 he released Beleza Tropical, the first of a slew of Brazilian reissues and compendiums for his Luaka Bop label. The album sold well, but the music never really caught on, mostly because it was impossible to find any original albums in print.

Two years later, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana traveled to Brazil, and Cobain came across a copy of Mutantes, the first album by Os Mutantes, or The Mutants, perhaps the most theatrically weird band of the period. Cobain became a huge Mutantes fan, bought all of their records, and wrote to the members of the band urging them to get back together so they could open for Nirvana on tour. Had this worked out, the day of Tropicalia would certainly come a lot sooner.

But perhaps its better that we waited, for there is something about current American culture that clicks uncannily well with the Brazil of the 60's. The Tropicalia movement was an overtly political one; the government of Brazil had just shifted into a military dictatorship, and the music is filled with mostly subtle jabs at various establishments.

There was a discernible cynicism towards manufactured structure and environments, such as the mid-sixties “creation” of Brazil's capital Brasilia, a city which literally sprang out of jungle, an effort to move Brazil's population away from the coast. Looking at Brasilia now, one gets the feeling of walking through Tomorrowland at Disney World; the city is marked by “space-age” buildings, preparations for a future that, thirty years later, is supposed to have already arrived. Moreso, racial lines were rapidly becoming blurred, as about 40% of Brazil's population considered themselves mulatto- and the country has the world's largest Japanese population in exile.

As you watch America's population grow and diversify itself, listen for it in our music, which is rapidly becoming more and more a product of “cut-ups:” samples and a polyrhythmic, polyethnic mix of beats.

And that is why Tropicalia works so well; it is cut-up, not just in the sense of Burroughs and Gysin, but in that it believes in what Brazilian singer Tom Zé openly refers to as “plagiarism.” Zé, after a hiatus close to two decades, released Fabrication Defect last year on Byrne's label, an album that functions as a series of what he calls “dragnets,” not in the Sgt. Friday sense, but in the sense of the criminal; a dragnet is a group of pickpockets running through a crowd, simultaneously creating a distraction and stealing all they can. Luaka Bop is soon releasing a collection disarmingly-titled Postmodern Platos, featuring remixes by other critical darlings such as Sean Lennon and the High Llamas, and will soon embark on a US tour featuring Chicago space-dub band Tortoise. Before Byrne contacted him to do an album, Zé was contemplating a job at a gas station.

Though it is good to see all this renewed interest, what separates Tropicalia from its more sullen 90's admirers is that its creators realized that they were doing something new during a time when freedom was a rare commodity. The music is unabashedly fun to listen to; it switches from genre to genre quickly and deftly enough to keep any A.D.D.-American happy.

The truly amazing thing about it (and everybody who writes about Tropicalia is contractually bound to say this, but it's true) is that it sounds absolutely modern. Plagiarism, especially as a deliberate aesthetic choice, has certainly come into vogue, and as you hear this new generation of musicians stealing from Brazil, you realize how well this whole cultural appropriation business can work.