caetano veloso (tropicália)

Caetano Veloso spearheaded a cultural and musical revolution with the inverted bossa nova and electrified psychedelic rock hybridizations of his spectacular solo debut.  Abandoning the traditionalist approach of his collaboration with Gal Costa 'Domingo',  he continues to work with international influences that characterized the seminal collection 'Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis'.  

Veloso reflects on the origins of this new Brazilian National Music:     "We were already talking about it in 66. In the inner cover of the album 'Domingo' it’s written: I’ll sing these songs that I wrote at ease some time ago because now I’m thinking about completely different things and projects. Gil had already had some meetings with other composers and musicians in Rio to try to spread the new way of seeing things. Gil wanted everyone to participate but they didn’t understand it. I’d been talking a lot with Rogério Duarte about the fact that the popular music composers in Brazil lacked the capacity to risk and were confined into the good-taste and politically correct world of the time. About the prejudice against rock and iê-iê-iê, which, in spite of not interesting us very much in the beginning, had a vitality that we discovered little by little...Tropicália sounds like something alive, in progress. Tropicalismo sounds academic, a movement in the conventional sense of it. I was not so much attracted to the idea of Tropicalismo, because this name conveyed the impression that we wanted to make tropical business in Brazil, from Brazil. I didn’t want the movement to be characterized like that, it intended to be internationalist and anti-nationalist. It had more to do with the universal sound, another designation that we heard and adopted for a period, related to Marshall MacLuhan’s idea of a global village, highly in vogue at the time. We were very interested in space conquests, rock’n’roll, electronic music, that is, in the avant-gardes and entertainment industry. It was all experienced as an international novelty that we wanted to address sort of unabashedly. Nowadays, though, I think the name couldn’t have been more correct...I’d say it resulted from the encounter between Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso’s personalities. Without him, I wouldn’t make music, let alone this whole thing inside music. Still, once I was inside music – specially because of Gil – I ignited a movement so responsible for the popular music issue in Brazil only because Gil himself was very excited for something like that to happen...I have the ability to finish articulating the elements. Many of them were brought by myself, but many weren’t. I brought many things from my conversations with Bethânia, with Rogério, which only happened because I am who I am, with my own thoughts, with what I observed and felt. But the final organization of these elements into a project sprang from Gil’s intuition. Gil suggested that we talk about the Beatles and mass culture...The popular art from Pernambuco and Brazil’s social and political situation at that time. The mixture of the will to act in History with the hearing of “Banda de Pífaros de Caruaru” and the consciousness of the Beatles role in mass culture, this conjunction set Gil’s mind on fire."

'Caetano Veloso' was a hugely successful artistic achievement; but the social implications of the Tropicália movement made Veloso a dangerous man to the repressive military goverment in Brazil at the time.  He and Gil were arrested a year later and exiled for their counter-cultural attitudes.  





http://www.caetanoveloso.com.br/






"Tropicália"   "The album was almost ready and the song had already been recorded, but had no title yet. Luiz Carlos asked me to sing new songs. When I sang this one he was marveled. He found it similar to the film Terra em Transe and to the work by an artist from Rio, Hélio Oiticica, called “Tropicália”. He said I should give this title to the song. I told him that I knew neither the person nor the work of art and that I would not give someone else’s work title to my song. The person might not like it. Manoel Barenbein, the producer of the album, loved it and immediately wrote: Tropicália. It was meant to be temporary, but it stayed there."





"Alegria, Alegria"  






"Superbacana"  






"Clara (feat. Gal Costa)" 



"Soy Loco por Tí, América"










'Caetano Veloso' 
full album:




All songs written and composed by Caetano Veloso except where noted. 

Side one
1. "Tropicália"   3:40
2. "Clarice" (Caetano Veloso, José Carlos Capinam) 5:31
3. "No Dia em que Eu Vim-Me Embora" (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil) 2:26
4. "Alegria, Alegria"   2:43
5. "Onde Andarás?" (Caetano Veloso, Ferreira Gullar) 1:55
6. "Anunciação" (Caetano Veloso, Rogério Duarte) 2:01
Side two
7. "Superbacana"   1:28
8. "Paisagem Útil"   2:35
9. "Clara (feat. Gal Costa)" (Caetano Veloso, Perinho Albuquerque) 2:43
10. "Soy Loco por Tí, América" (Gilberto Gil, José Carlos Capinam) 3:40
11. "Ave Maria"   2:06

12. "Eles" (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil) 4:40