![]() ![]() From Bahia’s capital Salvador came poet Torquato Neto, and also Gal Costa, who took up singing after hearing João Gilberto on the radio. It was there that he met Gilberto Gil, a multi-instrumentalist from a solid middle-class family, as well as José Capinam and Tom Zé, the self-styled agent provocateur. ![]() Caetano Veloso, older brother of singer Maria Bethânia, was a philosophy student at the Federal University of Bahia. Its inner circle all hailed from Bahia, the old capital of the country, where colonial Portuguese architecture and Afro-Brazilian heritage came into contact with New Wave cinema and 7-inch records from America. Mixing up bossa nova, psychedelia, concrete poetry and electronic wizardry, Tropicália gave us discombobulated pop, direct from the Third World. And in a country anesthetized by military dictatorship, it was a Technicolor clarion call. Hélio Oiticica’s image of the notorious gangster, Horseface, was re-used, with the added slogan “Be A Hero, Be An Outcast.” Gilberto Gil dressed up as a member of the (all-white) Brazilian Academy of Literature on an album cover. Caetano Veloso sang a carol on TV the night before Christmas holding a gun to his head. ![]() In late ’60s Brazil, a group of artists responded by trying to shock its audience into a reaction. Authoritarian regimes have exerted power by shutting down their citizens’ capacity to think – at least that’s how political theorist Hannah Arendt diagnosed them. ![]()
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