Pop Music as Everyday Resistance: Tropicalismo Contests Protest Music

To resist, to stand against: no oppressed group has survived without it. It often appears to be the last surviving kernel of utopian hopes, a kind of Mohican harrying of the dominant forces. But it may serve as cover for all kinds of reactionary impulses. On the other hand, as Clifford Christians points out as he traces the current suspicion of the grand narrative back to Newton, 'first foundations [are] no longer a credible anchor for our ethical principles' (1995: 88). If that is so, to paraphrase Luther, where do resisters stand? Or, in the terms Clifford Christians uses, by what criteria can the tension between freedom and moral order be worked out in the ethical act of cultural resistance?

The question can also be viewed from the perspective of the social sciences. What must be resisted? Some would say, the tyrant, others the cultural manipulator, most would say both. Though territorially based tyrants continue to exist, what is new in post-war culture is clearly the aestheticisation of politics, whereby power finds its alibi in 'naturalized', non-political meanings or myths, as Roland Barthes pointed out years ago (1957). So for many, what provokes everyday resistance is not directly violent, but the dynamics of marketing, in which the maxim 'sell (yourself) or die' is implicit in social relations of all kinds.

A polemic in the field of Brazilian pop music in 1967-68 provides a rare opportunity to examine an open conflict over how to regard authoritarian rule and the advent of consumer culture: both political and economic oppression at the same time. Who is the enemy? What can be done? How can pop music be a means of resistance? All of these questions were asked and answered by the protest music movement. Tropicalismo, on the other side of the controversy, can be seen as a response in a different key to the same situation and to protest music's questions and answers.

Political and cultural context

In Brazil, from the latter half of the 1950s onwards, there was increasing conflict between the new, US-dominated, transnational-led development model and hopes for greater economic democracy, raised by the populist government of Juscelino Kubitschek. A climax was reached in 1961, when the rightist Jânio Quadros resigned from the presidency after two years in office, creating an opportunity for authoritarian take-over. Democracy held, as the vice-president, João Goulart, took office, but from then on the Right purposefully prepared the coup, with US funding and advice.

Following the 'Revolution' of 1964, many politicians and leaders of the labour and other social movements directly involved with peasants, workers and soldiers were killed, jailed or exiled, while students, professionals and intellectuals without those links to mass organizations were spared.1 Preoccupied with technical solutions to economic policies, implemented in alliance with foreign capital and based on a general lack of social mobilization, the government was tolerant of cultural activities. As a result, critical discussion and production in the cinema, theatre and other 'bourgeois arts' flourished, as did critical journalism; and students, young professionals and intellectuals formed an important market for the budding culture industries. But the agit-prop gathered strength, with mass demonstrations and calls to arms, and in December 1968 the regime shut down all channels of expression to the opposition, with a general ban on all kinds of politically charged activities.

The focus of this article, however, is the period immediately before this 'coup within the coup', when cultural forms like pop music were seen by some as important vehicles of resistance, both cultural and political.

The precursor and musical point of reference to both protesters and Tropicalistas was the Bossa Nova, which can most easily be dated by its first hit, 'Chega de Saudade' (1958), written by Tom Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes and performed in a distinctive way by João Gilberto; Jobim and Moraes also wrote 'Girl from Ipanema', Bossa Nova's best known tune.

Bossa Nova revolutionised Brazilian music and made it an export product played and sung by the likes of Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, and Frank Sinatra. Combining the insights of jazz and samba, it formed the equivalent of chamber music in pop (Medaglia, 1968), as new recording and broadcasting technology did not require loud volume and the singer's voice became one more instrument interplaying with the rest.

Though its musical quality won middle class taste over, commercial success contributed to its decline. In 1962, the main figures of Bossa Nova gave a concert at Carnegie Hall. Some of them stayed in the US to play more lucratively to American audiences - and influence US jazz. Back in Brazil, commercial success made many composers self-indulgent and the movement lost its creative impulse. With tanks rolling onto the streets in 1964, its message of 'o amor, o sorriso e a flor' (love, smiles and flowers) and 'sal, sol, sul' (salt, sun, South) began to seem rather nonsensical.

For this and political reasons, cultural discussions centred on foreign cultural influence and manipulation of taste by television and record companies: in a word, cultural imperialism. The combination of music, business and politics and the fever pitch of the discussion is perhaps best illustrated by the march held in the streets of São Paulo in 1966 against the use of electric guitars. It was led by Elis Regina, the most commercially successful singer linked to the protest group, and singer-composer Gilberto Gil participated in it not long before helping to found Tropicalismo.

Electric guitars, identified with foreign and domestic rock'n'roll, were attacked as emblematic of the foreign commercial and political forces to be resisted. It was symptomatic of the period that the marchers did not differentiate between aesthetic rivals and political enemies, giving rise to an alibi of the kind Barthes wrote about: the politics of nationalism obfuscated the promotion of pop music style and vice versa.

Pop music trends were sold on television. Television had come to Brazil in the 1950s and in the 1960s became a truly mass media. Competitive pop music festivals, broadcast on television, became the main channel for promoting the consumption of pop music. They also became the arena for conflicts between organized groups who quickly identified, by music and lyrics, the political stripe of singers and groups. The situation was soon rumoured to be exploited by recording companies, who paid the fan clubs-cum-political groupings to approve or disapprove of what they heard. The politics and commerce of style was already well in place.

For the producers of protest music, Bossa Nova had gone wrong by becoming Americanized. To re-acculturate, they made the Brazilian peasant and worker a favourite subject. The overall theme was a future of social justice, 'the new age that will dawn' (Galvão, 1976), but always in mythical terms: a catharsis of the middle class's utopian frustrations, no real tool of resistance. A number of musicians studied rural musical traditions and experimented with using them, taking increasing distance from the soft-spoken romanticism of Bossa Nova, a return to preindustrial culture. Resistance meant creating an aesthetic of an alliance between workers and peasants, artists and students.2

Tropicália

The Tropicalista response began with 'Alegria, Alegria', by Caetano Veloso, sung at the 3rd TV Record Brazilian Popular Music Festival in September 1967. The song uses electric guitars and describes in vivid images what a young man sees while wandering through a big city, as the sun strikes a news stand with 'crimes, great passionate kisses, beautiful Cardenales, the faces of presidentes, teeth, legs, flags, bombs or Brigitte Bardot' - the information society was on its way. Received cautiously at the festival, it was only awarded fourth place, but soon became a hit. The press compared it to the work of artist Hélio Oiticica, whose installation resembling a favela was called 'Tropicália', and the theatre of José Celso Martínez Correa, which treated power from the perspective of wheeling and dealing, rather than oppression and repression. Accepting the label of Tropicalismo, an ad hoc grouping of like-minded musicians recorded the LP 'Panis et Circensis' in 1968 as a kind of cultural manifesto.

Who were the Tropicalistas? Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé, Gal Costa, had come from Bahia, a culturally vibrant state in the technologically backward Northeast, to seek their fortune in the culture industry of the South. Regionally outsiders, the were otherwise similar in age and middle class origin to the protesters. A founder of Bossa Nova from Rio de Janeiro, Nara Leão, also participated, as did Rogério Duprat, a classical musician from São Paulo. Rounding out the crowd were the Mutantes, a trio of young rock musicians from São Paulo who, at the margins of the political ruckus, wrote songs in both English and Portuguese that parodied the very youth culture of which they were a part.

Tropicália took in artistic influences that ranged from pop art and Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts' Club Band to the Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos. But what was most shocking to audiences at the time was its willingness to mix the new with the old and rub the public's face in the distance between popular taste and protest music's programme. The title of the LP, bread and circuses, is critical of the regime, but also takes on the culture industry, festivals and organized shouting. To cite only a few songs: the LP opens with 'Miserere Nobis', simultaneously a plea for the celebrated day of food enough for all, a parody of the church's discourse of 'always' and 'tomorrow' and, in the last words of the song, a veiled reference to the military regime: 'Brazil, rifle, cannon' are said in a kind of pig latin, with extra syllables, followed by 'ora pro nobis'.

Then the record reclaims kitsch for the educated public's taste, as Caetano Veloso sings 'Coragco Materno', a tear jerking radio hit from a generation before, in austere, choirboy style with a melodramatic string accompaniment. Rock'n'roll and afro-Brazilian religion are references in 'Batmacumba', while the words to that same song take the form of a batwing - a playful reference to concrete poetry. All coexisted in a pastiche; all are presented as equally Brazilian.

The Tropicalistas did not speak of resistance. When they spoke explicitly of repression, their most immediate enemy was the repressiveness of the militant audience. When Caetano tried to sing 'É proibido proibir' (It is forbidden to forbid), whose title was borrowed from contemporary Parisian graffiti, he was drowned out by the audience of a festival in September 1968, at which point he shouted a much quoted impromptu speech in which he said, among many other things, 'If you are the same in politics as you are in aesthetics, we're done for.'

Ironically, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil were jailed in December 1968 and exiled in 1969, becoming heroes to the part of the audience that had reviled them. In practical terms, they suffered as some of the protesters did from the guardians of order and were viewed alike as subversives.

Some conclusions

Let us return to the initial question of how freedom and moral order may coexist in an ethical undertaking like cultural resistance to dictatorship through pop. Reacting to political pressure, the makers of protest music tried to transfer the political capital of the Left and the student movement, tel quel, to pop music. To compensate for the mismatch, they sacrificed freedom to moral order. The Tropicalistas affirmed artistic freedom. Their right to a broad catchment area of influences was their cultural politics. For them, pop is not a political phenomenon. It is an artistic one - and a show business.

As for the sociological enemy, readily identified by the protesters as foreign influences and the show business that promotes them, Tropicália's main ideologue, Caetano Veloso, has always said that pop music is the industry in which he is active, creating art. The language of that industry is the code the Tropicalistas used, whether electric guitars, clothing, foreign and Brazilian rhythms or haircuts. The pop industry is transnational and they react to the issue of foreign influence with a confident shrug, believing that Brazilian pop music culture is strong enough to, well, resist.

For the Tropicalistas, cultural resistance by pop artists is not a voluntary act. It is what happens when art, understood as experimentation and discovery, is rooted in a rich, sophisticated cultural tradition, is exposed to the best the world can offer, and finds a niche in the culture industry. The voluntary part is the will to question consensus, the struggle for (artistic before political) freedom.

Almost thirty years later, time tells several stories. After returning from exile, style was as close as anyone came to politics. Caetano went through a period of androgynous effrontery while Gil brought his black identity to the fore. Chico Buarque got around the censors with verbal style - double meanings, irony and pseudonyms. In 'Acorda amor' (Wake up, my love), for example, he describes the arrival of the police in the middle of the night and exclaims, 'Call the burglar'. When censorship ended, protest music did not revive and has now been almost entirely forgotten, while Tropicália's eclecticism and iconoclasm have marked Brazilian pop ever since.

Never again were politics as controversial in the pop music scene in Brazil. Music is irrevocably show biz, in which the most important influence is of a musician's agent or recording company. However, it is curious to note that in a concert last year, Rita Lee, one of the former Mutantes - apparently uninterested in politics in the 1960s - touched on two themes dear to anyone interested in resistance to the current state of affairs: the poverty of the majority of Brazilians and women's longings for freedom - women's liberation, one would once have said. How dour such themes look on paper in comparison to the event! This points, perhaps, to the Tropicalista rule of thumb in matters of cultural resistance and pop music: what can be easily summarised is not good pop, which is the main thing; and social conscience - while it is neither here nor there in determining the quality of artistic works - is no one's private property.

Notes

1 This summary owes a great deal to Schwarz's (1992) classic view of politics and culture from 1964-69, first published in 1970.

2 Some, like Edu Lobo, produced good music and Chico Buarque is the prime example of a good musician and lyricist who spoke of workers' lives. Galvco notes, however, that he wrote only one song whose words refer to the myth of effortlessly achieved social justice and that he never recorded it.

References

Barthes, Roland, (1957). Mythologies. Paris: Seuil.

Christians, Clifford G., (1995). Communication ethics as the basis of genuine democracy. In: Lee, Philip (ed.). The Democratization of Communication. Cardiff: WACC/ University of Wales.

Galvco, Walnice Nogueira, (1976). 'MMPB: uma análise ideológica'. In: Saco de Gatos. São Paulo: Duas Cidades.

Medaglia, Jzlio. (1968) 'Balango da Bossa Nova'. In: Balango da Bossa. São Paulo: Perspectiva.

Schwarz, Roberto, (1992). 0 Pai de Família e Outros Estudos. (2nd ed.) Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra.

Liv Sovik (PhD) majored in English at Yale University and took her MA in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. She defended a doctoral thesis called 'Vaca Profana' on Tropicália and postmodern theory at the Communications and Arts School of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, in December 1994. She has worked for the World Association for Christian Communication, as a free-lance translator and for the Brazilian union movement. She currently holds a research and teaching fellowship at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.