Sonic Innovation: Cannibalizing the Electric Guitar
In these songs the electric guitar made its most controversial entrance into the Brazilian scene.[6] Although Tropicálista musicians revered and built on bossa nova (Moreno 1982: 139), many felt that bossa nova’s smoother sounds were an inadequate medium with which to respond to the dictatorship. Instead, the electric guitar presented a powerful tool with which to respond to the horrors of the regime. The innovations produced by the electric guitar and cannibalized by Tropicália showed how new sounds were enlisted to demonstrate resistance. It is therefore fruitful to examine Tropicália’s use of aural combinations and the technological advances (including the electric guitar) as vehicles of meaning. Significantly, Veloso explained that the movement’s incorporation of the electric guitar was far from being an attempt to model Tropicália after American or British musicians. Rather, it was part of Tropicália’s use of antropofagia to consume the other. Veloso elucidated: “Tropicálismo was a very ambitious project; we took in the hippie movement, pop music, the British invasion, student movements in the U.S. and France – we had all this material to discuss and reflect upon” (Veloso in Dunn 1996: 122). Therefore, the Anglophone roots of the electric guitar were decoupled from their northern origins through the process of cannibalization. For Tropicálistas, the electric guitar produced sounds to be consumed, digested, and re-excreted or re-birthed as an act of creation rather than passive replication.
Yet not all audiences were ready to hear the electric guitar as a sound of resistance due to latent conceptions of what resistance should sound like. In 1968, audiences at the FIC III (the third International Festival of Song or Festival International de Canção) misheard Tropicália. This festival replaced older radio festivals by partnering with the Globo television network. In addition to changing the medium of dissemination, there was also a significant shift in the demographic characteristics of the spectators. Whereas the radio festivals’ audience had been largely economically disadvantaged and Afro-Brasileiro, the new festival attracted a predominantly white, middle class audience that was politically engaged (Treece 1997: 4). Sound was the prime mover shaping social relations at the FIC that were marked by friction and antagonism.
Tropicália created shockwaves at the FIC III where Tropicálista musicians, including Veloso and Gil, performed the ground-breaking sounds and concepts. In the context of acoustic and vocal norms of the FIC, the audience reacted viscerally and violently as they erroneously heard the incorporation of the electric guitar as an extension of audible imperialism. What the audience failed to grasp was a deep critique of the military regime through vocals that were purposefully set in contrast to the new sounds. While Tropicálistas believed they were creating a uniquely Brazilian sound, the audience interpreted the incorporation of the electric guitar as a rejection of national Brazilian “unplugged” styles, and, even worse, as unreflective acceptance of American and British cultural imperialism on the part of the artists.
At the festival, in response to Veloso’ first performance of “E proibido proibir” (“It is Forbidden to Forbid”), spectators reacted with deafening booing. Several nights later, during his second performance of this same politically loaded song, the audience turned their backs on the performers and even pelted them with food and objects. Spectator reaction was so hostile that it would make the festival known as the Festival of Booing (Stroud 2000: 89). In his 1996 interview with Veloso, Dunn asked him about this critical event:
Dunn: I want to talk about a very important moment for Tropicálismo: the eliminatory rounds of the 1968 Festival Internacionale da Canção, when you sang “E proibido proibir,” and the uproar it caused. Why did the public react against this song?
Veloso: It was not so much the song itself [...]. The students who went to these festivals favored nationalism and a kind of socialist populism. This festival was started after the military coup in 1964, but in the beginning that government didn’t prevent left-wing cultural manifestations. The students reacted against what we were doing – it wasn’t how a leftist songwriter was supposed to behave. (Dunn 1996: 122)
Despite the irony that the song’s title was taken from the anti-establishment leftist French student protests, ultimately Veloso withdrew the song from competition, having been silenced by elite Brazilians just as other Brazilian artists had been in the past before later being embraced. In this way, the FIC III was a key moment for the Tropicália movement, being both the medium of one kind of protest and the object of another kind of resistance. Just as elite Brazilians scorned Carmen Miranda for her representation of Brazilian musical culture of the 1940s, the audience scorned the Tropicálistas for their representation of Brazilian musical culture of the 1960s. In both cases, the elites silenced the artists through a weaponized cacophony of booing.
In this way, although Tropicália was a harsh condemnation of the military dictatorship, it was also a critique of traditional leftist protest due to the audience’s misinterpretation and hostile reaction. Faced with the challenge of responding to the military regime, the movement sought to break new ground in ways that more orthodox means of resistance could not:
The challenge faced by the protest song movement was not merely the need to offer an ideological alternative to the state’s developmentalist mythology of popular and national identity [...]. Paradoxically, the orthodox left’s reaction to the modernization and internationalization of Brazilian culture was symptomatic of an idealistic isolation from the realities of the 1960s, which prevented it engaging critically and creatively with the new mass culture. (Treece 1997: 4)
Through innovation, Tropicália replaced instrumentalist formulation of protest in favor of sounds as a vehicle of resistance. In this way, the movement became a salient alternative to traditional protest and allowed Tropicálistas to condemn the military government’s repression as well as societal inequalities. Although it introduced a new aesthetic and challenged society to reexamine its assumptions, it also carried on the larger tradition of music as a tool of protest, resistance, and challenge in Brazil. According to Behague “it should be emphasized that early Bossa Nova was basically a reaction against the limits and prejudices of the more traditional samba, and Tropicálismo against unproductive nationalist bourgeois cultural values” and “Veloso and Gil’s credo was justifiably directed to the awakening of the middle class to the Brazilian tragedy of poverty, exploitation and cultural terrorism” (Behague 1973: 217-219). For these reasons, while the left at first reacted against the aesthetics promulgated by Tropicália, it eventually embraced the movement.
Ironically the audience’s revulsion did not protect the Tropicálistas from political persecution by the military dictatorship. Veloso explained:
What we were doing was new. Tropicálismo lasted for a year only, and the military didn’t know what to make of it – they didn’t know whether it was a political movement or not – but they saw it as anarchic, and they feared it. There were some intellectuals in the military, who had some understanding of what we were doing – they were the ones who recommended that we be imprisoned. They thought we represented dissension and danger. People had to take a stand and we were raising questions, giving interviews [...] these things were coming to fruition in our minds – a vision of Brazil in which there was freedom, strength. Obviously, we were enemies of the military regime, we hated it, and we thought that this regime was a source of shame for us. (Veloso in Dunn 1996: 131)
As the Tropicálistas continued their revolt against the dictatorship, some were imprisoned and tortured. Gil and Veloso were exiled and moved to London, the center of gravity rejected by the festival audience. Ultimately, the Tropicálistas prevailed musically and politically. For although the military regime lasted twenty years, Tropicália’s influences live on today as a revered form of sonic innovation in the pantheon of Brazilian musical culture.