Tropicalia - Revolution in Sound

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 21 February 2016

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tropicalia was a musical revolution in Brazil. Singer and journalist Monica Vasconcelos meets the key artists and contemporary champions of Tropicalia - from Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil to Marcos Valle and Talking Heads' David Byrne - and explores its enduring musical and political force. Burning brightly for only few years in the late 1960s, and politically inspired by the uprisings in Paris in May 1968, the Tropicalia movement electrified Brazilian music, combining the sophistication of bossa nova, samba and baiao with psychedelia, new Beatles-inspired electric sounds and orchestral experimentation.

It was a deliberately subversive mix that provoked the country’s military regime and led to the exile and imprisonment of some of Brazil’s star musicians. Tropicalia brought a new wave of liberation and energy into Brazilian music. Earlier in the decade, bossa nova had captured a mood of national optimism but, as the 1960s wore on, the national mood darkened.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading from the BBC.
0:04.0	The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts.
0:11.0	I'm Monica Vassconcelos and you're listening to BBC World Service.
0:18.0	In the late 1960s a new sound erupted in Brazil, transforming its music, subverting its politics.
0:31.0	The Greek has been Brazil. its politics. Tropicale.
0:35.0	Tropicale.
0:36.0	Exuberant, experimental.
0:40.0	Tropicalia was a bug. Experimental was about
0:45.0	a bad news, a disorder of the deepest
0:49.0	of the deepest Brazilian traditions,
0:52.0	samba and biome,, with psychodilia, rock, orchestral and new electronic sounds.
1:00.0	There'd been nothing like it.
1:05.0	And politically it was an intervention, a decision to break the rules and bait the rulemakers.
1:15.0	This music seemed to say,
1:19.0	be fearless, be irreverent.
1:22.0	Be free.
1:25.0	For its short existence,
1:26.7	tropicalia was a revolution.
1:30.9	It was not a revolution driven by kind of political ideologues. It was driven by artists.
1:39.0	There was no boundaries. They didn't know how to label us.
1:44.0	We were totally open to anything.
1:48.0	We were totally limitless. endless.
	...

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