Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

“Tropicalia was one of those things, dealing with new attitudes, the protest thing, feelings of the young generation." nia went to Rio to do this thing, and then I said, "Wow, that's maybe an opportunity for rejoining them in Rio and São Paolo to continue the work that we had started in Salvador." And I chose that when I had to make the choice in March 1964. I was just finishing school, then Unilever sent a guy to find new talents in different business schools all over Brazil, so, when I was approved, I chose to go to São Paolo to Unilever and not to Michigan. Because in São Paolo, I had Caetano and Bethânia already, and that was a guarantee that I was at home. So you joined the musical revue with Maria Bethânia? No, she did it alone. Caetano was supervising her stay in Rio, as requested by her father, and I was in São Paolo, but then, when that revue finished, she asked me to do a second revue with her and Vinícius de Moraes. So, the three of us did a thing in Rio, where we sang our bossa nova songs and Caetano's songs, and that was a showcase for our starting in Rio. And then me, Caetano, and Gal Costa moved to São Paolo and started the tropicália (movement). How did tropicalia come into being, and what was it supposed to represent? In Rio and São Paolo, we were involved with pop music, bossa nova, and the Jovem Guarda, the Brazilian rock move- ment. And the resurgence of the samba was also starting, and the classical Carioca samba in Rio had also been pro- moted, so we had different musical movements converg- ing to a new situation. Coinciding with all of that was this (surge of the Beatles and the Stones and the international rock scene, which really impressed us. So we got very inter- ested in adapting that to the Brazilian reality, doing some- thing equivalent in Brazil. So we start asking colleagues to join us, and we finally got a group-like me, Caetano, and Gal, and songwriters like Capinan and Torquato Neto, and musicians and conductors like Rogério Duprat, Damiano Cozzela, Sandino Hohagen, all of the interesting guys in São Paolo, like the Mutantes rock band and we said, "Okay, let's do a movement-launching record.” And then we did the Tropicalia: Ou Panis et Circenses (“Tropicália: Bread and Circuses") record, together with some TV appearances. And that was the launching of the tropicalia, which immediately provoked a very strong reaction, both a positive and nega- tive: positive in the side that some of the specialized press was really touched by it, but also negative in terms of the military people in power, and some sectors of the society, reacting against this new youth movement. Was there outraged protest against electric guitars? Not necessarily about electric guitars, but about the fact that we were using electric guitar out of context, because electric gui- tars were admitted for rock and roll, for youth music, American style, but not for samba, not for Brazilian music. In tropicalia, it was stretching the boundary, and that was really bothering some conservative sectors in Brazil, politically speaking, cultur- ally speaking Were there objections to particular songs? Not songs, just the sound, and the way of adding noncon- ventional behavior to the music-making-the whole atti- tude. Not a particular song, but the whole atmosphere, the whole outlook. What about specifically with the military government? The military were shutting Congress (down); they started impeding the democratic institutions, doing the coup d'état, doing the strike. And of course, they wanted a guarantee for the new ruling system that they were establishing, so ev- erything that would be a little jarring would be difficult for them. Tropicália was one of those things, dealing with new attitudes, the protest thing, feelings of the young generation, information coming from United States and Europe about new manners of interpreting the social life, the economic life, the political life. So that was very upsetting for the military that needed a very calm, very tranquil, very shut, and not outspoken society. That was the main reason for the harass- ment that we suffered. What was it like to work under those conditions? I don't know, because that was the reality. In a sense, it was very difficult, something that we had to put ourselves against, that we have to face, but at the same time, very natural, because that was the environment. You needed to submit lyrics to a committee for approval? That was the rule of the time. To publicly sing a song or to pub- lish it through a record or through a show, you had to submit the songs to the censorship staff. So they would say, "This song you can sing, entirely. This song, you have to cut those parts”; that was the groove. In my case, they had only one or two songs, because the songwriting was not effectively the problem with me and Caetano, it was more of the general outlook, the at- titude and the look and the projecting speech-not the literal speech, but the idea, the ideological speech. What happened during the song competition in 1968, when Caetano Veloso was booed performing "É Proibido