Christopher Dunn: Gil and Tropicália abroad

Fans of Brazilian music knew Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and Gal Costa, but Tropicália was all but unknown. Compared to other Brazilian musicians of their generation, the tropicalists were not particularly concerned with the exportability of their music.

The exiled tropicalists did not stay abroad in order to develop international careers, like Sérgio Mendes, Flora Purim, and Airton Moreira did in Los Angeles.

During their London exile, Gil and Caetano released brilliant albums, in the vein of acoustic folk-rock, but at that time, Anglo-American audiences were more attuned to their own pop and rock stars.

Soon after, Byrne rediscovered the works of fellow tropicalist Tom Zé, virtually forgotten at that time, releasing a compilation of his experimentalist work in the 1970s, which has set the stage for a belated discovery of Tropicália in the United States.

With the compact discs  boom, the with the entire tropicalist catalogue, previously available only in vinyl, now circulated digital format.

Suddenly, the tropicalist albums by Gil, Gal, Caetano, Tom Zé and Os Mutantes, all from 1968-69 and long out of print, began to circulate in Brazil and abroad.

Foreign artists, critics, and fans, especially those with an alternative and hipster sensibility, thrilled to these records, which sounded familiar in their post-Beatles psychedelism, but also different for their deep connection with the history of the Brazilian song. 

 In the 1990s, the tropicalists themselves commemorated the movement on the Gil/Veloso collaboration Tropicália 2 and produced critical reflections on the movement, such as Caetano's great memoir, Verdade Tropical.

It was a cultural movement, or if you prefer, a moment that emerged in the context of a military dictatorship, programmatically expressed in popular music, but in dialogue with other interventions in visual art, theater, cinema and literature.

Liberationist and libertine, Tropicália joined the opposition against the dictatorship, but also maintained a critical position in relation to the nationalist left and inspired a Brazilian counterculture in dialogue with other youth movements in the United States, Europe and Latin America.

In sum, it was a full platter for a young scholar of Brazilian culture. After my first meetings with Gil, Caetano and Tom Zé, who granted me interviews in 1992, I decided to write my dissertation on Tropicália.

In the late 1980s, Gil entered politics, serving as a city counselor in Salvador and engaging in the environmental struggle with the NGO Onda Azul, experiences that prepared him to lead the Ministry of Culture during first presidential term of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Lula.

I will always be grateful to Gil for accepting our invitation in 2006 to receive the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from Tulane, a gesture of solidarity with the university and the city of New Orleans, then in the initial phase of reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina. 

Over the years, Gil always identified himself as a tropicalist, an identity that oriented him in relation to new technologies, cyberspace, creative economies, cultural diversity and what he calls a “kaleidoscopic vision of Brazil.”