What is the Tropicália movement?

The ideas presented in this essay and helped to inspire a wider cultural and political shift in Brazil. A year later, in 1968, the Tropicália movement was epitomized by the album, Tropicália ou Panis et Circencis (misspelled Latin for Bread and Circuses) an by musicians Caetano Veloso, Gilerto Gil (ex-Minister of Culture, known as the “hacker minister”), Maria Bethânia, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes, Tom Zé, Nara Leão, Torquato Neto, and Rogério Duprat.

The title track, written by Gil and Veloso and performed by Os Mutantes, satirized bourgeois conventions and merged elements of traditional Brazilian song with international rock. It was voted 7th-greatest Brazilian song by the Brazilian edition of Rolling Stone magazine in 2009.

"Bat Macumba", featuring Gal Costa, is sleek, funky and catchy, with elements of psychedelic rock creeping in. Gil and Veloso were the driving forces behind Tropicália and their music was so radical they even spent time in prison after being deemed a threat by the Brazilian dictatorship.

The album came to be considered the defining sound of the Tropicália movement. The artists involved created a new exotic version of pop, being as influenced by psychedelia as it was by samba, bossa nova and more traditional South American genres. Tropicália created musical and cultural anarchy, a revolution in Brazilian sound.

The political undertones that surrounded Tropicália and Brazil at the time informed the movement. For many, Tropicália embodied the anger, anxieties and desires of the Brazilian left, which, at the time, was struggling under the oppressive rule of CIA-backed military group after it brought down the elected government of President João Goulart.

A motto often used by members of the movement was, “Seja Marginal, Seja Herói” (“Be a delinquent, Be a hero”), a phrase coined by Oiticica. The idea was to shake up the status quo and create something that threatened the establishment.

After Tropicália ou Panis et Circencis, music produced during that time was often politically charged. For instance, Caetano Veloso released the song “É proibido proibir” (It’s forbidden to forbid), which became an anti-dictatorship youth anthem in the years to come.

However, despite being connected to the counterculture and against the dictatorship of the country, Tropicália is considered an "alienated group" by the left wing movement of that time, making its lasting impact even more significant.

The movement is not restricted to just music and art, and its influence can be seen in literature with Torquato Neto’s work, cinema through Glauber Rocha, and theater from the work of Zé Celso and Teatro Oficina.

Singer, dancer and actress Carmen Miranda was also a strong influence and is said to be a precursor of the movement. Miranda came to prominence in the 1940s when she starred in a dozen Hollywood-produced movies. She was often dressed in Bahiana-esque costumes with tropical fruit adorning her head. This aesthetic became a stereotyped caricature of Brazil and this image was exploited to the max by Hollywood studios.

Soon she was accused of becoming Americanized by Brazilian intellectuals, but Miranda’s aesthetic grew fashionable again during the Tropicalist movement. As a pop culture icon and with her exaggerated appearance, Miranda wasn’t so much celebrated for her musical importance but rather her links to a stereotyped and “tropical” image of Brazil.