Tropicalist verb

THE DIVINE, MARVELOUS
Gal Costa
June 29, 2005

At the time I was living the whole Tropicalist thing. We never stopped talking about the new movements that were springing up around the world. Gil listened to Hendrix the whole day. Janis Joplin filled my head. That sound, the hoarse voice, all led me to want to do something different from what I believed, from everything I’d done and how I’d understood music till then. I was very extreme, there was very little I really liked. João (Gilberto) was my idol and everything else, or almost everything, I filtered out. I didn’t like “yeah-yeah-yeah” or the Jovem Guarda, anything like that. I needed to do something to express myself, to get out what I felt inside, with force, attitude, and frankly, something that would draw attention to myself.
Gil and Caetano were involved body and soul in these new experiments in Brazilian popular music. And in this research I came across “Divino, maravilhoso”, a song that really got to me. Caetano invited me to sing it in the TV Record Festival and Gil said he’d do the arrangement. He was so perceptive that he asked me how I wanted to sing it. I explained that I wanted to sing in a new way, explosively, in a different way. I wanted to reveal a different woman that was inside of me; another Gal from the one that sat on a stool quietly singing bossa nova. I wanted to sing explosively, letting it all out. So Gil did the arranging for “Divino, maravilhoso”.

When Caetano saw me going on stage draped in pendants with little mirrors hung around my neck and the afro hairdo that Dedé had done for me, he almost died of shock. He didn’t know anything about it. He hadn’t heard Gil’s arrangement or anything. I sang with all the fury and strength in me, half the audience stood up and booed. The other half applauded ferociously. A man in front of me shouted insults. An even greater strength filled me and made me confront him. I sang directly at him: “We’ve got to be watchful and strong, we haven’t got time to fear death!” I sang with such force and so aggressively that the poor man shut up and shrank into himself. It was the first time that I felt what it was like to control an audience. And an audience that was furious. At that time of political polarization, music was the only form of expression. It awoke passions, real wars. After “Divino, maravilhoso”, I was stronger, I’d grown. I think that night I went on stage an adolescent, a girl, and when I left it, I was a woman. I’d suffered, I was shattered, but I’d won.