Três trópicos da tropicália

become a tropicalist

Tropicalismo began in me as a painful experience. The development of a social, and then political and economic, conscience, combined with existential, aesthetic, and moral concerns that questioned everything, led me to think about the songs I composed and heard. Everything that came to be called tropicalismo was nourished by acts of violence against a taste that had matured steadily and was everywhere lucidly defended. (…) I felt I lived in a homogeneous country whose inauthentic aspects – and the various versions of rock certainly represented the one of them – were a result of social injustice (which fomented ignorance) and of its macro manifestation, imperialism, which imposed its styles and products.

(…)

Imagine with which power I didn’t have to think against myself to start listening to Roberto, Beatles and Rolling Stones – and even Elis – with love.

Zé Celso liked to say that there was a strong masochist component in tropicalismo. In fact there was something of a voluptuousness respecting what previously had been considered contemptible. But I – who, as I have said, had been in the habit of strolling among piles of cans at the supermarket for the sheer aesthetic pleasure – did not surrender to that voluptuousness without first subjecting it to close examination during the waxing hours of my insomnia.