Musical Heirs

Tropicália represented a very rich moment of the Brazilian music and an involvement with several tendencies: the Northeastern music, the classical music, the international and local pop music, Roberto Carlos, Luiz Gonzaga. This movement also communicated with other very strong things, like bossa nova, Jovem Guarda, samba. From the Tropicália moment on, the understanding of Brazilian music has changed a lot.

Personally, I don’t consider myself neither Caetano’s son, nor Ariano’s nephew (Ariano Suassuna). I’m more like a descendant of Augusto dos Anjos than a direct descendant of Tropicalism.

My generation worked with fragments, scrap, things that apparently had no use any longer, like mixing Brazilian music with influences from India, Africa, North-American-pop, British pop and so on. I got hold of many elements like the ones Tropicalism had introduced and just noticed that in the middle of the process. I knew I wasn’t creating anything new and that this had already happened long before. On those who have been making music from the 80’s on, like me, it is inevitable that something made by that group, formed by Tom Zé, Capinan, Gil, Caetano, Rogério Duprat, Os Mutantes, Gal Costa, hasn’t left its mark. Their mark is there and part of it is on us. But we cannot see Gil and Caetano as such a big tree whose shadow prevents others from being seen and other manifestations from coming up, their particularities from  being understood.

When the tropicalists made a party for the Rede Globo channel, a program called, I don’t know… something like “Tropicalism, all the years or 30 years,” the Tropicalism’s heirs they took to perform were axe music singers. Then, I think that the marketing victory of Tropicalism has very defined, marketing inheritors. It has already been said. The big mother Globo along with the Tropicalism patriarchs, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, have already said that. An event was prepared to say that.

Torquato is dead, Tom Zé was “exiled”, Capinan makes his living by lecturing courses; the Tropicalism portion that has prevailed and showed up in the last 20 years was the one which is more generous with the market, so, when it’s time to determine who are the inheritors, they are the Banda Eva, etc. That’s it.

The Tropicalism’s commercial inheritor is the axe music. But the ideological heir, the aesthetic heir, we don’t know who it is.

People who make music seize everything all the time, they seize technologies, postures, etc. and, by the way, this was the tropicalist’s attitude. Today, we might be experiencing the extinction of the heritage concept. There is no more heritage, there is seizing. That which is called heritage, which on one hand considers itself a positive thing and it is positive  and also laudatory to the pseudo-heirs – has diminished the work people had to reconstruct a Brazilian music concept that was going to naught.

What I feel as important for us who are emerging now is the realization that there isn’t a father. I don’t recognize myself in this father and this father doesn’t  recognize me either.

Carlinhos Brown, Lenine, Chico Science and I came out more or less at the same time. These people had been making music during all the 80’s, but just came out in the mid-90’s. So, I think that the coming out of these people cannot be attributed to a sheer and plain Tropicalism heritage. Maybe someone could rush and declare him/herself as a heir out of sheer flattery.

The Tropicalia’s strongest influence is the “Geléia Geral”, we have this and we can’t deny it. We exist, partly, because Tropicalism existed and, partly, in spite of that, because it is such a solid and well-rooted thing that it almost blocks the existence of other things in the form of thinking, marketing, in all forms. I believe our strongest influence (at least for us, the Northeasterners) is Luis Gonzaga and Jackson do Pandeiro. These two plus João do Vale, this one not so strongly, are the first pop artists from the Northeastern region. Afterwards comes this thing of putting everything into the centrifuge that Tropicalism did.  This centrifugal attitude of taking everything and, as Lenine said, making a rinse out of an avocado and mixing things apparently unmixable.

This reflection we have today about Tropicalism concludes, in my opinion, the Tropicalism cycle itself. I think such reflection is like looking at the brightness of an already-dead star. The star keeps on shining but it is dead. Instead of saying that Tropicalism is alive, it is better to say: Tom Zé is alive, Caetano Veloso is alive, Gilberto Gil is alive, Gal Costa is alive. What would be less tropicalist than Gal Costa nowadays? There is nothing, nothing to do with it.