Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil
By Caetano Veloso, translated by Isabel de Sena, edited by Barbara Einzig
Knopf, 354 pages, $26
Tropical Truth,” a memoir by Brazilian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso, is important and irritating in equal measure. But truth is never simple in the tropics.
Along with coffee, orange juice, airplanes and firearms, music is big business in Brazil. It’s also Brazil’s most vital form of artistic expression, even surpassing–though sometimes allied to–the greatest literary tradition in all of Latin America. Since the 1960s, when two musical revolutions–first bossa nova, then MPB, or musica popular brasileira–changed it forever, Brazilian popular music has arguably been the richest in the world.
The work of Brazil’s greatest songwriters and lyricists–among whom Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes are the best known internationally–equals in every regard that of the creators of the Great American Songbook. Today, four composers, all getting to be 60-ish, are indisputable masters. Milton Nascimento’s moving music is largely based on the melodies and memories of his native state of Minas Gerais, enhanced by the extraordinary octave range of his voice. Chico Buarque and Gilberto Gil have only serviceable voices, but the former (also a novelist, poet, playwright and son of a distinguished literary family) writes from a broad foundation of inherited culture, while the latter long ago adopted a populist stance, embracing African rhythms, reggae and a mild form of protest songs. Veloso, whose compositional and vocal gifts are, by his own admission, limited, learned early on to imitate and borrow.
Today Veloso often wears a suit and tie while crooning from a stool, but in the past, whether long-haired, curly locked and shirtless, or gauzy in loose white cotton, he was always calculatedly fey, managing, one way or another, to look like both Sonny and Cher. It was a pose, perhaps a disguise, but it was also meant to signal a revolution.
In the late 1960s, Veloso was the founder and point man of tropicalismo, an artistic movement, primarily in music, that is hard to define because its goals, reflecting its founder’s thinking, were so unfocused. Veloso opposed everything, including bossa nova, even though he revered its founder, Joao Gilberto, as his “supreme master” and continues to imitate his breathy vocal style today. He opposed rock music and American artistic “imperialism,” but he recorded his first revolutionary music with a rock band. He opposed stagey commercialism, but no one was more theatrical in attracting attention.
Veloso’s major innovation was a kind of cannibalism, a term that dates from the ’20s in Brazilian arts; it took in everything–rock music, concrete poetry, cinema, political protest, an elevated suggestiveness in lyrics, anything at all–and made it Brazilian. In one sense, what he did was the equivalent of Bob Dylan’s going electric at Newport: significant, and with long-reaching effects, but inevitable. It’s that period in his life, when he worked on this “great and beautiful task,” that he focuses on in “Tropical Truth.”
The book, however, falls short of greatness and beauty. Published in Brazil in 1997, it is now translated nicely enough by Isabel de Sena and bears a note that it was edited by Barbara Einzig, but it is, in fact, beyond all editorial remedy. Beginning with two errors of Brazilian history on the first page of the introduction, it is long-winded, dreadfully disorganized, frequently forgetful, careless, contradictory, often mean-spirited and always self-serving.
Veloso’s observations run the gamut from unconsidered to just plain silly. Although he has written and performed rock music from the start of his career to his latest CD, he condemns rock as “unoriginal” and “a rejection of all sophistication.” And could anyone else have ever praised Mick Jagger’s “diction” or found “true savagery” in Paul McCartney’s voice? He condemns the press for its “Machiavellian machinations” and its “mediocrity” but praises as “courageous” one of the most famously corrupt politicians in modern Brazilian history. He declares that he finds “nothing more disagreeable than the exposure of sexual intimacy,” then goes on to share his own, asserting that he would “make a great queer” and that “countless indisputable heterosexuals . . . have far less success with women than I do.” That machismo even leads him, after condemning Elizabeth Bishop for supporting the 1964 military coup, to refer to her disparagingly as “a woman poet at that!” No one is safe from his off-handed unpleasantness. He even declares that his friend and fellow composer, Gilberto Gil, who is black, has “immediate access” to certain aspects of “musical knowledge . . . by virtue of genetics.”
As for the story of tropicalismo itself, the tale is often lost in a wilderness of half-baked and half-digested ideas Veloso borrowed from friends, a small clique of ’60s intellectuals famous only among each other. Everyone who did not share his ideas and support his efforts is portrayed as inadequate at best and evil at worst, while those who worked with him, or at least had the patience to listen, were all geniuses, and all their works and deeds masterpieces and milestones.
In 1964 a military coup brought repression to Brazil and, in 1968, an outright police state. The long-haired, loud-mouthed, deliberately subversive Veloso was arrested, along with Gil and many others in the arts. At this point, oddly, “Tropical Truth” becomes, for 50 pages or so, a straightforward, moving account of imprisonment, interrogation, confusion and fear, one of the best views we have, from the dark inside, of the Brazilian version of dictatorship.
This was followed by three years of velvet exile in London, where Veloso lived comfortably in Chelsea, mixed with all the right people, recorded new songs, continued to write for a Brazilian magazine and visited home twice. “The public,” he admits, “barely noticed our absence.”
Though he is neither the center nor the highest expression of Brazilian popular music, Veloso is certainly a brilliant composer of songs, many of them long regarded as classics and widely recorded by other singers. He is also a major cultural figure who has played a central role, though not as central as he likes to think, in the artistic life of his country for nearly four decades. His story is important, and, at times, even in this very poorly made book, you can hear the authentic voice of Brazil, a country held back by happenstance and struggling to overcome the worst inferiority complex in the history of nations.
Truth, in the tropics, is never simple.
