CAETANO VELOSO: "Tropicália"

Edição Original em LP PHILIPS R 765.026 L 

(Brasil, Março 1968)

Try to explain Caetano Veloso to an Anglo-American audience and you end up constructing some fabulous hybrid of Brian Wilson, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Syd Barrett, John Lennon, and Bob Marley. The English-speaking pop world does not really have a Caetano Veloso, which is probably why the likes of Beck, Kurt Cobain, and David Byrne have worshipped him. Androgynous, profoundly intellectual, yet gloriously irreverent, he performs to packed soccer stadiums while playing unashamedly highbrow music. This self-titled solo debut (after an album called “Domingo” that he had recorded the year before with Gal Costa) was a key text in the formation of Tropicalia, a slyly seditious pop art movement of late 1960s Brazil. Veloso unwittingly unified a mix of leftish poets, painters, dramatists, and film-makers with his defiantly Brazilian response to the “neo-rock” of The Beatles. It is bossa nova played by psychedelic rockers and orchestrated by classical composers, complicated by horn arrangements and baroque vocal harmonies. The music is stunning – the wobbly psychedelic rock of “Clarice”, the haunting, complex chord changes of “Clara”, the jaunty Che Guevara tribute “Soy Loco Por Ti, América” – but even those who do not speak a word of Portuguese may be intrigued by Veloso’s concrete poetry lyrics. Brzil’s teenagers loved it; the military dictatorship of the time did not. Within two years Veloso was forced out of Brazil into exile in London, something that only confirmed his legendary status and propagated a remarkable career. (John Lewis in “1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die”)