Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil [Anglais] [Relié]

The Brazilian singer/songwriter most highly regarded by the First World intelligentsia, Veloso makes his U.S. publishing debut with a rambling, extremely erudite memoir focusing on his role in the late-1960s musical happening known as Tropic lia. While on the surface, Tropic lia and Veloso (often compared to Bob Dylan) paralleled the U.S. counterculture of the 1960s, the author explains the multilayered context of Brazilian politics and art that made the movement unique. From the innocence of his middle-class youth in the northern state of Bahia, to his stays in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Veloso vividly re-creates his formative years, which were immersed in French new wave cinema, progressive English rock and Brazilian letters, particularly concrete poetry. "What we wanted to do would be... closer to Godard's films," he muses. "Masculin-feminin [sic], with... its adolescent sexuality-I saw it as one more moment in our daily lives in Sao Paulo." That Veloso is well-read is not in question-he cites everyone from Wittgenstein and Proust to Deleuze and Andrew Sullivan, while at the same time introducing non-Brazilian readers to an unknown canon of authors such as poet Augusto de Campos and essayist Oswald de Andrade. If there is any complaint with the book, it is that Veloso can get caught up in a maze of sometimes unconnected ideas that obscure his lucid descriptions of the intricacies of Brazilian music and its often equally literate stars. However, this is a must for Brazilian music fans, as well as anyone interested in how the modernist age played out in South America.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In the eyes of the world, Veloso defines, symbolizes, and spearheads contemporary Brazilian music, which continues to grow in popularity in the U.S and elsewhere. Many listeners of international pop music have only recently gotten acquainted with his work, but the truth is, he certainly is not new on the scene. Veloso's career began in the 1960s, and he is credited as one of the founders and shapers of tropicalismo, the Brazilian musical form that succeeded bossa nova. His book is not, strictly speaking, an autobiography but more a personal history of tropicalismo. Hailing from the Brazilian state of Bahia, Veloso had an arts inclination from childhood; even as he began to make a mark as a singer-songwriter, he maintained interests in writing and filmmaking. His account is important in understanding--from the inside--the socioeconomic and political as well as musical threads woven into tropicalismo. Unfortunately, Veloso's wordy and indirect prose style will limit the book's appeal to only the most devoted of his fans. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"An excellent first-person narrative of that frightening and fantastic time in MPB...by its main mover." --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Broché .

Inadequately described as the John Lennon or the Bob Dylan of his country, Caetano Veloso has virtually personified Brazilian music for thirty-five years. Now, in his long-awaited memoir, he tells the heroic story of how, in the late sixties, he and a group of friends from the Northeastern state of Bahia created tropicalismo, the movement that shook Brazilian culture--and civic order--to its foundations and pushed a nation then on the margins of world politics and economics into the pop avant-garde.

Tropical Truth begins with a childhood in the Bahian hinterland, where Caetano (as Brazilians of all ages now call him) first heard not only the musical traditions of his own country and her Latin neighbors, but also the giants of postwar American song: Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Chet Baker, to name but a few. While teenagers in America would soon be enthralled by the primal (and commercial) beat of rock’n’roll, in Brazil it was bossa nova, that sublimely sophisticated music, that was to become the soundtrack of a generation. Inspired above all by bossa nova’s supreme master, João Gilberto, Caetano and his crew would set about creating a totally new sound. Tropicalismo would aim to “cannibalize” the extraordinary beauty and richness of Brazil’s musical past but at the same time to assimilate eclectically the most original elements of Anglo-American pop, an influence many rejected as yet another form of imperialism corrupting Brazil’s “authentic” character.

The birth of tropicalismo coincided with the wave of counterculture sweeping Western nations, but in Brazil that wave would hit the breakwaters of a brutal military junta. While supporting resistance to right-wing oppression (and the terrible social inequities it perpetuated) the tropicalistas nevertheless rejected the automatic connection to the Left and its unreflective nationalism, then the politics de rigueur of the artistic class. Their third way foresaw a Brazil open to free markets but likewise free in itself. It was a vision so subversive of both the political and musical status quo that before long Caetano faced imprisonment and was then forced into exile until the early seventies. But when he returned, it was in triumph: Brazil, no less than the state of her popular music, would never be the same.

Rich with the satisfactions of a novel, weaving the story of a country with that of its most idealistic generation, Tropical Truth recounts the odyssey of a brilliant constellation of artists: Caetano and his sister Maria Bethânia, the queen of Brazilian song; the black musical genius Gilberto Gil, Caetano's closest collaborator, with whom he was jailed and then banished; the great diva Gal Costa; the revolutionary filmmaker Glauber Rocha; the brothers de Campos, those luminaries of concrete poetry, who were among the tropicalistas’ learned mentors. Here is an unparalleled confluence of highbrow and pop, and with it the genesis of what has become one of the most wildly successful cultural exports ever produced by a nation other than the United States.
By turns erudite and playful, dreamlike and confessional, Tropical Truth is an utterly unexpected revelation of Brazil's most famous artist, one of the greatest popular composers of the past century.

Caetano Veloso was born in 1942 in Santo Amaro da Purificaçâo, Bahia, Brazil. He lives in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro.