Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture
An analysis of Tropicália, the Brazilian countercultural movement of the late 1960s that features 18 period photos and four pages of color illustrations.
In the late 1960s, Brazilian artists forged a watershed cultural movement known as Tropicália. Music inspired by that movement is today garnering considerable attention at home and abroad. Few new listeners, however, make the connection between this music and the circumstances surrounding its creation, the most violent and repressive days of the military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. With key manifestations in theater, cinema, visual arts, literature, and especially popular music, Tropicália dynamically articulated the conflicts and aspirations of a generation of young, urban Brazilians.
Focusing on a group of musicians from Bahia, an impoverished state in northeastern Brazil noted for its vibrant Afro-Brazilian culture, the book discusses how artists including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Tom Zé created this movement together with the musical and poetic vanguards of São Paulo, Brazil's most modern and industrialized city. The book shows how the tropicalists selectively appropriated and parodied cultural practices from Brazil and abroad in order to expose the fissure between their nation's idealized image as a peaceful tropical "garden" and the daily brutality visited upon its citizens.
Right: Catalogue cover for UNC Press from album cover of Tropcicália, ou Panis et circensis (1968)Publication Date: October 15, 2001
ISBN 0-8078-2651-0 cloth ($55.00)
ISBN 0-8078-4976-6 paper ($19.95)
256 pages; 12 color and 18 b&w illustrations, notes, bibliography, index
