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It was exactly 40 years ago that the musical revolution that came to be known as Tropicália was introduced to Brazil, and the world. Tropicália's genesis can be dated with some precision. It came when two musicians in their mid-twenties, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, courageously took to the stage at a 1967 song festival in São Paulo with compositions that they knew would sorely stress the boundaries of musical taste.
Their performance was epoch-defining. It was a kind of big bang from which much that came afterward in Brazilian pop music history evolved.
In part to needle what he expected to be a conservative audience, Veloso had selected an eccentric, long-haired band of Argentine rockers for his backup band, at a time when long hair was still nearly taboo, and delivered a song, "Alegria, Alegria", or "Happiness, Happiness", which electrified the booing audience into silence.
"Alegria, Alegria" was an unmistakable departure from Brazil's songwriting tradition. It was an erudite reworking of archaic genres (the song is set to the rhythm of a marchinha, an Afro-Brazilian form influenced by ragtime in the '20s) organized around a trinity of electric guitar chords.
The song's contemporary references to Coca Cola and television, and the absence of comfortable nostalgia or sentimentalism, marked it as an unmistakable artifact of the sharp-edged, uncertain present in a Brazil of military dictatorships and political ferment.
The next day, at the same festival, Veloso's partner in crime, Gil, sang an equally provocative tune, "Domingo no Parque", or "Sunday in the Park". The lyrics centered on a double-murder committed by a jealous lover, and the musical arrangement was clearly influenced by the Beatles.
The song also contained the ubiquitous sounds of a berimbau, a traditional, resonating instrument of African origin made of a gourd, a wooden bow and a metal string. Gil was backed by a large orchestra and youthful São Paulo rockers Os Mutantes. His performance was a novel melding of tradition and the cutting-edge.
The two musicians had intentionally set out to trigger a musical upheaval, and they succeeded. Their movement, Tropicália, went on to sweep away the petty divisions that up to then had divided Brazilian rockers from bossa nova die-hards and old school samba crooners. Tropicália would combine the...