Tropicalia

Music, as you know, has always been very important to me and since I've retired I've enjoyed a very rich and rewarding experience of diving deep into music on an almost daily basis. Even though I rarely (meaning almost never) go to live shows any more, I get just as much satisfaction by exploring an artist's or a genre's catalog while browsing through Spotify, Bandcamp and YouTube.  

I went through a period of exploring minimalism (Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, etc.), Blue Note soul jazz (Stanley Turrentine, Freddy Hubbard, Lee Morgan, Les McCann, etc.), vintage reggae (Gregory Isaacs, Althea & Donna, Ranking Trevor, Lee Perry & the Upsetters, etc.), Australian improvisers (The Necks, Oren Ambarchi, etc.), and the 20th Century lesbian composers (Pauline Oliveros, Ione, Annea Lockwood, Ruth Anderson, etc.).

For the past month or so, I've been listening almost exclusively to Brazilian music, particularly the tropicalia movement of the 1970s.  My gateway to this music was probably David Byrne's Brazil Classics 1: Beleza Tropica anthology back in the 1990s.  I enjoyed that record immensely and played it in heavy rotation well into the 2000s. My interest in the genre was maintained by Seu Jorge's Portuguese covers of David Bowie songs for the soundtrack of the 2004 Wes Anderson film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.  But it wasn't until June 2023 that I did a deep dive into the catalog of the artists represented on these records.

The effort was wonderfully rewarding. The music is so lively and sunny and life affirming that it's like having pure, unadulterated sunshine shot straight up your ass with a flashlight.  This music makes me happy. It makes me laugh. It makes me want to dance and it makes me want to play it over and over again.

Tropicalia isn't a genre of music - it was actually a protest movement by various young Brazilian rock and samba practitioners against the military regime that ruled Brazil in the 1970s. The tropicalists merged Brazilian samba with psychedelic rock, jazz, and the avant garde and anything else they could find, creating an extremely diverse range of sounds and styles.  I can't post a "typical" tropicalia song because such a thing doesn't exist - it would take at least a dozen tracks (or a complete listening to Byrne's Brazil Classics) to get any idea of the breadth of the music. 

Gilberto Gil is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the movement, although he would probably modestly point to his friend Caetano Veloso as the title holder. But I understand that David Byrne was inspired to start documenting the tropicalia movement when he stumbled across a copy of the Tom Zé album Estudando o Samba ("Studies in Samba" or literally "Studying the Samba"). My June 2023 deep dive back into tropicalia started when Four Tet (Kieren Hebden) posted Tom Zé's instrumental Toc from Estudando on his 2,000-song Spotify playlist.  So instead of posting my favorite Gilberto Gil track (as if there were one single track that stood out above all of his other incredible work), here's Ogodô, Ano 2000 by Tom Zé, not a track from Estudando but from Brazil Classics, Vol. 5: The Hips of Tradition, his "comeback" album produced by David Byrne.

Tom Zé is a consummate trickster, the Loki in the pantheon of tropicalia gods, and it's a fool's task to try and "explain" him, but Ogodô is Xango Agodô, a god or spirit in the Brazilian Umbanda religion. The polytheistic religion was created when African slaves brought their traditional beliefs to Brazil and mixed them with Catholicism, much as later Brazilian tropicalists mixed traditional Brazilian samba with various contemporary styles. The lyrics are mostly just an invocation of the name "Ogodô" over and over again, followed by some nonsense syllables mimicking the sounds of the instruments - "talac-tac-tac-TAC - tambourine" and "toloc-knock-knock-KNOCK - agogô" (a Brazilian percussion instrument). The bridge is sung in Portuguese and then repeated in heavily accented English: "The science in her trance will make the sign of (the) cross and we will light bonfires to appreciate the electric bulb."

Make of that what you will. Here's a recent, stripped-down, unplugged version of Ogodô. I'm convinced that the Brazilians do indeed have access to the Fountain of Youth - Zé is 55 in the performance up above, and here he is in 2020 at the age of 84, remarkably spry and good-natured despite uncooperative pants and a recalcitrant mike stand.

In closing, I just want to reemphasize that there is no common sound or style to tropicalia other than a percussive trace of samba, but you'll never get that out from Brazilain musicians - samba is in their very DNA. Each song from the movement is as unique in its own way as Ogodô is from almost everything else. I'll have to post more of these songs in the future to do justice to the diversity of the music.