It's forbidden to forbid.

• Author: Dunn, Christopher
• Position: The impact of the 1960's art movement Tropicalismo on Brazilian culture

"Voces estao entendendo nada, nada absolutamente nada!" For Caetano Veloso the students at the 1968 International Music Festival in Sao Paulo just weren't getting it, they understood absolutely nothing about his music. Clad in plastic clothes, electric cords wrapped around his neck, swiveling his hips, shaking his long, Medusa-like hair, Caetano's outburst came in the middle of his highly provocative song, "E Proibido Proibir" (It's Forbidden to Forbid), which was inspired by a slogan of the May student uprisings in Paris. Caetano had appropriated the term to drive home a point about creative freedom to a public which was unwilling to accept electric guitars, rock'n'roll-influenced songs, or any other elements of Anglo-American youth culture.

Twenty-five years later Caetano remembers: "The students reacted against what we were doing because it wasn't within the behavioral limits of the left-wing composer of popular music. I knew it was going to cause a scandal. I knew they were going to react badly. To be sincere I provoked them. It was a happening." Caetano's diatribe against the young audience was perhaps the most celebrated spontaneous "happening" in the Brazilian cultural scene of 1968 and has been quoted often in the years since. The impromptu speech reached a crescendo backed by the atonal, almost punk strains of Os Mutantes, an avant-rock band from Sao Paulo, as the crowd booed wildly and threw garbage on the stage: "If you're the same in politics as you are in aesthetics, we're done for!"

These were dangerous times in Brazil. The "revolution" which had installed a right-wing military regime was four years old. The symbolic passeatas (protest marches) against the regime were giving way to urban guerilla warfare. In December, 1968, the government of President Arthur da Costa e Silva responded by declaring the Institutional Act V which established a rigorous censorship of the arts and media. The decree was followed by the mass detention of left-wing student leaders, labor organizers, and of course, outspoken, high-profile artists such as Caetano Veloso and his partner, Gilberto Gil, who were promptly arrested and later sent packing to London.

Until their exile, Caetano and Gil were at the center of a cultural movement dubbed by the media as Tropicalismo. In the mid-1960s they had joined forces with a handfull of co-conspirators from their home state of Bahia, including Tom Ze, Gal Costa and Jose Carlos Capinam, and descended upon Sao Paulo. There they hooked up with the Os Mutantes and the vanguard erudite composers Rogerio Duprat and Julio Medaglia. The young Bahians also made contact with the inventors of Concrete Poetry, Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, who would become their intellectual mentors and principle defenders in the Brazilian press.

The Tropicalistas' peculiar mixture of national genres from bossa nova to baiao with rock, tango, rumba, and bolero revitalized and forever transformed popular Brazilian music. Ironically, their most virulent critics were left-wing students, artists and critics who rejected any real or perceived capitulation to cultural imports. Following the military coup of 1964, the jazzy sounds of bossa nova, pioneered by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joao Gilberto in the late-1950s, fell out of favor with the politically engaged urban youth who preferred acoustic protest music. Brazilian protest music was an extension of a larger cultural movement organized by a network of Centros Populares de Cultura or CPC (Peoples Centers of Culture) which sought to mobilize workers and students through "revolutionary and consequential" art. Although the fledgling military regime put an end to the CPCs, the protest culture flourished.

At the other end of the pop music spectrum was the Jovem Guarda, or Young Guard, which achieved massive success with their Brazilianized rock diddies. Roberto Carlos, today a huge star of romantic music, was the undisputed king of what was popularly...