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Caetano Veloso or the Taste for Hybrid Language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
Like many sociocultural phenomena in Brazil, popular music, as everyone knows, is the result of a meeting of influences. It could almost be said that it is born a cross-breed, given the half-European, half-African origins of its best-known first genres, lundu, choro and maxixe. As a result of its history it comes under the sign of the Cannibalism, the metaphor invented by modernist writers in the 1920s to refer to the ‘ritual devouring’ by which Brazil assimilated foreign values and made them its own.
Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil readily used the concept of Cannibalism at the end of the 1960s, when they founded Tropicalismo, which claimed a mixture of genres, styles and arts as its basis, and married international pop music and Brazilian traditions, electric guitars and berimbau. Tropicalismo as such only lasted for a few months, but the ideas which it promoted profoundly marked contemporary Brazilian culture. Caetano Veloso returned to the history of this movement in Verdade Tropical, an autobiographical work in which he reveals his thoughts on a number of subjects close to his heart: music, the cinema, masters/teachers, friends, family, love, sexuality freedom, prison, exile, books, language, etc. For this author, composer, performer, actor, director, poet and prose writer, inveterate and voracious reader and incorrigible chatterbox, anything to do with human beings is fair game. For Caetano loves words, and loves to talk about words. As early as the acknowledgements page he praises Unamuno, the author, according to him, of comments which are “the most moving that a foreigner has ever written about the Portuguese language”. And in a chapter entitled ‘Língua’ he mentions not only the songs he has written in English and his interest in the Anglo-Saxon language, but also his attachment to Romance languages in general and Portuguese in particular.
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References
Notes
1. See the article by Luciana Stegagno Picchio, ‘Brazilian cannibalism: myth and literature', Diogenes 144, October-December 1988.
2. The New York Times commissioned Caetano Veloso to write a article on Tropicalismo and the place of Brazilian culture in the world. In the end he wrote a book, which was published in 1997 in São Paulo by Companhia das Letras and later in the USA.
3. These lines are also Caetano's allusions to the musicians he worked with and refer, respectively, to a love affair which one of them had in the Brazilian Northeast, and to the Italian and Portuguese origins of Ricardo Cristaldi and Otávio Fialho. My thanks to José Miguel Wisnik for having explained, amongst other things, these private jokes.
4. C. Lévi Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Paris: Plon, Collection ‘Terre Humaine', 1955, p. 117. Is it because Portuguese patronymics are so similar that Brazilians give their imagination free rein when choosing fore names, culling them from all available sources: antiquity (Sócrates, Júlio César, Cyro), the Middle Ages (Hermenegildo, Abelardo, Clóvis), history and culture (Vitor Hugo, Wagner, Wellington, Napoleão) and the indigenous population (Peri, Iara, Moacyr, Moema …)?.
5. "I will not put bebop in my samba/until Uncle Sam plays the tambourine/takes over a pandeiro and a zabumba/ stops confusing the samba and the rumba. /Then I will mix Miami with Copacabana/ I will mix chewing gum with banana/ (…) I want samba-rock, my brother/ I want to see great confusion." Chiclete com Banana by Gordurinha and Almira Castilho was a great success for Jackson do Pandeiro and later for Gilberto Gil. At the same time, Caetano coins a bilingual portmanteau word (chic-left), probably the equivalent of ‘champagne socialists'.
6. Deixa isso pra lá by Alberto Paz and Edson Menezes, brought the young Jair Rodrigues to prominence in 1964.
7. "Floresça, fale, cante, ouça-se e viva/ a portuguesa lingua, e, lá onde for,/ senhora vá de si, soberba e altiva./ Se té qui esteve baixa e sem louvor/ culpa é dos que a mal exercitaram,/ esquecimento nosso e desamor", in ‘Carta a Pero d'Andrade Caminha', Poemas Lusitanos, Coimbra: Atlântida, 1961, p. 97. [The translation quoted is by Georges Le Gentil, La littérature portugaise, Paris: Éd. Chandeigne, 1995, p. 61.]
8. "Tem de todas as línguas o melhor: a pronunciação do Latim, a origem da Grega, a familiaridade da Castlhana, a brandura da Francesa, a elegância da Italiana. [ … ] E para que diga tudo, só um mal tem: e é que, pelo pouco que lhe querem seus naturais, a trazem mais remendada que capa de pedinte", F. R. Lobo, Corte na Aldeia, Diálogo I, Lisbonne, Ulisséia, p. 85.
9. "Última flor do Lácio, inculta e bela/ És, a um tempo, esplendor e sepultura:/ Ouro nativo, que na ganga impura/ A bruta mina entre os cascalhos vela … // Amo-te assim, desconhecida e obscura/ Tuba de alto clangor, lira singela,/ Que tens o trom e o silvo da procela/ E o arrolo da saudade e da ternura!// Ano o teu viço agreste e o teu aroma/ De virgens selvas e de oceano largo! / Amo-te, ó rude e doloroso idioma, // Em que da voz materna ouvi: "Meu filho!"/, E em que Camões chorou, no exílio amargo,/ O gênio sem ventura e o amor sem brilho!" Poesias, 1902.
10. In Eduardo Lourenço, Imagem e Miragem da Lusofonia, Lisbonne: Gradiva, 1999, p. 143.
11. "Suspecte lusophonie", Le Monde, 18 March 2000.
12. F. Pessoa, Le Livre de l'Intranquillité, Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1999, p. 270.