From cannibalism to logical trash: the tropes of Tropicália

Abstract

When the multidisciplinary movement Tropicália emerged in the late 1960s, critics soon detected its affinities with and debt to antropofagia (cultural cannibalism), the vanguardist movement within Brazilian modernism associated primarily with Oswald de Andrade and his “Manifesto antropófago” (1928). Antropofagia is a complex trope that has been employed to signify vengeance, exploitation, and appropriation, but also resistance, hybridity, and creative dialogue. In association with tropicalist music, antropofagia is most often understood in terms of productive consumption, involving the "devouring" of international rock and related sound technologies in order to produce music both locally grounded and globally informed. The musician Tom Zé, who is often described as the most experimental tropicalist, has developed an alternative myth about the movement, which emphasizes the popular culture of the northeast and the temporal disjunction of this region in relation to coastal urban areas. This myth gained musical expression in 2012 with the release of Tropicália lixo lógico, a concept album that seeks to explain Tropicália as a product of cognitive clash between northeastern popular culture, rooted in medieval Mozarab Iberia, and an Aristotelian logic cultivated in modern Brazil.