Nuevo mundo - Mundos Nuevos (Dec 2015)
De l’art engage à la contre-culture : la scène musicale brésilienne (1969-1974)
Abstract
In the early 1970s, while under military dictatorship, Brazil experienced new music developments linked to counter-cultural ideals. Paradoxically, the Brazilian government helped develop the music industry by massively intervening in the economy. As the prospect of a social revolution was getting less and less likely, some musicians adopted hippie, unconventional or desbundadas attitudes and lifestyles, breaking not only with the established order but also with the traditional ways of committing themselves to the nation. While integrating rock and experimental trends to their works, they claimed and asserted subjectivity together with aesthetic, political and sexual freedoms. The article aims at analyzing these works from the perspective of the artistic figures who interacted with MPB (Brazilian popular music) and Tropicalism, as an acronym and a movement formed in the late 1960s. My main hypothesis is that this counter-culture in popular music – including the then widespread notion of desbunde – notably impacted the kind of nationalist essence that had been dominating the Brazilian artistic field until then.
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