“E onde queres romântico, burguês”

Abstract

Caetano Veloso is the paradigmatic representative of a tradition in Brazilian popular music: songwriters who, because they rely on metalinguistic procedures, blur the boundary between high art and pop art, and thus require interpretation. With Gilberto Gil and other artists in the tropicália movement, in the late sixties, Veloso created an esthetics of fragmentation, resorting both to the sophisticated and cool repertoire of bossa nova and to the popular music based on excess and sentimentality.