Today Gilberto Gil is a musical legend and Brazil's Minister of Culture, but in 1965, he was a budding bossa nova singer and guitar player in the rural Bahia region, drawn to the action in Sao Paulo. "I was young and very enthusiastic about sharing our country views," says Gilberto.
The previous year, Humberto Branco had taken over the government in a military coup, recessed the Congress, and started cracking down on leftists and political rivals. At the same time, hordes of idealistic youth like Gil poured into the capital, bringing fresh ideas and creative new directions in music, film, and art - and challenging the military dictatorship.
"We were absorbing the whole ecstatic revolution that was going on in Europe and the States," says Gil, who, with Caetano Veloso, was one of the founders of Tropicalia, a musical movement born in 1967, which fused bossa nova with Brazilian folk music, rock, and political and social messages. At the same time, the Tropicalia art movement was exploring new directions in graphics and architecture, while Cinema Novo (New Cinema) directors were exposing the country's vast poverty.
The new generation of Brazilian artists absorbed everything from campus protests in Berkeley and Black Panther rhetoric to the French New Wave and Norman Mailer as they formulated their own contributions to the late-60s creative explosion. "At that time, things arrived in Brazil almost as a kaleidoscope, bits and pieces of information," says Sergio Dias, a founding member of Os Mutantes, who took Tropicalia in a psychedelic direction in the late 60s, and cites the Beatles and the Beach Boys as musical inspirations. "We tried to put it together the best we could, so that probably created our music - that's why it's so crazy." In 1969, Gil and Veloso were arrested for anti-government activities, then exiled to London, where they collaborated with members of Yes and Pink Floyd.
Musically, Tropicalia's influence is heard today in music by David Byrne and Beck - whose 1998 album Mutations is named for Os Mutantes and includes the single "Tropicalia" - but Gilberto suggests the movement's greatest legacy is its "revolutionary, challenging attitude."
"That was a very special time in terms of the whole planet," says Gilberto, who has come full-circle as a member of leftist President Luiz Ignacio Lula Da Silva's cabinet. "We were entering a new time and societies all over the world were more prepared to demand and establish what they wanted as a lifestyle - and that boom all over the world was the initial movement of what we now call globalization."
