Sunday, June 8, 2008

Surrealism- Tropicália Edition...

...is cancelled. After some research on the ultimate authority, I realised that Tropicalism is inspired by concrete poetry, which rejects "expressionism, perhaps, lyric abstraction and randomness". So instead, here are some songs where "there is no intimism or worry about the subject, the obligation is to end up with the distinction between body and concept and create a new language."

So basically the movement has very little to do with the notion of surrealism, or even absurdism, given the lyrics of the following songs, which I painfully checked last night for appropriate general nonsense. A good example of playing with language is the song Bat Macumba (the lyrics are featured in the Museum of portuguese Language in São Paulo), which works a bit like a mirror, lyrically.
1 to 4 have what I consider to be surrealistic lyrics, whereas 5 to 7 are more about the sound of the words.

09 Tropic
07 Baby.mp3
14 Baby (1968).mp3
16 Panis Et Circenses.mp3
03 Bat Macumba.mp3
11 Jimmy, Renda-se.mp3
05 Dor e dor.mp3

6 comments:

ejaydee said...

The first song should be Tropicalia, not Tropic.

steenbeck said...

Fascinating...I love the idea of an art movement coming out of a certain place based on specific principles. When we were teenagers we used to write "manifestos." And it sounds like this one has a written and a MUSICAL manifesto. I love the idea of antropofagia, as I understand it. Interesting that it extended to a movement in Brazilian cinema as well. I'll have to look into that. This also puts the album Tropicalia 2, which I have and like but didn't know anything about, into perspective. Haiti, the song they mention on Wiki is my fav song from it, and I'm glad to learn more about it. Oh, and I like the music, too. Thanks for posting, sorry I listened too late to dondle it all up on RR.

ejaydee said...

NO problem, I only recommended Panis Et Circenses on the Mothership. Like Maddy, I started making sense of a lot songs and at the same time got surrealed out. I actually don't know the Tropicalia 2 album. It's intriguing though because the music Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil made in the 80's is very different from the earlier stuff. I wonder how it translates when the context and the circumstances are different. I should also add that these aren't the best songs, but the ones I thought were more surrealistic until I knew better.

steenbeck said...

I'd be interested to hear more--what you consider more of the 'Best songs.' I looked into Cinema Novo and found it really inspiring. A camera in our hand and an idea in our head--that was their motto, apparently. It's compared with a lot of film movements that I love and wish I had been a part of. I couldn't find any whole films on netflix, but I found some clips on youTube and it looked visually very interesting. Couldn't understand a word, of course.

ejaydee said...

Well Dor E Dor is one of my favourites. Cinema Novo looks like it relates to what was going on around the same time in the rest of the world, which is an idea I like.

steenbeck said...

In an article I read it was compared to the French New Wave...wait, here's a quote, because I couldn't remember it all...
Cinema Novo was contemporary withthe French nouvelle vague, the independent cinema of North America, British free cinema, Spanish and Argentine nuevo cine, Cuban revolutionary cinema, the birth of Black African cinema and movements of renewal in countries as different as Japan and Czechoslovakia.

One thing I really love about all of them is that they reject bloated production values and the notion that you must have millions of dollars to make a film, but they're still very interested in the way that it looks--more than a lot of much more expensive mainstream films. And they're political, too. I really do find it inspiring--makes me want to make a movie!!

Glauber Rocha sounds very interesting...it seems he was a big fan of manifestos. I saw some clips of his films on youTube.