Mpb Quotes

“In fact what estranged me most from rock, and from that entire impulse toward Americanization, was that it reached me without carrying any trace of rebellion.”
― Caetano Veloso, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil

“I could not help remembering that I myself had uttered to a journalist in 1967, during the dawn of tropicalismo, a sentence that Tom Zé would soon use in a song resonant with the movement: "I am Bahian and I am a foreigner." In fact, we had understood that in order to do what we believed necessary, we had to rid ourselves of Brazil as we knew it. We had to destroy the Brazil of the nationalists, we had to go deeper and pulverize the image of Brazil as being exclusively identified with Rio.”
― Caetano Veloso, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil

“My idle dreams of leaving behind what I was already doing professionally in order to study, to direct films, or to write receded with the shock of prison and exile. I simply lacked the strength even to adumbrate an act of will. The bell that had rung as I was falling asleep that morning the police had come to take me away had so deeply left its mark that I was still trembling at the sound of the doorbell in Chelsea. So it was impossible for me to dare do anything I might wish. And insofar as there was growing receptivity to what I did among my fellow professionals in London, a simple instinct for survival bound me to the activity in which I was already installed. I would stay home listening to Gil play, at times playing myself, watching television, reading, and above all conversing with people who came by. I was always chatty, but my happiness did not last even until my head hit the pillow. There was always something to feel ashamed of. And I didn't know how to get out of this.”
― Caetano Veloso, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil

“E o que muda o mundo é a chance de Aladim”
― Luli

“Rio. Not only are the Blacks and the Indians slaves to the technology of the Whites, but they also have to be slaves of their nostalgia for origins. They have to fill the role of ancestor to the human race and bear witness to its mysterious and ritualistic origins. A division of labour: some exploit them physically, while others exploit them culturally, feeding on their music, their dance and their description within anthropology. There is no contradiction in this. Indeed it is quite the reverse: the slaves collude in all this themselves. In hunting, the whole animal is put to use: meat, horns, hair, blood and fur - even the entrails will serve to read the future and the mask will serve as emblem of the deity.

There are of course happier things you can say about Brazil. In particular, that a part of the happiness and the sensuality, the vital languor and the maternal seduction of everything here - in spite of the objective misery - derives precisely from that coupling of master and slave, which extends as far as the abduction of women and vital energy and as far as the absorption by all of the ritual signs of servitude. This is the revenge of the cultural order on the political, something which no longer occurs within Western societies, perhaps for want of sufficiently subtle slaves. Here time maintains a unity, is a time that lends itself to living, in its monotonous, languorous unfolding, the bodies all mingling together, both the master's and the slave's, even though the master tortures the slave and the slave devours the master. But perhaps all this is merely due to the heat.

The heat is like an objective sleep. There is no need for sleep here because it already envelops you like a dream, like a veiled form of the unconscious. Nothing is repressed. Everything is in the insane agitation of molecules. This is the way it is in the Tropics: violence itself is lazy and the subconscious takes on the form of dance. Hence the absurdity of psychoanalysis in these latitudes. It is a parody connected with European privilege, part of the colonial heritage. But in fact, what is the state of the unconscious for us, in Europe itself?”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“The fact that MPB (Brazilian Popular Music) would come to concentrate the energy of this generation only confirms the power of the tradition that made bossa nova possible: in fact, MPB has been, for Brazilians as well as for foreigners, the sound of the discovery of a dreamt-of Brazil. [...] MPB proves to be the most efficient weapon for the affirmation of the Portuguese language in the world, when one considers how many unsuspected lovers it has won through the magic of the word sung in the Brazilian way.”
― Caetano Veloso, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil

“At times, through the years, I have heard Gil say, and been deeply moved by it, that when he met me he felt as though he were leaving behind a great loneliness: when he saw me he was sure that he had found a true companion.”
― Caetano Veloso, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil