Tropicália

Recorded in 1967 and placed first on his 1968 album, it was produced by Manoel Barenbein and arranged by Júlio Medaglia, with the Beat Boys playing. It opens with the percussionist Dirceu reading a parody of Pêro Vaz de Caminha's letter of 1500 to the King of Portugal, the founding text of Brazilian literature, which names the Gauss of that time as its scribe: Rogério Gauss was the album's engineer. Bird cries and percussion set the scene. Medaglia, a musician from the classical world, recalled that he first expected Caetano to have a conventional career, then saw that his ambitions were far larger. Rolling Stone Brasil wrote that the arrangement made the movement's intentions plain, and Caetano has said that tropicalismo wanted to mix things and to leave room for experiment.

Caetano finished the song before it had a name. At a lunch in São Paulo the photographer and film producer Luiz Carlos Barreto heard it and suggested Tropicália, after Hélio Oiticica's 1967 installation of tropical plants, sand and structures evoking self-built favelas. Caetano did not know Oiticica's work, and in Verdade Tropical he wrote that the title seemed to shrink the song to a mere place on the map. His manager Guilherme Araújo liked it, and he kept it, meaning to change it, and never did.

Meaning and afterlife

It is a list-song in the manner of Noel Rosa's Coisas nossas, raising a monument to a contradictory Brazil on the central plateau where Brasília stands. It names Carmen Miranda, quotes Roberto Carlos and Chico Buarque's A Banda, borrows from the old songs Luar do Sertão and Olhos Verdes, and nods to Louis Malle's film Viva Maria!. Rolling Stone Brasil placed it 21st among the greatest Brazilian songs, and Bravo! sixth among essential ones. Gal Costa recorded it, and Beck's 1998 Tropicalia is a different song inspired by the movement.

Caetano has kept it in his shows: a live version appears on Noites do Norte Ao Vivo (2001), he released a live recording with Hiran in 2020, and it was in the set when he and Bethânia opened their tour in Rio in August 2024. The upload in the hypersongs web is the original 1967 studio recording in a 2006 remaster.