Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World Read Free

in the end, the group that ultimately preached most passionately in bossa nova’s name was in many ways the most improbable of its disciples.
    Led by two extremely articulate young singer-songwriters, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, the late-sixties pop movement known as
tropicalismo
(or
Tropicália
) seemed at first glance to fly in the face of everything bossa nova was about. Voraciously eclectic, the
tropicalistas
threw rural accordion music, outdated torch songs, jingles, Stockhausen, and the howl of machinery into their mix of sounds, often combining them to jarring effect in a single song. Most provocative of all, they even took up the electric guitars of
ye-ye-ye
, despised as imperialist noise by their artistic peers.
Tropicália
was, in short, an affront to the decorum bossa nova had made an art of, and it was booed off more than one stage by audiences who took it upon themselves to defend bossa nova’s lingering standards of good taste.
    And yet, in interview after interview, Veloso and Gil insisted they had come not to bury bossa nova but to carry on its modernizing work. Although they regularly cited the Beatles as an influence, they invoked more often the name of João Gilberto, in whose voice and guitar they still heard the sounds of an undiscovered country. For them, though, that country was no longer the Brazil of a space-age, First World future. It was a Brazil that looked its contradictions squarely in the face—its sophistication and its barbarity, its FirstWorld dreams and its Third World lives—and made something beautifully, arrestingly true out of them. What the
tropicalistas
were doing, as they saw it, was simply taking the quiet clash of realities in Gilberto’s hypermodern roots music and amplifying it. They were taking the suave humor in the Gilberto/Jobim hit “Desafinado” (Off-Key)—a winking apology for those whose sense of harmony diverges from the norm—and turning it into a celebration of cultural dissonance in all its forms. Or as Veloso once put it, in a song critical of those who would reduce bossa nova to a set of formal rules: “The truth is that we learned from João forever to be out of tune.”
    As it happens, the
tropicalistas’
reinvention of bossa nova is one chapter of the story that you won’t find in this book. But just knowing something of its terms may add to the pleasure of reading what is rightly
Bossa Nova
’s heart, soul, and narrative backbone: the unlikely rise of João Gilberto from hopeless dreamer to his current stature as one of the great geniuses of pop-song history. Castro deftly mythologizes the five-year-long
via crucis
of nervous breakdowns and quasi-homelessness that led to Gilberto’s discovery of the sacred beat, shaping it into a saga that thrills all on its own. But its thrills are that much deeper if you picture Gilberto pursuing not just a beat, or a style, but a more perfect feel for the shape of an imperfect modernity.
    That, after all, is something American listeners can surely relate to. And that, finally, is what this book teaches us: not just who
really
invented bossa nova, but why we need to start hearing it as more than just a mood. Lord knows we’re ready to. Rock’s claim on the future of popular music expired some time ago, and amid the scramble of new, competing claims, there are inevitably some that look to the immediate pre-rock past for inspiration. Thus it is that lounge lovers, jazz revanchists, and other kindred camps, God bless them all, have begun the long-overdue rethinking of bossa nova’s banishment to the background. But the process remains far from complete. For while there’s nothing wrong with loving bossa nova for its leopard-print retro charms or as a souvenir from jazz’s last real brush with mass appeal, we’ll never really know what bossa nova can offer us until we find out what it offered Brazilians. And that, perhaps, is nothing more or less than what the last century’s greatest art usually offered: