Caetano Veloso

Caetano Emanuel Viana Teles Veloso (Brazilian Portuguese: [kajˈtɐnu emɐnuˈɛw viˈɐnɐ ˈtɛliz veˈlozu]; born 7 August 1942) is a Brazilian singer-songwriter, musician and political activist. Veloso first became known for his participation in the Brazilian musical movement Tropicália, which encompassed theatre, poetry and music in the 1960s, at the beginning of the Brazilian military dictatorship that took power in 1964. He has remained a constant creative influence and best-selling performing artist and composer ever since. Veloso has won nineteen Brazilian Music Awards, nine Latin Grammy Awards and two Grammy Awards. On 14 November 2012, Veloso was honored as the Latin Recording Academy Person of the Year.

Veloso was one of seven children born into the family of José Telles Veloso (commonly known as Seu Zeca), a government official, and Claudionor Viana Telles Veloso (known as Dona Canô). He was born in the city of Santo Amaro da Purificação, in Bahia, a state in northeastern Brazil, but moved to Salvador, the state capital, as a college student in the mid-1960s. Soon after that, Veloso won a music contest and was signed to his first label. He became one of the originators of Tropicália with several like-minded musicians and artists—including his sister Maria Bethânia—in the same period. However, the Brazilian military dictatorship viewed Veloso's music and political action as threatening, and he was arrested, along with fellow musician Gilberto Gil, in 1969. The two eventually were exiled from Brazil and went to London where they lived for two years. In 1972, Veloso moved back to his home country and once again began recording and performing. He later became popular outside Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s.

Veloso was born in Santo Amaro da Purificação, Bahia, Brazil, the fifth of seven children of José Teles Veloso (1901–1983) and Claudionor Viana Teles Veloso (1907–2012). His childhood was influenced greatly by artistic endeavors: he was interested in both literature and filmmaking as a child, but focused mainly on music. The musical style of bossa nova and João Gilberto, one of its most prominent exponents, were major influences on Veloso's music as he grew up. Veloso was 17 years old when he first heard Gilberto, whom he describes as his "supreme master". He recognizes Gilberto's contribution to Brazilian music as new—"illuminating" the tradition of Brazilian music and paving the way for future innovation. Veloso moved to the Bahian port city of Salvador as a teenager, the city in which Gilberto lived, and a center of Afro-Brazilian culture and music.

In 1965, Veloso moved again to Rio de Janeiro, with his sister Maria Bethânia, also a musician. Shortly after the move, Veloso won a lyrics contest for his composition "Um Dia" and was signed to Philips Records. On 21 October 1967, Veloso won fourth prize and gained a standing ovation at the third annual Brazil Popular Music Festival with his song "Alegria, Alegria". on which he was backed by São Paulo group Beat Boys; along with the performance of his friend Gilberto Gil, who was backed by psychedelic band Os Mutantes, this marked the first time that rock bands had performed at the festival. During this period, Veloso, Bethânia, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Tom Zé, and Os Mutantes developed "Tropicalismo", which fused Brazilian pop with rock and roll and avant-garde music. Veloso describes the movement as a wish to be different - not "defensive" like the right-wing Brazilian military government, which vehemently opposed the movement. Although Gil and Veloso's performances at the 1967 MBP Festival were rapturously received, within a year, Tropicalismo had become a deeply divisive issue among Brazil's youth audience, with Marxist-influenced college students of the Brazilian left wing condemning Tropicalismo, because they believed it commercialized Brazilian traditional music by incorporating musical influence from other cultures, specifically the United States.

The musical manifesto of the Tropicalist movement was the landmark collaborative LP Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis ("Tropicalia: or Bread and Circuses"), issued in mid-1968, which brought together the talents of Veloso, Os Mutantes, Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé and Gal Costa, with arrangements by avant-garde composer-arranger Rogerio Duprat (who had studied with Pierre Boulez) and lyrical contributions from poet Torquato Neto. The album's group cover photograph depicted the collective holding a variety of objects and images, in a deliberate reference to the cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The tensions between the Tropicalistas and the student left peaked in September 1968 with Veloso's now-legendary performances at the third annual International Song Festival, held at the Catholic University in Rio, where the audience included a large contingent of students who were vehemently opposed to the Tropicalistas. When Veloso (backed by Os Mutantes) performed in the first round of the Festival's song competition on 12 September, he was initially greeted with enthusiastic applause, but the situation soon turned ugly. Dressed in a shiny green plastic suit, festooned with electrical wires and necklaces strung with animal teeth, Veloso provoked the students with his lurid costume, his sensual body movements and his startling new psychedelic music, and the performers were soon being bombarded with loud insults, jeers and boos from the students, who became even more incensed when American pop singer John Dandurand made a surprise appearance on stage during the song.^{[citation needed]}

The ideological conflict climaxed three days later on 15 September when Veloso returned for the second round of the competition, performing a specially-written new song entitled "É Proibido Proibir" ("It is Forbidden to Forbid"). The leftist students began hissing and booing as soon as Veloso's name was announced, and when he began his performance, his overtly sexual stage moves and the experimental music of Os Mutantes again provoked a wild reaction – the students began booing so loudly that the performers could barely be heard, and a section of the crowd then stood up and turned their backs to the stage, prompting Os Mutantes to turn their backs on the audience. As the performance continued, the students pelted the stage with fruit, vegetables, eggs, paper balls and anything else that came to hand. Veloso then stopped singing and launched into an impassioned monologue, in which he excoriated the students for their conservatism. After being joined by Gilberto Gil, who came on stage to show his support, Veloso finished his diatribe by telling the students "...if you are the same in politics as you are in aesthetics, we’re done for!" and declaring he would no longer compete in music festivals. He then deliberately finished the song out of tune, angrily shouted "Enough!" and walked off arm-in-arm with Gil and Os Mutantes. A studio version of the song was later released as a single, and the closing section of the tumultuous live performance featuring Veloso's speech, was issued as the single's B-side. [103] Even though Tropicalismo was controversial among traditional critics, it introduced to Música popular brasileira new elements for making music with an eclectic style.

Veloso studied philosophy at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, which influenced both his artistic expression and viewpoint on life. Among his favorite philosophers were Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, and Herbert Marcuse. Veloso's anti-authoritarian political stance earned him the enmity of Brazil's military dictatorship which ruled until 1985; his songs were frequently censored and some banned.