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Charles A. Perrone

Latin American Music Review, Volume 23, Number 1, Spring/Summer

2002, pp. 60-78 (Article)

Published by University of Texas Press

DOI: 10.1353/lat.2002.0011

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60 : Charles A. Perrone

Latin American Music Review, Volume 23, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2002© 2002 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

Performing São Paulo:

Vanguard Representations

of a Brazilian Cosmopolis

Charles A. Perrone

Poète, prends ton luth . . .—Alfred de Musset (1835)

Sou um tupi tangendo um alaúde . . .—Mário de Andrade (1922)

In the twentieth century, São Paulo experi-enced successive waves of development schemes, modernization, and ar-tistic response. In the 1920s, this site of ever-increasing industrializationand urban evolution witnessed the emergence of nationalist aestheticthought in modernismo, or Brazilian Modernism. The inaugural publicationand œuvre par excellence of the combative phase of this movement was Paulicéia desvairada (1922) by Mário de Andrade. This collection of avant-garde verseinitiated, with musical flair, a city/artist-in-the-city thread in Brazilian lyricthat passes through other principal modernistas and finds pointed expres-sion both in the mid-century neo-vanguard of poesia concreta and in diverseoutput of the later twentieth century.1

Brazilian concrete poetry solidified in São Paulo in the mid-1950s dur-

ing the national policy of developmentalism. The technologically orientedand theorized aesthetic practice of concretismo could only arise from such a citified and industrial conjuncture. A telling crystallization of concretist concepts is the single-line agglutinative poem “cidade-city-cité” (1963) byAugusto de Campos, which had a curious prefiguration in Paulicéia desvairada and has enjoyed a series of interpretations linked to music and perfor-mance.2 The concrete poets and the poetry particularized in “cidade,” inturn, are essential referents in one of Brazil’s best-known songs, “Sampa”(1978), by renowned singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso. He was the leader

of Tropicália or tropicalismo, the cutting-edge multi-field movement that marked the late 1960s, during the expansion of communication media



S ã o Paulo: Vanguard Representations of a Brazilian Cosmopolis : 61

within the early stages of the so-called “Brazilian economic miracle” that peaked in the 1970s. Veloso’s celebrated composition appeared a decadeafter the noted musical reactions to São Paulo of fellow innovator Tom Zé.“Sampa” reconstructs significant encounters during the rise of the tropicalist

effervescence and, illustrating the interdisciplinary reach of lyric in Brazil,relives in a distinctively allusive manner the theme of the young artist in a center of modernity.

Emanating from and reflecting upon the hub of São Paulo, Paulic é ia desvairada, “cidade,” and “Sampa” are high points of a cosmopolitan im-perative in the modern Brazilian arts. In wider perspective, these threeselect creations are emblematic of movements—modernismo, concretismo,tropicalismo —that comprised major moments of rupture in the history of Brazilian culture by virtue of their radically fashioned questionings of “the

relationship between the metropolis and the colony . . . in a search forcultural independence.”3 With due recognition of the differences in genreand epoch of each, the present study concerns the representations of São Paulo in this trio of works and the centrality of performative roles inthem, including the relative treatments of notions of self within encom-passing sound, textual and thematic structures. Examination of the threereveals key moments of the modern Brazilian arts and inventive profilesof a cosmopolis that values varied origins and produces forward-looking creative endeavors.

Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) was the consummate nationalist Modern-ist, at once preoccupied with tradition and renovation. He was by manymeasures the most complete Brazilian artist-intellectual. Dedicated professorof the conservatory, ethnomusicologist avant la lettre, institutional organizer,and a writer versed in all genres, Mário remains an axial figure in both Brazil-ian musical criticism and modern letters. One half of the twenty volumes of his complete works (Livraria Martins) are verse, narrative, or literary essay.His fiction and poetry consistently exhibit principles of organization andsensibilities from the world of music—folk, popular, and classical. As anassiduous student of song-text issues in Brazil puts it, specifically musicalsyntax and creative processes admirably “contaminate the literary space”of Mário’s writings (Diniz, 5). The highest-impact item of his repertory, theunusual novel Macunaima (1928), was dubbed a “rhapsody,” and there aremultitudinous utilizations of musical motifs in his several books of poetry. Of these, the most eventful and urban-focused was his initial modernista textualexploration, the collection built around São Paulo.

Paulic é ia desvairada (Hallucinated City ) is a collection of three parts, eachwith its own degree of musicality and performance activity. The first is a playful yet penetrating preface with a brief self-dedication. Frequently im-pressionistic, this inviting segment proposes a theory of modern lyric largelybased on conceptions of melody, harmony, and polyphony.4 The twenty-one poems of the main sequence are animated by the life and environs of




the municipality, which often include sounds or expressive behavior in-volving music. The third division is an extended quasi-dramatic text with a type of musical composition as subtitle and imagined as a massive perfor-mance occurrence in open areas of downtown São Paulo. The first of the

twenty-one poems, “Inspiração” (“Inspiration”), introduces the lyric voiceof a harlequin, a performer whose locally inspired discourse is emphaticand impassioned: “São Paulo! comoção de minha vida . . .” (“São Paulo!tumult of my life . . .”), a sort of evocation of the muses in the words of anesteemed reader (Lafetá, “Cidade,” 88). The second poem, aptly titled “Otrovador” (“The Troubadour”), demonstrates the musicality and anxietyabout identity that pervade the series as a whole. The signal line is the last one: “Sou um tupi tangendo um alaúde!” (“I am a Tupi Indian strumming a lute!”). The publicly active pose taken here carries over into the last part

of Paulic é ia desvairada. A lone footnote therein sets up a textual and spiri-tual link to the assertive case of mid-century concretism realized in “cidade.”The anti-normative verse that Mário devised in this volume, though

owing much to French-language models, was made to reflect the burgeoning of something new in Brazilian reality, the urb, and in the arts, the local equiva-lent of l ’ esprit nouveau. The “anti-syntax” he devised gave rise to a diversifiedlinguistic attack, a “polyphony that translated modernity” (Passos, 57).The speaker’s gaze and attention do not follow any apparent pattern, logicaladvance, or route through the boroughs. Long shots and close-ups of areas,

landmarks, and points of reference do not necessarily clarifythe perceptions of readers outside the time period or city itself. Places, build-ings, transports, commerce, parks, and so on mostly appear with a subjectivebias, as associations to occupy the mind of the speaker. Adrian Roig affirmswithout hesitation that the poet does not present any sort of objective viewbut rather “les impressions, les sensations, les émotions intenses qu’il éprouvedans sa ville.” Elements of the modern population center are always foundthrough “le moi omniprésent du poète.”5 Indeed, a dominant property of commentary and criticism on Paulic é ia desvairada is a concern with the speaker’sexcessive self-absorption, the overwrought temperament of the lyric voice,and a consequent relative distancing from portraiture of São Paulo.6

An analysis of the performative nature of Mário’s book finds that it isstructured by the behavior of the harlequin voice in several ways. Familiartopography is reorganized, in a general fashion, as a subjective tract. Withinthat approach, a sort of hallucinatory trance highlights distortions by anamor-phosis (visual deformation and related artistic rendering). Most significantly,one can conceive of the city as a discourse of dance, a theatrical spatialization(Sousa, 162–64). The anthological line “São Paulo é um palco de bailadosrussos” (“ . . . is a stage for Russian ballets”) most effectively communicatesboth the sense of stagecraft and the projection of manifold points of view.7 Aplatform of self-discovery and affirmation throughout most of the lyricalsequence, São Paulo comes to be an arena for a wider range of performers.




There is a measure of autonomy in the third section of Paulic é ia desvairada ,“As enfibraturas do Ipiranga (Oratório profano)” (“The Moral Fibrature of the Ipiranga [A Profane Oratorio]”). The cast of the sui generis piece has a lonesoloist, a first-person consciousness carried over from the main part. Several

choral configurations present, above all, collective vantages, group structures,factions, and contrasting aesthetic tendencies of the time (see Nunes). Thisboisterous face-off is most profitably dealt with as a period experiment and asa performance-oriented manifesto (Unruh, 42–50). In this situation, a uniqueintrojection by the author opens an opportunity for consumer participationthrough morphology that radiates in urban imperative and usability. Thedisputatious faction representing convention utters:

E as . . . . . . . . . cidades, as . . . . . . . . . cidades,as . . . . . . . . . cidades, as . . . . . . . . . cidadese mil . . . . . . . . . cidades …[and the . . . cities . . . and thousand . . . cities](original ellipses)

A footnote bids readers to complete the exercise by filling in, depend-ing on which side they might be on, the names of local writers, exempli-fying with the actual author: “mariocidades.” The maker of the footnotethen adds that this is just for the sake of rhythm, that the suffix does not exist. Such an emphasis on personalized rhythm is perfectly modernista and

consistent with Mário’s preoccupation with musical terms of reference inliterary contexts. The grammatical claim merits closer scrutiny. Strictlyspeaking, there is no suffix -cidade; the true morpheme is simply -idade.Still, words ending in -cidade are quite common in Portuguese. Moreover,in the execution of a text-for-performance of municipal proportions, thepluralized units of -cidade conveniently echo the urban scene being playedout. This incident cum footnote blends real-life author with narrator, thedramatic voice or lyric self with the artist-citizen, and breaks the illusion of fiction like no other passage in Paulic é ia desvairada. Further, this en passant

act displays a dominant gamesomeness; regard for domestic representativityis rather limited to a Modernist plane. The affair, finally, can be seen, heard,and understood to prefigure another quite distinct view of verbal coinci-dences, of urbanization, and of Brazilian aesthetic originality.

Eminently informed and cosmopolitan, poesia concreta in Brazil was con-ceived as a minimalist antithesis to the kind of verbose, exclamatory, andinflamed speaker-driven verse found in Paulic é ia desvairada, an early exampleof modernista vanguardism. The preliminary and “orthodox” phases of thehyper-modernist neo-vanguard movement in the 1950s werefollowed by a period of inven çã o, or open-ended creativity. One of the most successful and durable fruits of this later stage of invention was the trilingualPortuguese-English-French “cidade-city-cité” by Augusto de Campos. Thistext is non-discursive yet quite signifying. Stylistically, it implies a denial of




verse as a vehicle for expression of self and constitutes an iconic assertion of urbanness through linguistic materiality, including shape and sound features.In the original, the poem is printed on a three-crease fold-out (almost 3.5inches or 8.5 centimeters tall) as a single horizontal line (19 in. or 39 cm. long)

in bold futura font. What unfolds is the following visual utterance: Atrocaducapacaustiduplielastifeliferofugahistoriloqualubrimendimultipliorgani

These 150 letters comprise the roots of thirty alphabetically arrangedwords that end in cidade/city/cit é , the common nominal suffix in each lan-guage preceded by the letter c. With this morphemic trait and the extract-able urban “theme,” there is an insinuation of the local-author selection

option offered in “As enfibraturas do Ipiranga.” In view of the expresspreferences of the concrete poet, such a suggested predecessor might be

judged more of a subtle mnemonic register. A more direct inspiration forthe linear opus would be found in verbal experiments that Augusto refash-ioned in Portuguese, such as James Joyce’s 100-letter words (the voice of thunder in Finnegan ’ s Wake ). The Brazilian poet also paid homage to poet-composer John Cage, whose chance operations (e.g., with the I-Ching ) modelformal constraints or procedural generators of postmodernist text.8

Several such procedures oriented the construction of Augusto’s verbal

skyline. In the primeval design, the first filter for word selection was simplyending in -cidade, but since this monolingual option would have qualifiedendless words and resulted in an “interminable text,” the author appliedthe additional aleatory requirement that each word should also function in

Figure 1. “pentahexagram for john cage” by Augusto de Campos.




English and French with the same orthographic root and respective equiva-lent c+suffix. Thus, with strict control over the morphology of constituentsin the constructivist manipulation of form, the process of elaboration neces-sarily “accepted a chaos of meanings.”9

This abdication of semantic rule, fortuitously, did not yield incongruousperiodiplastipublirapareciprorustisagasimplitenaveloveravivaunivora cidade

city

cité

outcomes. On the contrary, the conglomeration of words and lexical cor-respondences proved to be appropriately cosmopolitan. In the first place,sharing with English and French guaranteed portability and greater visibilityalongside Portuguese. The overall result, further, was replete with urban aware-

ness and relevance. Virtually in the middle of the mélange is “multipli-,”projecting a noun (multiplicity) suitable for the characterization of twentieth-century destinations with many varied ingredients and diverse populations(e.g., São Paulo, the modernist city of Paulic é ia desvairada and beyond). Incontrast, toward the end of the sequence, “uni-” (unicity) suggests uniquequalities of the verbal assemblage and its geographical co-relation. Roots suchas “atro, dupli, fero, rapa” project a combination—“atrocity, duplicity, feroc-ity, rapacity”—that connotes the rigors and dangers of the concrete jungle,while “feli, saga, tena, vera, viva -city” would imply more positive aspects.

“Periodicity” and “historicity” add chronology and the unfolding of eventsto the skeleton story of an urb, while “loqua, plasti, publi -city” bring intoplay artfulness, the materiality of language, and its social uses.

An acute observer of technological aspects of writing in Brazil has beenfascinated by that which temporalizes in Augusto de Campos’ poems, by“the tensioning between spatialization and succession, intervals and linearities,verticalities and horizontalities.” The peculiar case of “cidade” would involvea more marked “horizontal progression” and, semantically coherent with theurban vehicle, “accelerating, running over” in the verbal flow (Süssekind).Such syntagmatic motion is clear in any reading (silent, out loud, musical) of the poem, while the physical substance of the letters erecting upward accentsand the sensation of skyline aids in the making of a complementary paradig-matic balance. Internal sets of interrelated words do their part to set upcharacteristic tensions. The inescapable signifying levels of the procedurallydetermined list, in sum, do correspond to the metropolitan idea. Curiously,the last noun is “voracity,” which in the poet’s mind, ends up in a position todevour all the foregoing and leave bare, for contemplation and consider-

ation, the nouns “cidade-city-cité,” the intended focus.Without explicit mention, this implementation of the verbivocovisualmethod of the concrete poets—combining selections and placements of se-mantic units, sound, and visual components—inexorably rings of São Paulo,




birthplace and natural home of the architectural and industrial class of lyric that was concrete poetry. It was essentially in its textual constitutionthat Paulic é ia desvairada could stand for and speak to the city. What furtherrepresentativity may be claimed for Augusto’s poem resides in its extra-

textual presences and manifestations as an item and icon of the urban land-scape and soundscape, as well as of local and transnational artisticpatrimonies in the age of technology. Indeed, few Brazilian works of art inthe twentieth century have sparked as many responses and reprises as theultra-modern “cidade.”

The poem was conceived and has been practiced as a score for vocal-izations, performances, and settings. Soon after its conception, art-musiccomposer Gilberto Mendes forged an ultra-modern version.10 In the wakeof tropicalismo, which Augusto did much to elucidate as a music critic, the

releases of Tom Zé became vehicles for some of the former’s creations. Onan urban-theme album by this artist transplanted from the northeasternstate of Bahia, the opening salvo of the concluding track, “Sr. Cidadão”(Mister citizen) was the poet’s vocal rendition of “cidade.” This was thefirst concrete poem to appear on a commercial recording.11 Several otherrestatements would diversify the poem’s impact, as seen below.

The collaboration with Tom Zé was fitting because of his victorious song-festival entry “São Paulo, meu amor,” integrant of a city paradigm intropicalismo and a sort of unofficial municipal anthem for some a decade

before “Sampa.”12 Tom Zé’s song was well received despite its strong mea-sures of caustic language and ambivalent attitude toward Brazil’s economiccenter. The first strophe begins

São oito milhões de habitantes / de todo canto e nação / que se agridemcortesmente / correndo a todo vapor / e amando com todo o ódio / se odeiamcom todo amor

[They are eight million inhabitants / from every corner and nation / whoassail one another courteously / speeding full steam ahead / and loving with

total hate/ they hate each other with total love]yet ends “porém, com todo defeito / te carrego no meu peito” (in spite of your faults / you are dear to my heart). The less-than-pretty account goeson to welcome an invasion of prostitutes and to accentuate, parodically,air pollution and the local obsession with work. The prize-winning tunewas included on the artist’s debut LP, a concept album about experiencesof estrangement, aversion, and wonder in the bustling town. As a discern-ing specialist notes, “[m]ost tropicalist songs depict some aspect of urbanlife, from the disparities of uneven modernization to the shifting percep-tions of technology, space, and affective experience,” and Tom Zé’s first solo effort (1968) “may be read as a satiric chronicle of his first impressionsof São Paulo, especially its aggressive capitalist culture.”13 In this sense, the




subsequent album (1972) including “Sr. Cidadão” prefaced by “cidade”was an extension of a musical worldview begun at the height of tropicalismo.

Graphic appreciations and re-workings of “cidade” began with ErthosAlbino de Souza’s programming of the poem onto an IBM punch card(1972, in the infancy of computer art), which was later magnified onto a large black card (with orange chad holes above the standard-letter text)and circulated in various circles.14 One of the most impressive renderingscame in the domain of installation-sculpture: a 70-meter row of red meter-high letters gracing an entire exterior side of the exhibition hall of theBienal de Arte in São Paulo.15

Beginning in the late 1980s, Augusto began to give electronic and mul-timedia treatments to the poem. It was featured on a huge moving digitaldisplay on a downtown thoroughfare, which was filmed and coordinatedwith the author’s reading in Poema cidade, a well-traveled 1986 documen-tary by Tata Amaral, and on other public-television specials. A sight-and-sound spectacle in celebration of the centennial of the Avenida Paulista (October 1991) included the voice and synthesizer arrangements of “cidade”by Cid Campos, a rendition that developed into a studio recording forPoesia é risco, a collection of similar declamations and settings of originalpoems by Augusto and of his translations of assorted avant-garde texts.

Figure 2. Augusto de Campos and “cidade” sculpture; photo by Lygia Campos.




This proliferation of variants of “cidade” reached its apex in the sensuallyenhanced grand finale of a show—a vocal-instrumental-video performanceof these texts, also called Poesia é risco —which toured Brazil and was alsopresented at such academic institutions as the University of Florida andYale University.

Augusto, Cid, and video specialist Walter Silveira performed a substan-tial portion of the multimedia show at Cité de la Musique, Paris, as part of a special series dedicated to the music of Brazil. When the splendid Frenchmusical institute organized the cycle Musiques du Brésil/Carte Blanche à

Caetano Veloso, the internationally acclaimed luminary of Brazilian popu-lar music was empowered to ask two other acts to perform with him. Hechose emergent northeastern singer-songwriter Lenine and, to the surpriseof those not familiar with Veloso’s breadth, Augusto and team.16 Velosoincluded in the program his own setting of “Pulsar,” a cosmic word-fieldby the invited poet. The final number of the concert was Veloso’s “Oestrangeiro” (Foreigner, stranger), which begins with mentions of Frenchfigures with ties to Brazil, Paul Gauguin and Claude Lévi-Strauss. It wasfortified on the occasion by a musical improvisation and voicing of “cidade-

city-cité,” Augusto’s most noted title with respect to international content and impact. While having been effected at a European venue, this polyva-lent link energizes a conspicuous relationship in the post-Modernist arts inBrazil, stressing a purposeful cosmopolitan dimension with technological

Figure 3. Augusto de Campos and Cid Campos, bass.




overtones that naturally invokes a prominent Modernist heritage of thenation’s capital of production.

A previous public event embodies such emphases more palpably. In1983, when the music community in Brazil honored Augusto’s contribu-

tions to popular music with a public-television special in São Paulo, thecrucial text “cidade” was included, de rigueur, via a video clip of a studioreading. Yet the most emotional and relational appearance was that of Veloso, who performed the landmark “Sampa,” summoning legacies of modernismo and encompassing the impact of the concrete poets alongsidemultiple other artistic points of reference governed by encounter and in-teractions within the realm of the host city.

“Sampa” (1978)—the title is a nickname for São Paulo that is nearly pho-netically identical to the musically powerful name samba —is both a noted

instance of the poetry of song in Brazil and a commercial success that hasbecome a veritable hymn to Brazil’s megalopolis.17 A chronicler of sixties-seventies’ trends gives an indication of the critical opportunities the compo-sition provides: “In an extraordinary poetic moment, Caetano Velosointerprets the difficulty and the enchantment of the confrontation of thetropical dream and the tough reality of São Paulo.” A complete quotation of “Sampa” seals a recognition of its remarkable poeticity and relevance as anembodiment of a turn in middle-class culture (Holanda, Impress õ es, 86–87).

Veloso’s lyric comprises 27 to 36 lines depending on how rhymes and

melodic phrases are perceived to organize the three strophes. The text asserts a changing identification with space and place, tracing an arc from a mythicalmoment of arrival, through a period of resistance and transition, to a comfort-able localization within the discovered territory. Further, “the song realizes a passage from the certainty of sameness to the acceptance of difference” (Wisniket al., 86). This voyage involves an interplay of self- examination and revelationof environs marked and situated by the arts. Personalities, texts, and circum-stances form beams of the edifice of representation:

Alguma coisa acontece no meu coraçãoQue só quando cruza a Ipiranga e a Avenida São JoãoÉ que quando cheguei por aqui, eu nada entendiDa dura poesia concreta de tuas esquinasDa deselegância discreta de tuas meninasAinda não havia para mim Rita LeeA tua mais completa traduçãoAlguma coisa acontece no meu coraçãoQue só quando cruza a Ipiranga e a Avenida São João

Quando eu te encarei frente a frente, não vi o meu rostoChamei de mau gosto o que vi de mau gosto mau gostoÉ que Narciso acha feio o que não é espelhoE a mente apavora o que ainda não é mesmo velhoNada do que não era antes quando não somos mutantes




E foste um difícil começo, afasto o que não conheçoE quem vem de outro sonho feliz de cidadeAprende depressa a chamar-te de realidadePorque és o avesso do avesso do avesso do avesso

Do povo oprimido nas filas, nas vilas, favelasDa força da grana que ergue e destrói coisas belasDa feia fumaça que sobe apagando as estrelasEu vejo surgir teus poetas de campos e espaçosTuas oficinas de florestas teus deuses da chuva Panaméricas de Áfricas utópicas túmulo do samba [mas possível novo quilombo de ZumbiE os Novos Baianos passeiam na tua garoa E novos baianos te podem curtir numa boa

© Editora Musical GAPA (Intersong)

[Something goes on in my heart / Only when Ipiranga Ave. crosses São JoãoAve. / When I first got here I understood nothing/ Of the tough concretepoetry of your corners / Of the discrete inelegance of your girls / For methere was not yet any Rita Lee / Your most complete translation / Something goes on in my heart / Only when Ipiranga Ave. crosses São João Ave. //When I saw you face to face I didn’t see my own face / What I saw in badtaste that was bad taste I called bad taste / It’s that Narcissus finds ugly that which isn’t a mirror / And the mind takes fright from that which isn’t yet old/ Nothing of what wasn’t already when we are not [M]utant[e]s / And youwere a difficult start, I push away what I do not know / And he who comesfrom another happy city dream / Learns quickly to call you reality / For youare the inside out of inside out of the inside out inside out /// From theoppressed people in the queues, in the slums and shanties / From the powerof money that builds and destroys beautiful things / From the filthy smokethat rises extinguishing the stars / I see on the rise your poets of the fields (deCampos) and spaces / Your workshops of forests your gods of rain / PanAmericas of Utopian Africas tomb of the samba but a possible new Zumbiquilombo (maroon refuge) / And the New Bahians stroll in your mist (fog) /

And new Bahians can enjoy you just fine]The singer addresses the town itself in a direct familiar second-person ap-proach, te, teu, tuas (thee, thy, thine), but intertextuality and allusion playmuch greater roles in “Sampa.” A connection to the artistic sphere of “cidade” is established in each strophe: “dura poesia concreta,” connoting the movement as well as the characteristic ground cover of pavement;“avesso do avesso do avesso,” a suggestion of unpredictability and thereversibility of identities in a complex setting via a quotation of concretist co-founder Décio Pignatari; and “poetas de campos e espaços,” citing thefamily name of the other co-founders and evoking the visual and spatialaspects of their noted trials in lyric, as in “cidade.” Theatre is brought tobear with “Oficina” and “Zumbi” (Teatro Oficina and Teatro Arena, whoproduced the musical “Arena canta Zumbi”), while tropicalist literature is




present in Panam é rica (a novel by José Agrippino de Paula) and “deuses da chuva” (a novel by writer-musician Jorge Mautner).18

More pertinent to musical spheres, in a composition whose title is onlydifferentiated from the word samba by voicing of the bilabial consonant in the

latter, it is no surprise that allusions to other songs and players should abound.The instrumental introduction of “Sampa” is a melodic phrase from “Ronda”(Paulo Vanzolini), an archetypal samba-can çã o (ballad) of São Paulo nightlifeand strongly identified with the city itself. “Rita Lee” and “[M]utantes” arenods to the seminal rock trio that accompanied Veloso, Gil, and Tom Zéduring the early days of tropicalismo.19 The phrase “túmulo do samba” stirs upa disparaging comment made by carioca bossa-nova icon Vinícius de Morais.“Novos Baianos” cites a groundbreaking samba-rock group of the 1970s (alsoaided by Augusto) alongside a hint at a local musical icon, the traditional

samba/choro group Demônios da Garoa, whose name banks on a stereotypi-cal meteorological image (garoa=fog, mist) of the area.20

Place-related intentionality is embedded in the meshing of the first lineand the second, which carries a dated sociolinguistic and geographical cul-tural marker. The avenue crossing (an important location in late sixties’ youthculture) is projected onto a cordial plane, and the way of speaking (including subject-verb-number disagreement) is, in Veloso’s own words, “my most pro-found way to say that I am in São Paulo” (qtd. by Sant’anna, 87). These sung phrases, in addition, function much like “São Paulo! comoção de minha vida!”

in Paulic é ia desvairada to affirm an individually-focused intensity. Critical read-ings of “Sampa” intimate Mário de Andrade’s milestone collection in severalways. A number of parallels allow for useful comparisons in the understand-ing of the lyrical statements and their performative representations of thecity. The less than widely known referents in Mário’s local-scenario poemsled to assertions of virtual incomprehensibility in the 1920s. Veloso’s series of allusions may be regarded as more successful in the sense that most of thetitles or names he incorporates form more poetically functional images inde-pendent of their real-life designations or listeners’ familiarity with them.21

In broader terms, a question that has occupied analysts of Paulic é ia desvairada is the extent to which subjective immoderation might destabilizethe external poetic rendering of São Paulo, assumed to be a natural objec-tive of a so-titled collection. The title “Sampa” also raises expectations,within the limitations of a single lyric, for a certain level of attention to thepurpose of depicting the object of esteem. And in similar fashion, Veloso’sretrospection proves to be rather less of a place portrait and more a subjec-tive account of actions and reactions within municipal bounds. A loqua-cious analyst has stressed the presence of tropicalismo in the song, calling it “a tune of self-investigation of the narrator” and noting that Veloso andSão Paulo blend into “the same persona—the most developed city and art-ist of Brazil”—while the epical song “dives into the lake of the ego” (Sanches,138–39). Such individualism may overshadow the impulse to render the




territory artistically, per se, but nevertheless leaves room for larger scaleepochal extrapolations. As Paulic é ia desvairada was a brash affirmation of new Modernist aesthetics and of the newness of the flourishing locale,“Sampa” indeed had more to do with a young artist’s coming of age and to

terms with a wholly different environment. In terms of personal trajectory,the samba-can çã o “Sampa” actually meant something of a return to tradi-tion for Veloso, who was prone to undertake unconventional and explor-atory projects in the 1970s.22

As for non-biographically inflected analysis, Luiz Tatit has studied themelodic contours of “Sampa” in conjunction with the unfolding of the words(278–98). The semiotician-musician concludes that the two capacities in whichthe narrating voice operates—as a subject with emotional reactions to sur-roundings he is at odds with and as an evaluator who, with the benefit of

hindsight, can extract essences—come to unite in a process of dynamicthematics (313). In this assessment, Tatit follows Romildo Sant’anna, for whomthe intersections of codes and citations in “Sampa” generate an allegoricalimage of a mixing of cultures, forms of social relations, physical spaces, sub-

jective experiences, etc., “everything constituting the sensible panorama of the city given the cognomen ‘ paulic é ia desvairada ’ by Mário de Andrade”(83).

That literary connection also graces the sociological reading of “Sampa”done by Marcelo Ridenti. To unravel the web of cultural strands in thewords and melody, he employs sections of Marshall Berman’s All that is

Solid Melts in the Air (1982). The North American thinker examines howselect Western artists expressed the modernities of metropolises, Baudelaireand Paris being the classic example. The chief consequences of modernlife are a tension between a “solid” vision of existence and a “diluting” one,as well as a polarity between infinite development or innovation andunsatiable destruction. All this, for Berman, is associated with the questionof newly found individuality, of freedom from the mystifying experienceof the sacred. Modern city life offers substantial adventure and meaningfulchange but an anguishing loss of certainties and unities. In its own context,“Sampa” reveals attitudinal ambiguities in the manifestation of individual-ity (cf., especially the admission of narcissism) while moving between polesof endless evolvement and transformation vs. fracturing and splintering.This applies both to artistic scenes and to São Paulo’s own maturation. Thecorner of Ipiranga and São João, a nodal point in the sixties, was alreadydecadent in cultural terms by 1978, when Veloso composed “Sampa.” It isnot coincidental that in noting signs of decadence in crossing points in the1990s, Ridenti should foresee still newer locales for “the crossings of mo-dernity in the paulic é ia desvairada ” (303–305), for the continuing transfor-mation of São Paulo remains bound, in terms of imaginative representation,to the influential book by Mário de Andrade.

Veloso’s rhythm of destruction/construction relates to a contrast betweena utopian view of Salvador, Bahia (an oft-romanticized land of origin of the




principals who made tropicalismo, “outro sonho feliz de cidade”) and thetough big-city demands of São Paulo. As the application of Berman helpsto show, the inter- and intratextual gestures in “Sampa,” resounding his-torical ambient factors and conditions, further structure fundamental op-

positions in the song: past-present, old-new, elder-youth, vulgar-refined,self-society, resistance-acceptance, beauty-ugliness, cloudiness-clarity, fan-tasy-reality. These dualities relate variously to concretismo, the movement inwhich Augusto de Campos’ more abstract “cidade” was established. Somedialogue more evidently with interacting semantic fields in the scored text.These associations are all wholly in line with, and epochally complement,geo-cultural and musical lines of inquiry within the foundational vision, inPaulic é ia desvairada, of the cosmopolis of São Paulo.

Notes

1. Oswald de Andrade, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, ManuelBandeira, and Murilo Mendes are the most distinguished poets whoacted upon the Modernist urge to address the city. On Brazilianmodernismo and industrialization, see the comparative studies of Simonand Morse. An indication of the weight of the legacy of the primefigures of the 1920s in youth poetry of the 1970s is the illustrated vol-

ume of verse by João Farkas, S ã o Paulo de Andrade (São Paulo: MassaoOhno, 1976). Lest he be confused with other major writers, Mário deAndrade will mostly be referred to here by first name alone.

2. To avoid confusion with his son Cid, cf. below, or fellow concrete poet brother Haroldo de Campos, Augusto will be referred to here by hisfirst name. Similarly, the poem “cidade-city-cité” will be referred to bythe Portuguese title only. On concrete poetry in different contexts, seePerrone, Seven Faces, ch. 2.

3. Holanda, “Will the Third World,” 4. All translations from Portuguese-language sources are my own unless otherwise indicated.

4. On this much-discussed preface, the poems, and the modernista revuesin the context of art music, see Wisnik, 104–26. See also Manoel onMário’s early poetics. Part of the preface was recorded by a perfor-mance troupe along with some of the principal poems of the collection.

5. Roig, 21. He dedicates an entire section of his extensive study (74–124), the lengthiest of Paulic é ia desvairada to date, to the various musi-cal aspects of the poet-musician in the book (as author, narrator, and/or character).

6. On the critical fortune of Paulic é ia desvairada, see Lafetá, “Sujeito lírico”and Passos.

7. Such diversity is seen as pivotal to the poem’s beauty by Naves, whosituates emergent urban popular music in relation to high-browmodernismo.




8. Conte, 10–11, 43. The Campos brothers co-translated Panaroma do Finnegan ’ s Wake (São Paulo: Conselho Estadual, 1962); one fragment was recorded on Augusto and Cid’s CD cited below. Augusto latercomposed the intriguing visual poem “CAGE-CHANCE-CHANGE,” subtitled

“pentahexagram para john cage” (1977), as well as an eponymous poem-preface to a volume of Cage’s selected writings, the Brazilian versionof which he revised. De segunda a um ano, Rogério Duprat, trans. (SãoPaulo: HUCITEC, 1985), ix–xxiii.

9. Augusto de Campos, video interview with Roland Greene, July 1987,audio-visual archives of poetry collection Lamont Library, HarvardUniversity.

10. The foldout of “cidade” originally appeared in the concretist arts journalInven çã o no. 4 (1964). Mendes’ musical setting appeared in no. 5 (1967).

11. Campos, Balan ç o, 345. This edited volume contains Augusto’s princi-pal critical articles about Veloso and cohort, as well as tropicalismo. Foran in-depth treatment of the concrete poets’ contributions to popularmusic, see Perrone “From Noigandres…”

12. The songwriter’s original idea was to call it “São Paulo, mon amour,”a parody of the film title Hiroshima mon amour. The renamed composi-tion took first place at the IV Festival of Brazilian Popular Music of TVRecord in São Paulo in late 1968. On sound recordings, the song hasthe definitive title of “São São Paulo.” It is also documented as “São

São Paulo, meu amor.”13. Dunn, 101, 105. See the section “Made in Brazil: Tropicália, Mass Cul-

ture, and Urban Experience” (100–109), which begins noting how SãoPaulo was the ideal site for the movement. This discussion elaborateson the repertory of Tom Zé’s cited 1968 album, which was re-releasedand critically acclaimed as a lost treasure in 2000. The dystopian festi-val song is discussed separately (139–40). For a detailed sociologicalreading of “São São Paulo” see Caldas, 127–40.

14. The item appeared in the artists’ book (loose-leaf portfolio) of JulioPlaza and Augusto de Campos, Caixa preta (São Paulo: Duas Cidades,1975) and was utilized as the cover of a 1992 collection of thirty poemsin homage to São Paulo sponsored by the Secretaria Municipal deCultura.

15. Artist Julio Plaza, 1987. This work was later imaged on the Internet along side the computer card and other versions of/links to “cidade.”URL: http://www.uol.com.br/augustodecampos/home.htm

16. The tripartite performance, with its complementary northeastern andneo-avant-garde components, merited an uncommon full page of cov-erage in France’s leading daily (see “Les constructions poétiques deCaetano Veloso, l’homme du Nordeste,” Le Monde, 12 May 1999, p. 31).The release of Gerard Béhague’s French-language study of Brazilianpopular music was coordinated with this event.




17. In December 1999 the Globo television network presented 600 song-candidates to be ranked by critics and artists to make a list of the top100 songs of the twentieth century. Veloso’s highest ranking song was,in fact, “Sampa.” In an informal poll in January 2000, SPTV viewers

in São Paulo were polled regarding the songs most representative of the city. The two highest placers were “Sampa” and “Trem das onze”by Adoniran Barbosa (Zuza Homem de Mello, e-mail 23 July 2001).On the occasion of the city’s anniversary in 2001, the daily Folha de S ã o Paulo conducted an on-line survey of various aspects of reader percep-tion and municipal preferences; a sweeping majority indicated “Sampa”as the city’s trilha sonora [sound track]. Veloso declared that the wordhe most likes is “cidade” (interview with Carlos Vaz Marques, Journal de Letras e Id é ias, 12 Dec. 2001, p. 15.

18. On Mautner’s interpretive link with tropicalismo, see Perrone, “Do bebop . . .” See his own diverse comments in Cyntrão, 107–108, and passimin Debates section, 179–207.

19. For an insightful academic treatment of a 1990’s tropicalist revival inNorth America, see Harvey. This vocalist and the group have alsobeen the object of major journalistic interest, e.g., Larry Rohter, “Ig-nored for Decades, Os Mutantes Is Now a Hot Band,” The New York Times, Sunday, 15 April 2001.

20. Lafetá, “Cidade,” concludes with a relevant discussion of images of

mist in Mário’s city poems of the early 1920s and the early 1940s.21. I owe this observation, as well as the primordial inspiration for the

present study, to Antonio Carlos Secchin.22. On the artist’s development up to 1987, see Perrone, Masters, ch. 2. Con-

sider as well the wider scope of Dunn, passim, and Sanches, ch. 5, 121–64.

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Discography

Campos, Augusto de and Cid1995 Poesia é risco. Mercury CD 526 508-2.

Martins, Antônio José Santana 1968 Tom Z é . Rozenblit LP 050 010.

Rpt. Sony CD 495712, 2000.1972 Tom Z é . Continental LP 1-00-84.

Various1971 M á rio de Andrade in memoriam, poesia e som. Festa LP 79502.

Veloso, Caetano1978 Muito. Polygram LP 6349-382.

perrone-charles_performing são paulo- vanguard representations of a brazilian cosmopolis

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