Psychedelic rock in Latin America

Psychedelic rock in Latin America is the psychedelic rock music scene in Latin America.

Latin America proved a particularly fertile ground for psychedelic rock. The Brazilian psychedelic rock group Os Mutantes formed in 1966, although little known outside Brazil at the time (due to the fact that they recorded in Portuguese), they have since accrued a substantial international cult following. Os Mutantes also played a central role in the short-lived but revolutionary Brazilian aesthetic movement Tropicália, also known as 'Tropicalismo' (Tropicalism), an anti-authoritarian artistic reaction to the repressive military junta that seized power in Brazil in 1964. Encompassing visual art, theatre, poetry and music, Tropicália combined the popular and the avant-garde, and fused traditional Brazilian culture with foreign influences, including contemporary developments in British and American psychedelic music, and above all the music of The Beatles. As well as recording their own material, Os Mutantes collaborated with other key figures in the burgeoning Tropicalist movement, including singer-songwriter Gilberto Gil, whom they backed on Gil's second LP.

The musical manifesto of the Tropicalist movement was the landmark 1968 collaborative LP Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis ("Tropicalia: or Bread and Circuses") which brought together the talents of Os Mutantes, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, 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 collective also performed a number of concert "happenings" which were intended to both involve and provoke audiences, and these reportedly had a similar effect on Brazilian audiences to that experienced by folk purists who witnessed Bob Dylan's early "electric" concerts - the performers sported long hair, wore outlandish psychedelic costumes, used electric guitars and amplification, and played at full volume. Brazil's military junta was becoming increasingly suspicious of the anarchic anti-establishment attitudes of the Tropicalistas, who also found themselves at odds with the nationalistic student left-wing, who favoured traditional Brazilian musical forms, and rejected what they saw as the corrupting influence of Western pop music.

...
Wikipedia