Bossa No Chance

I guess it wasn't meant to happen.

Let's drown our national sorrow in Brazils finest export... the unbridled psychedelic cut and paste avant art protest music car crash of Tropicália.

This mind altering mix started life some time ago as a playlist for an old Art School co-pilot in response to a Tjuana Brass laced tape that he put together for a trip to Glastonbury Festival back in 1989. I raise you Brazil to your Mexico. It's Glastonbury Festival again this week and Brazil is on everyones mind so it seemed like a good time to share it. Enjoy.

From Soul Jazz Records liner notes to their stunning Tropicália compilation, from where some of these nuggets are sourced...

"The Tropicália movement was born in 1968, a momentous year around the world. It was the year of the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, the Prague Spring, the Chicago Convention, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the anti-war movement, the student rebellion in France, civil rights, the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union and the birth of the women’s movement. In Brazil, army violence that killed three protesters in the opening months of 1968 failed to keep students from protesting the four-year-old repressive Brazilian military dictatorship. It was against this extraordinary backdrop that Tropicália arrived. As a coherent movement allied to worldwide political and cultural unrest, Tropicália lasted little more than a year, yet it had – and continues to have – a profound effect on Brazilian society. Mixing psychedelic rock, avant-garde musique concrete (tape loops, sound experiments), samba, funk and soul, Tropicália was so radical – and its social implications so politically profound - that its leading protagonists, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, were arrested, imprisoned and finally exiled in 1969. Tropicália’s unique ideology mixed high art with mass culture."

And if you ever thought the Sixties was all about London or San Francisco, check out Marcelo Machados fantastic film: