Over the course of the twentieth century, Brazil both developed an economy necessary for mass consumption of media and was under several autocratic governments who all employed censorship to some degree. The most notable of these was the United States backed military government that started in 1964 until 1985. This government was famous for it’s censorship of music due to the rise of major countercultural movements like Tropicalía and MPB. These genres of music often contended with censorship with veiled anti-government lyrics other subtle actions. The political music landscape of Brazil was also shaped by the governments co-opting of popular music as propaganda. These various forces also had to contend with the rise of foreign musical influences. All of these factors make the 1970’s a noteworthy period for both Brazilian popular music and the broader topic of government relationships with art. This conflict can be seen through various songs written during this time, as well as in documents written and interviews of people who were in that time.
While some early Brazilian pop musicians self-censored their political lyrics out of fear of retribution, the government did very little to censor early on. However, this changed over time as the government grew more populist. In the 1930, President Getúlio Vargas took the presidency in a coup with the support of the working urban masses. According to sociologist José Roberto Zan, “Brazil was at the end of a long and drawn-out transition from a country that mainly exported agricultural commodities to an urban-industrial economy.” (Roberto Zan, 2003). With this, the general urban populace became a large and powerful group that Vargas needed to keep happy to remain in power. This lead to the use of populist language and policies by the Brazilian government. As Vargas tightened his grip on power through the 1930’s, he “encouraged artistic and cultural events but censored those that ran contrary to the ideology of his explicitly authoritarian nationalist state.” (Roberto Zan, 2003). With his large amount of centralized power, Vargas ensured that the media promoted values that supported his government through censorship and control over the fledgling but popular Brazilian mass media. The government began encouraging the working class to assimilate through the state ideology of trabalhismo. They continued to tighten control of the media through the Department of Press and Propaganda. However, the dictatorship ended in 1945, and a more democratic government replaced it. With this new government came much less censorship, until 1964.
In the 1960’s, politics and music once again began to collide again. The People’s Center for Culture, or CPC, was founded. This organization encouraged artists to become more political, because they “saw ‘the people’ as potentially the revolutionary subject, but hampered by a fragmentary and alienated culture.” (Roberto Zan, 2003). The CPC’s ideas began to spread among the general populace. The organization saw support from many major pop musicians across popular and more regional genres. However, the CPC and other such groups were shut down when the military took power in 1964. The new military government didn’t immediately censoring art, but they did ban unions and other such groups from hosting cultural events. This led to popular music being largely seen on tv, which was becoming popular throughout the 1960’s. These television programs hosted popular protest music known as MPB. These shows were able to openly broadcast leftist music until 1968. This was when the government began to censor popular music, after censoring other media for around a year. This censorship faced much backlash, from both the musicians and their leftist audience. At the 1968 Third International Song Festival, “Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso introduced elements from international pop music via protest lyrics that were more in line with the student and counterculture movement in Europe…Veloso faced a jeering audience, made his performance of ‘Ë Prohibido Prohibir’ into a ‘happening,’ and then dropped out of the competition in solidarity with Gil. Despite the jeers of the leftist audience, federal agents from the Department of Public Safety were tracking every move of the two tropicalistas.” (Roberto Zan and , 2003). This controversy led to Gil and Veloso fleeing the country, the government requiring every song be submitted to the government for censorship, and other conflicts that would come to a head during the 1970’s.
The 1970’s saw the peak of both the power of the dictatorship and the censorship of art in Brazil. Now that the government had solidified its power, largely thanks to the passage of Institutional Act Five in 1968. According to Roberto Zan, “the military government’s decree Ato Institucional no.5 came into force, and all recorded music had to be submitted to censor.” (Roberto Zan, 214). The government gave the power to, among many other things, censor all forms of mass-media. This greatly constricted the ability of all artists throughout Brazil to express themselves including, of course, musicians. However, this did not stop musicians from trying to write protest songs. One of the most famous examples of an artist defying the censors is singer, songwriter, and playwright Chico Buarque. According to Mike Gonzalez, Buarque’s songs “were marked by a subtle poetic language which often veiled sharp criticism” (Gonzalez, 1). Chico Buarque often used wordplay to hide his critiques of the government, censorship, and general social issues. His 1971 album Construção is notable for not being censored by the government at all despite having numerous anti-establishment lyrics. While Buarque is the most notable example of this, many other musicians had to do this as well. Tom Zé, another notable musician active during this period, also often wrote political lyrics. According to Christopher Dunn, in his essay “Tom Zé and the Performance of Citizenship in Brazil”, his lyrics “delivered with evident irony, belie a coded identification with the social values of the urban youth counterculture that flourished in Brazilian cities in the early 1970’s and was at odds with the values of the regime.” (Dunn, 221). Zé was forced to censor his lyrics out of fear the government would find his lyrics unfit with their values. Zé, Buarque, and every other musician in Brazil had to either censor their own work to fit government standards or be silent. This was the status quo until 1979, when Institutional Act Five was overturned and the new constitution was amended to protect freedom of speech in 1988.
The Brazilian government also saw fit to use music to their own ends. They used the older and more standard form of Brazilian popular music, leading to a reaction: “The transition of samba culture into a burgeoning tourist industry, along with the military regime’s disfiguration of samba music for patriotic ends, sowed the seeds for the creation of Quilombo in 1975.” (Bocksay, 75). In his article, “Undesired Presences: Samba, Improvisation, and Afro-politics in 1970s Brazil”, Stephen Bocksay discusses the rise of samba schools, which tended to serve some ideology about the trajectory of the genre. The Quilombo school, according to Bocksay, “concerned itself, notably so, with the prosperity of social cohesion and creativity over the velocity and standardization of samba music.” (Bocksay, 75). The Quilombo school fought to push the genre forwards, in spite of the government trying to keep it in the traditional style that they sued for propaganda. This conflict between tradition and progress can be seen all throughout Brazilian popular music in the 1970’s.
The many songs, documents, and interviews paint a complex but clear picture of the 1970’s Brazilian music scene. It was a deeply interconnected web of government censorship, anti-establishment politics, traditionalism, and subtle protest. The regime change and consolidation of power within the 1960’s set the stage for the 1970’s, as it collided with the various shades of leftism within the British populace. This resulted in the exile of artists like Veloso and Gil, while everyone within the country like Buarque and Zé had to adapt their music to the censorship forced upon them by the government. It was almost a continuation of the mass censorship that had occurred previously under the regime of President Getúlio Vargas. The government saw this art as a threat to itself, so it acted on their interest to preserve and grow their own power. At the same time, they also attempted to use traditional music, specifically samba, as propaganda. This, along with foreign influences, led to a defensiveness on the part of many Brazilian musicians over the perceived integrity of their music. Although that Brazilian government has since democratized, censorship still continues elsewhere. What happened in 1970’s Brazil is simply one instance of what governments had and continue to do in order to uphold their authority.
Works Cited
- Zan, José Roberto, and Michael Jarrett. “Popular Music and Policing in Brazil.” In Policing Pop, edited by Martin Cloonan and Reebee Garofalo, 205–20. Temple University Press, 2003. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14bsz5b.16
- Dunn, Christopher. “Tom Zé and the Performance of Citizenship in Brazil.” Popular Music 28, no. 2 (2009): 217–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40541428.
- Gonzalez, Mike, and MIKE GONZALEZ. “Buarque, Chico.” In Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003, edited by Daniel Balderston, and Mike Gonzalez. Routledge, 2004. https://wooster.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/routlaclit/buarque_chico/0?institutionId=4607
- Bocskay, Stephen. “Undesired Presences: Samba, Improvisation, and Afro-Politics in 1970s Brazil.” Latin American Research Review 52, no. 1 (2017): 64–78. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26743666.