In the age of the digital download, Jeff Harford rediscovers the album ...
Media censorship, suppression of political opposition and a heavy-handed crackdown on the freedoms that so many other world citizens were flamboyantly enjoying threatened to suck the life out of the nation's arts scene.
One response to this brutality was Tropicalia, an innovative cultural and musical movement that embraced a magpie-like approach to creativity, borrowing influences from here and there to produce new and thrilling things.
Sometimes overtly political, the movement's key players faced harassment, torture, exile and even death but that didn't prevent the band Os Mutantes from rising to enormous popularity, trading on a dizzying mix of psychedelic/avant-garde rock, pop and traditional Brazilian music styles.
Os Mutantes' self-titled 1968 debut avoids direct confrontation with Brazil's iron-fisted rulers, with only a couple of tracks hinting at a social and political context. Instead, the band comprising Arnaldo Baptista (vocals, keys, bass), Sergio Dias (vocals, guitar), Rita Lee (vocals, recorder, autoharp, percussion) and a host of supporting musicians breaks the shackles of conservatism by liberally splashing the air with colour. The adventure into uncharted musical territory is joyously anarchic, with multiple layers of instrumentation that point to the influence of The Beatles' Sgt Pepper.
You can hear the close harmonies of the Mamas and the Papas, the fuzztone guitars of American rock acts of the early '60s, the Ye-Ye music of France, the whirling of carnival music and street theatre.
Most notable of the modern acts influenced by Os Mutantes is Beck whose 1998 album Mutations, from which the single Tropicalia was lifted, is a direct homage to Brazil's most inventive band.
