MUSIC AND NATIONAL CULTURE: POP MUSIC AND RESISTANCE IN BRAZIL

Abstract

In the late 1960s Brazil was experiencing a boom in its television and record industries, as part of the so-called “Economic Miracle” (1968 74) brought about by the military dictatorship’s opening up of the market to international capital. Censorship was introduced more or less simultaneously and responded in part to the military’s recognition of the potential power of the audio-visual media in a country in which over half of the population was illiterate or semi-literate. After the 1964 coup and until the infamous 5 Institutional Act (AI-5), introduced in 1968 to silence opposition to the regime, the left wing cultural production that had characterised the period under the government of the deposed populist president, Joao Goulart, had continued to flourish. Until 1968, the military had largely left the cultural scene alone to face up to the failure of its revolutionary political and cultural projects. Instead the generals focused on the brutal repression of student, trade union and grassroots activists who had collaborated with the cultural left, thus effectively depriving these artists of their public. Chico Buarque, one of the most censored performers of the period, maintains that at this moment he was saved from retreating into an introspective formalism in his songs and musical dramas by the emergence in 1965 of the televised music festivals, which became one of the most talked about events in the country (Buarque, 1979, 48). Sponsored by the television stations, which were themselves closely monitored and regulated by the government, the festivals still provided oppositional songwriters with an opportunity to re-