Um estudo do jogo de forças na música brasileira no tempo do tropicalismo

Abstract

This work aims to investigate the power struggle between the various agents in the Brazilian musical scene in the sixties, analyzing it from historical observations and accounts from the period studied in conjunction with Pierre Bourdieu’s market and field theories on symbolic goods and bringing these theories together to study the Brazilian Popular Music (MPB). The changes in the habitus in the MPB scene, as well as how those changes took place since Bossa Nova entered the music world, made the arrival and ascent of new - and sometimes opposing - musical genres possible, such as the Canção de Protesto (Protest Song), the Iê, Iê, Iê and, finally and especially, Tropicalism, pointing out aspects like struggle for predominance, strategies to take over control, relationships between oppressors and the oppressed, field dynamics, and capitalization of symbolic goods. The research was carried out by means of an extensive bibliographical survey of original and historical material, as well as a great deal of Bourdieu’s sociological work. The intent of this dissertation is to understand how those changes in the Brazilian musical “web” enabled the emergence of a unique and continuously changing style like the Tropicalism, a style capable of absorbing all others, which came before and after it, but keeping the structure of its supremacy and the accumulation of symbolic goods of its main founders - Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil - unchanged. The research seeks a new approach to the History of Popular Brazilian Music, in an alternate light, which may become a way of understanding the development of mass culture in Brazil.