Tropical ginsberg

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for older poets, but it was exactly what the masses of young Americans
wanted to hear, a contained scream. Ginsberg was ready to assume all
the “marginals,” and praise them.
“Howl” was a celebration of something old – Whitman’s call for
future poets – through the way Neal Cassady used to talk – the “hippest”
way of talking. It was a trumpet call over an empty field, which sprang
forth a generation of contesters, and protesters. With “Howl” Ginsberg
managed to make his “elegy for the generation,” as it became what
every young transgressor of Ginsberg’s time was talking about, selling
thousands of copies. This elegy is also a love confession to the poet’s
predecessors – Blake, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Whitman, and many others
– while he rants about everyday occurrences of his life. What he
assumed, a generation of Americans also assumed later on. Ginsberg had
finally mastered his art, and matured his soul and mind to the point of
producing a highly refined poem, with lines like “angelheaded hipsters
burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the
machinery of night,” and still very much in touch with street English, as
in “the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!”
The same ability to mingle the traditional with the modern, that
Ginsberg mastered and portrayed in his poetry, can be seen in songs of
the Tropicália. However, it also took the tropicalistas a long time to
attain this ability. Caetano and Gil, somewhat mentors of the Tropicália,
released three albums (Caetano one, and Gil two), which sound not very
different from the amounting sameness which the majority of Brazilian
musicians seemed to be producing, before the album manifest Tropicália
ou Panis et Circensis. Caetano’s first album, Domingo, sounds as a oneway
street to Bahia. A homage to an aging samba with a crippled walk,
it manages only to authenticate Caetano’s immaturity as a musician;
Caetano himself called the album “sub-bossa-nova.” 189 The album has
no electric guitars in it. On the other hand, Gil’s first two albums –
Salvador 1962-1963 and Louvação – already present a musician with
excellent abilities, capable of creating rare gems such as “Roda,” with
its involving rhythm, and brilliant harmony, but still timid, and chaste, if
we are to consider such songs from his next album as “Questão de
Ordem,” and “Marginália 2,” when Gil finally electrified his songs and
performance.
Many of the tropicalistas believed that the last breakthrough in
Brazilian music had occurred with the song “Chega de Saudade,” a
189 Caetano Veloso Online. “Contracapa do Disco Domingo.” 11 December 2009.
http://www.caetanoveloso.com.br/sec_discogra_textos.php?language=pt_BR&id=1.