September 23, 2004
Caetano Veloso.
This superb mid seventies Veloso record has the most sumptuos cover. Catherine said it was nice to see a man relishing in his sexuality. Go "Open Image In New Window" to witness the gatefold in a bit more detail. They're quite disorientating these images, his narcissism is so extreme here, it seems like only gay men allow themselves to pout and preen like this. What is fascinating is how this lavish self-love is paired with the experimental bent of the music, it's almost as if self-indulgence is conjoined not with closeted masturbation (well that's the critical trope for solo avant-garde wank isn't it!) but with public self-exposure. That is an altogether rarer collusion.
The record is a collision of ethnographic-style recordings of Brazilian folk, tape loops and Veloso's gourgeous balladry. Traces of Garage Rock too. I've always been intrigued by the relationship Arto Lindsay has with Caetano. Lindsay, fluent in Portuguese and with a Brazilian background, was roped in to translate Veloso's biography into English and evidently they've remained friends. He'd also done liner notes for David Byrne's "Tropicalia" compilation (a classic case of compiler thrashing around in the dark, incorrectly curating the document of a scene, misrepresenting it with tracks recorded nearly a decade after the collective activity it purports to depict). To us in muso-land Arto looms large, he's an underground celebrity, but Veloso is almost obscure. Conversely Veloso is, in fact, practically a superstar in Brazil. So you see it's all intriguingly bent out of shape.
Other completely wonderful Veloso records are: his peak period "Caetano Veloso" (Phillips 1968) (which along with the first Os Mutantes record, Gal Costa's debut and the collective Tropicalia record "Ou Panis et Circensis" is *definitive* Tropicalia), his 1986 acoustic record on Nonesuch and apparently his 1969 "White Album". In keeping with my earlier observations most of his records seem to be eponymously titled.
Posted by Woebot at September 23, 2004 06:48 AM