Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Tom Zé’s Irará

2022; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 58; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3368/lbr.58.2.4

1548-9957

Christopher Dunn,

Brazilian cultural history and politics

Abstract This article considers the work of musician Tom Zé (Antonio José Santana Martins, b. 1936), who rose to prominence in 1968 as a participant of the multidisciplinary movement, Tropicália, together with several other artists from the state of Bahia. I focus on his early life in Irará, a small town on the edge of the northeastern sertão, his early experiments as a singer-songwriter, and his later evocations of his place of origin based on an idea of temporal disjunction in relation to modern coastal Brazil. I discuss how Tom Zé engaged the popular northeastern song tradition of cantoria as well as canonical texts about the region, such as Euclides da Cunha's Os sertões. Finally, I consider his concept album, Tropicália lixo lógico (2012), which proposes a novel theory of Tropicália based on the encounter between modern urban Brazil and the sertão, imagined as a temporal vestige of medieval Mozarab Iberia.