HOME FEATURES COLUMNS FILM LIT MUSIC BLOG CONTACT		Lit Brutality Garden: Tropicalia and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture by Christopher Dunn UNC Press ISBN 0-8078-4976-6 (Originally published in the Wire) Not only do the subaltern speak, they eat too. This is the fascinating theme of Christopher Dunn's Brutality Garden, a thorough and impressive look at Brazil's all-too-brief Tropicalia movement that is also one of the best books on music to come out in years. Neither unconditionally devoted nor coldly analytical, the genius of Dunn's text is that it is essentially a history of Brazil's relationship with globalization as seen through this tiny period of playful rebellion that spanned from 1967-68. That practically the entire rise-and-fall of Tropicalia's main figures-Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil-is summarized in one chapter speaks to how careful Dunn is in setting up Tropicalia as part of a richer, broader heritage of Brazilian nation-building and anti-imperialist protest. Dunn traces the roots of the movement to Oswald de Andrade, a Brazilian writer who authored two manifestos in the 1920s that were influential to later-century movements for self-identification among native artists. The "Brazilwood Manifesto" called for a "poetry for export" that sought to disrupt the imperial teleology, instead relying on what was "regional and pure." This idea of rejecting globalized flows of culture and capital, and the momentum of Western industrial history, was elaborated in his "Cannibalist Manifesto." Oswald took the idea of "digesting" outside influences quite literally, encouraging artists and critics to "eat" the other side of the binary. Dunn writes that this project took inspiration from indigenous peoples "who were believed to ritually cannibalize vanquished enemies in order to absorb their physical and spiritual powers." Years later, Veloso would explain that "the idea of cultural cannibalism fit us, the tropicalists, like a glove. We were 'eating' the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix." Dunn focuses his discussion of the movement primarily on Veloso, Gil and Tom Ze, with Os Mutantes, Gal Costa and Jorge Ben playing significant supporting roles as well. Most of the story is told from the perspective of Veloso, though one never gets a satisfying, fleshed-out impression of the interpersonal relationships among the movement's principle actors and actresses. Rather, Dunn's history is vaguely top-down, told through the lens of significant concerts, television specials and record releases. One potential improvement could have been an increased emphasis on the reception, sales and marketing of Tropicalia records. Throughout the two "real" years of Tropicalia (Dunn marks the tenure's end as December 27, 1968, the day Veloso and Gil were arrested and eventually exiled), one sees all these frozen moments where it really seemed like things could have changed for the better. With a confused government more concerned with Leftists and overt, chest-thumping protest singers than the freaky tropicalists, folk heroes like Veloso and Gil were able to quietly foster a counterculture that would last long after its heroes had been exiled (or worse yet, moved onto worldbeat reggae). The beauty of the original movement was in its own, nuanced contradiction. These were songs of critical protest in the fluffiest, poppiest most "tuned-out" garb. Dunn has a fascinating analysis of the tropicalist treatment of Carmen Miranda, a 1940s samba artist who had essentially been objectified abroad and relegated to "sell-out" status at home. Rather than reject her, Dunn explains that Veloso wrote her name into his song "Tropicalia" to "recover" and "dislocate" her, reading her tragic break from the Brazilian canon as an allegory of Brazilian culture and its reception abroad. This was the kind of subtle, self-aware critique that both confused authorities and captivated the youth. Dunn points out that the offspring movements would become increasingly dependent on drugs or Western hippie hand-me-downs, generally lacking the analysis of nation-self that drove the tropicalists. Perhaps Brutality's only flaw is that it fizzles toward the end. Dunn's last chapter-a survey of the movement's legacy-doesn't really answer his own implied question: Did Tropicalia work? Judging by the way the movement has been adopted by figures like Beck, Tortoise or David Byrne, it's hard to say, and it all cuts back to the heart of the art vs. politics question that puzzled Brazil (and most other societies) throughout the century. Can Jorge Ben's beautiful music be reduced to a stand-alone cut on a rare groove compilation or sample-material for MC Jewel? Or do we forcibly airdrop Ben, Gil and the rest back into the raunchy machinery of state repression and censorship that plagued 1960s Brazil and read them as devoted, "political" missionaries? Perhaps, as Dunn would have us believe, this was a rare moment in which they could be read as both. Throughout Brutality Garden, Dunn does an admirable job balancing both sides of the story, tempering a slavish love for the music with a convincing, jargon-free analysis of the movement in postmodern terms, and for that, his book captures both the beauty and insight of the movement itself.