A trailer for the upcoming Os Mutantes documentary. Not sure how the doc will turn out, but Brazilian 1960s culture has been a mid-level obsession of mine for about a year now.
“Imagine a 1960’s Brazilian rock band on a weekly television program disguised as aliens, witches, or conquistadors, performing surreal hymns to such bizarre figures as Don Quixote (or at other times Genghis Khan and Lucifer) while tossing massive nets and giant rubber caterpillars across their audience…[Os Mutantes] provoked even further outrage by fashioning their own outrageous musical instruments, often constructed out of such common household objects as rubber hoses, cans of hot chocolate, or bottles of bug spray. Finally, they did all of this under the watchful eyes of a brutally repressive right-wing military dictatorship, as they were regularly censored by the government…”
The name of the doc comes from their song “Panis et Circenses,” which means “bread and circuses” — “a derogatory phrase which can describe either government policies to pacify the citizenry, or the shallow, decadent desires of that same citizenry. In both cases, it refers to low-cost, low-quality, high-availability food and entertainment, and to the exclusion of things which the speaker considers more important, such as art, public works projects, democracy, or human rights.” Pretty ballsy to play that under a military dictatorship. Here’s a (so-so quality) video of the band playing the song:
The rather poetic lyrics are here (“I demanded that a dagger of pure shining steel be made / To kill my love, and I did it / At five o’clock on Central Avenue / But the people in the dining room / Are occupied with being born and with dying”).
Finally, here’s Os Mutantes playing with another great musical hero of ’60s Brazil, Gilberto Gil — currently the country’s Minister of Culture (!) in the Lula government. It’s astonishing how much joy they played with, considering the political situation and the sort of songs they’re singing:
And since it’s illegal to mention Gilberto Gil without mentioning Caetano Veloso — both were famously jailed by the government — here he is playing in 1998:
Finally, here’s a video of Brazilian songstress Cibelle covering Veloso’s 1971 “London, London,” written while he and Gil were in exile there. Both song and video feature American New Weird America singer Devendra Banhart (who I initially thought was too weird for his own good, but who I’ve come to enjoy quite a bit):