Buried Treasure: Os Mutantes

[Today: Rio de Janeiro's colorful answer to The Beatles...]

To give Os Mutantes its proper due, I would need to write this review backwards in technicolor ink, while a marching band of drunken dwarves played assorted tunes from The Beatles’ catalogue. That would be some review, and some day I just might write it, but today let’s instead begin with Tropicalia, an artistic movement that sprung up in Rio de Janeiro in the late 60’s in response to a repressive and hostilely anti-intellectual Brazilian government.

The musicians and artists who took part in the Tropicalia movement delighted in pointing out the absurdities in the government’s positions, and in this regard they were playing a very dangerous game. Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil were exiled to London for the unpardonable sin of creating music, and one could reasonably argue that their fame spared them a much worse fate.

Os Mutantes were the clown princes of the Tropicalia movement. While their peers – including Gal Costa, Tom Ze, Jorge Ben, Veloso, and Gil – created songs that (however obliquely) spoke to the politics of Brazil, ‘The Mutants’ seemed to have beamed in from another planet. Brothers Arnaldo and Sergio Baptista, along with vocalist Rita Lee, made music that mocked conventional Brazilian rhythms, and their self-titled 1968 debut is an intoxicating blend of psychedelic whooshes and clangs, playful melodies, and catchy hooks. Throw Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles in a Brazilian blender with a few hundred milligrams of pure LSD, and the result might sound something like this.

The group managed to release five albums (no doubt because the government couldn’t begin to decipher what they were up to) before Lee departed for a solo career in 1972. Little known or appreciated in their own time, they built a steady cult following that eventually included musicians such as David Byrne, Kurt Cobain and Beck. They turned down a chance to open for Nirvana in 1993, before finally playing in the United States for the first time in 2006.

Os Mutantes is one of the finest albums of the psychedelic era – a mischievous, thrilling joyride that belongs in every music collection.

Listen: Bat Macumba

Tags: Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes, Tropicalia