The article analyzes styles of Brazilian popular music that arose in the Sixties, reading them in terms of continuity and discontinuity vis-à-vis bossa nova. The core argument is that, although the experiments in harmony of the bossa-nova musicians influenced a number of songwriters of the following generation, the latter broke with the aesthetics of restraint pioneered by the former, which was in keeping with various other cultural forms of the period, such as concrete poetry and Oscar Niemeyer's architecture. Popular musicians of the later generation, from protest music to tropicália, returned to the traditional Modernist view of Brazil as an inexhaustible trove of cultural information, archaic and contemporary, regional and universal, and to the Modernist aesthetics of excess.
Brazilian popular music; Bossa nova; Tropicália; the Sixties; Modernism