This paper highlights the scarcely understood plurality of genres in 1960s MPB and Tropicália, correlating it to the decade's upheavals. Such plurality of genres is unprecedented in a single set of practices in the history of Brazilian popular music, and the paper argues that its appearance in a moment marked by the broadest population's search for decisory participation and dialogue is significant. In this ethnomusicological research, music genres were taken as discourses, and different genres were perceived as the discourses of different social and cultural groups. Investigating this phenomenon through the concept of intertextuality, I analyzed how cultural identities built around delimited genres were deconstructed by the rupture of the frontiers between genres. A plural subject emerged from this, challenging binary, mutually excluding pairs such as militancy/ aesthetics, nationalism/ transnationalism, MPB/Tropicália.
intertextuality in Brazilian MPB and Tropicália; subjectivity in music; musical discourse and genre