Between the Popular and the Avant-Garde: the influence of concrete poetry on Caetano Veloso’s album “Araçá Azul” (1973)

Caetano Veloso is one of the most important composers in Brazilian popular music and Portuguese-language song. It is known, through statements from the composer himself, that he was strongly influenced by Concrete Poetry, the main Brazilian avant-garde movement of the second half of the 20th century. This research aims to identify and analyze this influence in Veloso’s work after the peak of the Tropicália movement, focusing on the album “Araçá Azul”, released in 1973. According to the composer, the album represented the revival of a “São Paulo-concrete” album project, which had been interrupted by his imprisonment and exile. In other words, it is a work directly influenced by the aesthetic and conceptual ideas of Concrete Poetry. This invites a detailed analysis of the album, aiming to examine its particularities as the product of a convergence between a popular music composer and an avant-garde poetic movement, while engaging with the aesthetic and political issues of Brazil’s cultural environment at the time and, more broadly, with the developments in art during the second half of the 20th century.