Eliot
Wilder:
November,
2001

They sound like an acid-soaked, Yoko-fronted ABBA. They could be mistaken for a Brazilian Beck or Pizzicato Five with Portuguese accents. What they are is a wibbly-wobbly hybrid of disparate influences forged in a South American political movement known as Tropicalism. What they are is Os Mutantes, the mutants.

In late 1968 Brazil's dictatorship decreed the Institutional Act, which sought to effectively quash free artistic expression, especially music that did not conform to the government's stringent standards that all songs performed be simple, provincial folk tunes. Artists such as Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa and Gilberto Gil rebelled against the restrictions by recording outrageous-sounding pop art albums that were influenced heavily by the psychedelic "happenings" going down in the United States and Great Britain. The exotic sounds created by these bold Brazilians - who risked imprisonment for their flagrant disregard of tradition and who were finally forced to flee their homeland - seemed to be of another universe altogether. And none whipped this dreamscape of giddy sonic sorcery quite like Os Mutantes.

Beginning with "Os Mutantes," it's clear that singer Rita Lee and brothers Arnaldo and Sergio Dias Baptista were more than capable of performing a bossa nova, as long as they could throw in a jarring string arrangement, wheezing accordions and flanged voices. The opening track, "Panis et Cirensis" ("Bread and Circus"), jumps out at you with blaring trumpets, seemingly signaling the start of a race (or, perhaps, a call to arms?), which quickly subside to reveal a daft nursery rhyme punctuated with sitar, tambourines and a frantic coronet. Soon the track comes completely unglued, as if the tape machine is breaking down, then buzzsaw guitars, galumphing drums and piercing piccolos epoxy the entire contraption back together - while Lee chirpily intones, "I released tigers and lions in the backyards / But the people in the dining room / Are preoccupied about birth and death." The whole made whirligig rises to a glass-shattering climax followed by loony, chattering voices. And this is only the first tune on the album.

The group's subsequent two records, "Mutantes" and "A Divina Comedia ou Anido Meio Desligado" ("A Divine Comedy or I Walk Disconnected"), mix up a melange of Hendrix, vaudeville, mariachi, German waltzes, snippets of the Hallelujah chorus and a dab of the Stones' "Satisfaction." Somehow, it all works; the songs are both melodic and memorable.
Memorable enough for Beck to name his album "Mutations" as a salute to the band. And memorable enough for David Byrne to compile them on "World Psychedelic Classics One" on his Luaka Bop label.

"The Mutants were," according to the Planet of the Mutants Web site, "the most important and influential rock band in Brazil. They were the first in the country to mix elements of rock and pop with elements of Brazilian music. Although they have been admired by musicians like Kurt Cobain, very few know about these pioneers." Pioneers, alas, that several albums later would shed their "Pepper"-era uniqueness and charm by opting for a much less compelling prog-rock approach. Such was the difference in the musical climate between 1968 and 1972.

Sadly, in the 1980s, Arnaldo Baptista fell out of a window, suffered brain damage and wound up something like Brazil's answer to Syd Barrett. Rita Lee remains active, however, having transformed herself from a disco diva in the '70s to, ironically, a singer of simple, provincial folk tunes.

Nevertheless, the songs that so outraged Brazil's rightists still feel fresh and original. Listening to them now, they manage to be seditious without resorting to aphorisms, mixing their messages with wit and a hallucinogenic ambiguity. Which is what makes them so truly subversive. At the close of "Night Walker," amid Spanish trumpets, backward guitars and Mama and Papas-style harmonies, a robotic voice emerges and repeats the phrase, "It is forbidden to forbid." Thirty years on, what was once forbidden in Os Mutantes' native Brazil has finally fruit to a whole new generation of listeners.

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