A militância pela arte moderna em Vaca Profana, de Caetano Veloso

Uma análise da estética tropicalista como resistência cultural

Abstract

This article analyzes the song Vaca Profana, by Caetano Veloso, recorded by Gal Costa on the album Profana (1984), to demonstrate that the work updates, in the midst of Brazil’s redemocratization, the principles of Tropicalist aesthetics. It hypothesizes that the song expresses an advocacy of modern art, understood as a defense of creative freedom, the blending of references and the right to desire, against conservative moralism and purist nationalism. The qualitative and bibliographic research draws on Oswald de Andrade (1928), Favaretto (1996), Schwarz (1978), Napolitano (2001), Dunn (2009) and Bakhtin (1987), among others. It discusses the anthropophagic heritage, allegory, carnivalization and the context of political opening. It concludes that Vaca Profana shows the permanence of the Tropicalist project as cultural resistance, in which aesthetic freedom is inseparable from political freedom.