Tom Zé’s Irará

Abstract

This article considers the work of musician Tom Zé (Antonio José Santana Martins, b. 1936), who rose to prominence in 1968 as a participant of the multidisciplinary movement, Tropicália, together with several other artists from the state of Bahia. I focus on his early life in Irará, a small town on the edge of the northeastern sertão, his early experiments as a singer-songwriter, and his later evocations of his place of origin based on an idea of temporal disjunction in relation to modern coastal Brazil. I discuss how Tom Zé engaged the popular northeastern song tradition of cantoria as well as canonical texts about the region, such as Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões. Finally, I consider his concept album, Tropicália lixo lógico (2012), which proposes a novel theory of Tropicália based on the encounter between modern urban Brazil and the sertão, imagined as a temporal vestige of medieval Mozarab Iberia.