Melos and Logos: Caetano Veloso and the criticism of the public domain in the poetry attributed to Gregório de Matos

Abstract

Bahians and poets, the baroque Gregório de Matos and the tropicalist Caetano Veloso are connected in the use of the same “tropical and demystifying language” (ÁVILA,
1994) of the streets, of the transit between written and sung words. However, the affects and the ethical and aesthetic effects are quite diverse. When singing “Triste Bahia”, Caetano
recovers all the technical-persuasive procedures of poetry at the time of Gregório, however, to reverse the colonial ethos, exposing his decadence and impertinence. Singing Gregório the way Caetano sings, inserting verses in the public domain, restores the discussion around the authorship of the poetry attributed to the poet of colony Brazil. To the “ostensible ornamentality of Baroque rhetoric” (OLIVEIRA, 2003), Caetano proposes a new look at the permanence of
the “old state” in Brazil in the 1970s.