Edu Lobo stirs up tensions between Tropicália and Clube da Esquina by defending the musical superiority of the Minas Gerais movement

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The artist’s statement brings to light grievances already overcome in Milton Nascimento’s relationship with Caetano Veloso. Edu Lobo revives old rivalries by declaring that ‘Clube da Esquina is much more sophisticated than Tropicália’ Nana Moraes / Divulgação ♪ MEMORY – “Clube da Esquina is much more sophisticated than Tropicália”, declared Edu Lobo in an interview with newspaper Folha de S. Paulo to promote the release of the album Oitenta on November 7th. Unintentionally, the Rio artist’s statement stirs up tensions and rivalries – in theory, already overcome – between the members of the two Brazilian musical movements. The sorrows would have been laid to rest when, when writing the preface to the book The Dreams Don’t Age – Stories of the Clube da Esquina (1996), Caetano Veloso publicly recognized the musical greatness of the gregarious Minas Gerais pop movement of the 1970s in a text that Fernando Brant (1946 – 2015) understood as redemption for the Bahian artist. This is because, as Caetano himself recognizes, the author of the march Alegria joy (1967) initially identified in Milton Nascimento – architect and mentor of Clube da Esquina – a talented composer, but who, strictly speaking, in Caetano’s first impression, presented “nothing much more than a development of what Edu Lobo had already been doing that was interesting, that is, a development of Bossa Nova that encompassed stylizations of northeastern forms”. The fact is that, for years, Milton Nascimento fueled resentment that the members of the Minas Gerais movement had not been properly valued by the media and also by fellow Bahian members of Tropicália. In fact, Rolling Stone magazine – whose Brazilian edition was orchestrated by the fierce journalist Ezequiel Neves (1935 – 2010) in the 1970s – mercilessly attacked the album Clube da Esquina (1972), an album that would become the object of unanimous acclaim over the years. years. “I put (the album) Clube da Esquina on the record player and I can’t like anything. I think it’s a massive bore”, said Ezequiel, a rock devotee. Milton’s hurt grew with the omission of the names of Clube da Esquina artists in interviews in which Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil analyzed the evolution of MPB upon returning to Brazil in 1972 after forced European exile. With good reason, Milton never digested the omission of Clube da Esquina in the “evolutionary line” of MPB, as if the musical movement of Belo Horizonte (MG) was inferior or less relevant and revolutionary than Caetano and Gil’s Tropicália. “One thing that hurts me is that I spent almost two years working alone here in Brazil while everyone was away, saying they couldn’t work here. Som Imaginário and I were tough, we took a lot of pain, but we went out there and opened the doors to many things. Now everyone comes back, thinks everything is beautiful and doesn’t even mention our name. It wasn’t easy this whole time. In fact, when we started to form the group, people said that there were no musicians in Brazil. And the thing was just for the person to come down from their little pedestal that they thought would be right away. […] I do not hide this and I do not forgive: in these last two years, the solid thing that existed here was Milton Nascimento and Som Imaginário”, protested Milton, without mentioning Caetano and Gil by name, in an interview published in April 1972 in the magazine O bondinho, vehicle of the Brazilian alternative press at the time of repression. The fact is that Milton’s complaint seems to have reverberated for years in Caetano, who considered the album Clube da Esquina the opposite of the general tropicalist jam. So much so that, in the memoir Verdade Tropical (1997), published 25 years after Milton’s interview, Caetano touched on the wound, saying that he had not celebrated Milton with the emphasis that he, Milton, expected for “a sense of differences and for horror to demagoguery.” Differences aside, all tensions seem to be in the past. Already recognized as geniuses of the same dimension and importance in MPB history, octogenarians Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Milton Nascimento – the three born in 1942 and currently 82 years old – fraternize and celebrate each other. However, Edu Lobo’s declaration about the musical superiority of Clube da Esquina compared to Tropicália stirs up – even without Edu’s apparent intention – a previous antagonism that, in truth, is in the history of Brazilian music, even if already completely diluted by dust of time.

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