Caetano, the literate: brief theoretical-emotive essay on the artist and his time

Abstract

The authors explore aspects of literary construction and themes that permeate Caetano Veloso’s literary-musical work and are parallel to the sociocultural construction of the country in the context of the last 60 years. The article aims to practice analysis and interpretation of texts, the process of contextualization necessary for understanding discourses, the literary movements understood in the studied period, and aspects of the cultural and identity construction of the Brazilian people, such as memory, anthropophagy, and cultural hybridism. The authors manage to demonstrate the examples to be discussed and present Veloso as an author who provides these discussions/interpretations, both as the author of the music lyrics used for reflection and as exercising leadership roles in various cultural movements, with emblematic speeches and artistic constructions that promote exercises for literary analysis at different reading levels. Through the analyzes and interpretations of the texts, it is possible to affirm that Veloso builds his verbal-musical speech according to his time and ahead of it, innovating the poetic making, testing syntactic constructions, creating words and concepts, mixing, playing with the poetic making and, consequently, composing a sociocultural reframing.