ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Caetano Veloso transformation from a bom moco, or "nice young man", into an enfant terrible and how the sexual politics which he developed and advocated during the Tropicalia period differed from the cultural politics of the day. It discusses the political significance of his ambiguous style and divergent sexual identity in the context of late 1960s Brazil, illustrating how Veloso turned to the representation of desire and pleasure to recover a dialectical and critical relationship between individual and social identities. Style and sexuality have always been closely linked to the process of image-making throughout Veloso's career, but the two were fundamental during the Tropicalia years in 1967 and 1968. The question of the vital importance of style to considerations of pop culture was emphatically raised in Britain with the publication of the newspaper critic and jazz singer George Melly's Revolt Into Style in 1970.
