The Interactions of Musicians, Mass Media and the State in the Context of Brazilian and Uruguayan Authoritarianism

Abstract

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Uruguayan and Brazilian states clashed with politically and culturally contestatarian artistic movements. While counter-cultural artists built their images and created art against the grain of accepted cultural norms, politically engaged artists supported and participated in the struggle for social change, serving as mouthpieces for social movements by using their songs to transmit political messages. Not all artists fell squarely into one camp or the other, and career trajectories more often delved into more than one type of expression. Still, identifying artists with one or the other category according to the predominant tendencies in musical production contributes to the analysis of the period. Both types of artists encountered varying forms of repression which transformed their art aesthetically and according to communicative necessities. The movements to which they belonged accordingly re-shaped themselves. The state responded to these transformations and adjusted its approach to cultural movements in turn, participating in a dialogue charged with different and unequal power relations.