Tropicália was a movement that lasted just short of a year, spanning from Hélio Oiticica’s 1967 art installation of the same name, wherein viewers walked along a tropical sand path only to come face-to-face with a television set, to the debut of a TV show, wherein its constituents buried the movement on-air. But Tropicália’s influence was vast. A loose collective that included Veloso, Gil, Os Mutantes, vocalist Gal Costa, songwriter-composer Tom Zé, bossa nova singer Nara Leão, Brazilian-pop performer Jorge Ben, arranger Rogério Duprat—along with visual artists, experimental poets, playwrights, and filmmakers—these creatives modernized Brazilian culture just as the country’s ruling military junta began to strangle democracy and expression. Tropicália produced only a handful of albums and a compilation, but it went on to transform Música Popular Brasileira (MPB), along with future generations from Brazil and around the world. As author Christopher Dunn put it in Brutality Garden, his 2001 book on the movement, this was “simultaneously an exciting period of counter cultural experimentation and severe political repression.”

The ’60s were a fraught time for Brazil, and the Tropicalistas struck a precarious balance between political extremes. In 1962, Brazilian president João Goulart took office and attempted to move his country to the left with a series of reforms. By April Fool’s Day, 1964, a CIA-assisted military coup d’état toppled his administration and moved the country to the far right. In this climate, artists had to walk a thin line between the communist left and the increasingly prohibitive military regime on the right.

On one side, students and intellectuals protested that their art and music was insufficiently political, crassly embracing American pop culture instead of Brazilian music, while the other side was concerned they weren’t nationalist enough. Imbibing the heady works of Bob Dylan, Jean-Luc Godard, Pink Floyd, Luis Buñuel—as well as taking in the revolts in France and the rise of the Black Power movement in the U.S.—the Tropicalistas amalgamated the countercultural trends of the decade and brought them to bear on their own heritage. Os Mutantes’ 1968 ritualistic rocker “Bat Macumba” succinctly contains the collective’s concerns: Written by Veloso and Gil, it evokes Bahian religious cults macumba and candomblé as well as Batman. On paper, the lyrics reveal their concrete poetry roots; the words even look like bat wings.

“The idea of cultural cannibalism fit Tropicalistas like a glove; we were ‘eating’ the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix,” Veloso said later. “We wanted to participate in the worldwide language both to strengthen ourselves as a people and to affirm our originality.” In the lineage of 20th century Brazilian music, Tropicália intermingled with outside sounds in much the same ways as its predecessors had: Samba took in Argentinean tangos and American foxtrot; bossa nova dug West Coast jazz; and Jovem Guarda was the sound of American rock’n’roll. Tropicalistas chewed the blotter of ’60s psychedelia and brought these kaleidoscopic visions to bear on their love for colorful film star Carmen Miranda, the drunken drums of Carnival, and underpinning it all, João Gilberto’s bossa nova.

The movement took root in the oppressive shadow of the junta. Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine describes disposed president Goulart as “an economic nationalist committed to land redistribution, higher salaries, and a daring plan to force foreign multinationals to reinvest a percentage of their profits back into the Brazilian economy”—three notions that sought to bridge the gap between rich and poor. It was a plan decidedly at odds with the American government and economist Milton Friedman’s influential theories, which instead touted deregulation, hyper-inflation, and the privatization and outsourcing of a country’s natural resources to multinational corporations, plus cutbacks on all social programs.

From the mid-’60s into the ’90s, throughout the Southern Cone, the brutal, CIA-approved, corporation-funded, U.S.-friendly regimes of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Jorge Videla in Argentina, and President Artur da Costa e Silva in Brazil were in firm control, and Friedman’s caustic theories were mercilessly put into practice. Hundreds of thousands of deaths and “disappearances” followed those who opposed such measures throughout South America—be they union leaders, academics, or students.

But according to Klein, President Costa e Silva almost made a tactical error, imposing these punitive measures in half-steps: “There were no obvious shows of brutality, no mass arrests… the junta also made a point of keeping some remnants of democracy in place, including limited press freedoms and freedom of assembly. By 1968 the streets were overrun with anti-junta marches… and the regime was in serious jeopardy.”