A generation of Latin American and Caribbean teen-agers in the '60s and '70s grew up scrutinizing each new arrival from the Beatles or Led Zeppelin with the intensity of archaeologists handed a freshly unearthed hieroglyphic. Straining to translate riffs, references and lyrics across cultures and languages, the Latin kids ended up reconstructing the meanings of Western pop classics according to their own experiences, a process that eventually produced some of the finest modern musicians in the region.

If culture flowed equitably and democratically across frontiers – which it doesn't – Pearl Jam fans in Ohio would be furiously cramming Portuguese and tracking down old Brazilian movies in order to better inhale every last bit of Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil's Tropicália 2, one of the most important pop releases of 1994. The fact that this is not happening, that the historic collaboration between Brazil's two fiftysomething songwriting giants at the peak of their powers produces but a blip on the First World pop screen, is a theme that the songwriters weave through Tropicália 2 so slyly that it never needs to be mentioned explicitly. Indeed, there is little of anything explicit on this album of brilliantly nuanced polyphonic pop songs, sambas and "Revolution No. 9" style sound collages. Meanings and melodies turn corners when least expected, words twist into puns, and actions are simultaneously what they seem and what they are not. When Gil and Veloso cover Jimi Hendrix's "Wait Until Tomorrow," are they simply two '60s veterans of swinging London (where they lived for years in exile from Brazil's military dictatorship) paying tribute to a hero? Or are they reworking Hendrix's fable of emotional betrayal, fathers and shotguns into a commentary on relations between the First and Third Worlds? Such ironic, multiple meanings lap over Tropicália 2 like the waves on Ipanema Beach.

The surreal, complex situation of the Third World and especially postmodern Brazil is the subject of Tropicália 2 and has been at the center of much of both Veloso's and Gil's individual work for the last 25 years. Because an understanding of this subject demands a familiarity with Brazilian culture, it is largely ignored by American critics, who tend to lean on the adjective sophisticated in order to avoid entanglement in a web of unknown, often untranslatable references in these artists' work. Although it's true that Veloso's impressionistic, dadaist lyrics and Gil's command of every Afro-Brazilian rhythm ever invented qualify as sophisticated, this music is anything but safe, as a glance at Arto Lindsay's excellent lyric translations reveals.

"Haiti," the devastating opener, slices and dices racism, class pretension, AIDS policies and the U.S. embargo of Cuba with a sly nose-thumb at Paul Simon for good measure. Effortlessly multi-cultural – we're in the thick of Brazil's European-African soup – Gil's and Veloso's voices, whether softly speaking (as on "Haiti") or singing in unison (as on "Cinéma Novo," a brilliant discourse on the interrelation of samba and film), become a metaphor for mixed cultures, dual meanings and double consciousness.

Tropicália refers to a '60s movement of artists and intellectuals in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil (Gil and Veloso were among its leaders), who attempted to construct a national alternative culture that was anti-colonial, modern and Brazilian. Less well known is that Tropicália has its roots in a much earlier avant-garde movement, the 1920s Cannibalists, a group who playfully derived their cultural metaphor from Brazil's man-eating Tupinamba Indians. Taking their cues from the cannibals, they suggested that Brazilian artists should devour every scrap of foreign and domestic culture, assimilate, digest and then expel it, Brazilianized. Good cannibalists both, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil have digested the Beatles and Jobim, our canon and theirs, and they've spit out a rock & roll samba that anyone who wants to know what's going to happen to pop music in the new global culture should be sinking their teeth into. (RS 688)

DAISANN MCLANE