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Gilberto Gil
Did Gilberto get any attention from this forum, when he was appointed minister of culture some months back? How’s he doing?
New job for a Brazilian pop star
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Larry Rohter The New York Times
Wednesday, January 8, 2003
It is as if Bob Marley had been appointed Jamaica's minister of culture or Bruce Springsteen were put in charge of the National Endowment of the Arts. When Brazil's new government took office Jan. 1, its culture portfolio went to one of the country's biggest pop stars for 35 years, the singer-songwriter and guitarist Gilberto Gil.
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"The challenger of the establishment will now experience things from the other side," was the way one incredulous newspaper delivered the news. Even before President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva officially announced that he had chosen Gil to be his minister of culture, the appointment was tangled in controversy. "I've gone from being the stone thrower to the glass," Gil said during a news conference at his recording studio. "But that's the way life is: You move from one state of things to another."
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Along with his friend and frequent singing and songwriting partner Caetano Veloso, Gil is a founder of the counterculture movement known as Tropicalismo. In that capacity he continues to question the status quo. He has written hundreds of songs, recently released a CD box set with 28 of his solo recordings, filled concert halls from Sao Paulo to Tokyo and won a Grammy Award in the world-music category in 1999 for his album "Quanta."
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When Tropicalismo emerged in the late 1960s, it angered the rightist military dictatorship then in power because it advocated unrestricted personal freedom, including a permissive attitude toward drugs and sex. Gil and Veloso were imprisoned for several months in 1969 before being forced into exile for two years in London, an experience that Veloso writes about in his book "Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil."
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But the Tropicalistas also alienated the Brazilian left, largely because they enthusiastically embraced American and British rock 'n' roll at a time when Marxists all over Latin America were condemning pop culture as a particularly insidious manifestation of American imperialism. That rift never quite healed, and to this day Brazil's orthodox left remains suspicious of Gil and his focus on Pan-Africanism and the ecology.
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Gil, 60, is not even a member of da Silva's Workers' Party and did not take part in drawing up the cultural program in the party's platform. He belongs instead to Brazil's small Green Party and in the past has supported Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who defeated da Silva in two presidential elections but could not run for a third term. As a result, some Workers' Party leaders have greeted Gil's inclusion in a 26-member cabinet with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
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"I confess that I would have preferred other names more in tune with the party's cultural project," said Carlos Alberto Libanio Christo, a Roman Catholic friar who is one of the new president's closest friends and advisers.
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Gil also clearly irritated others when he said he was going to find it hard to make ends meet on the $2,500 a month that cabinet members earn here and would continue giving concerts on weekends. With both a family and a working band to support, he said, "I don't have sufficient savings to remain four years living just on a minister's salary."
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Some leading film and theater personalities have expressed reservations about Gil's appointment. Their argument seems to be that if the new leftist government insists on choosing a creative person instead of a bureaucrat to be minister of culture, the designation should have gone to one of their own and not to a musician.
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"I think Gil should spend all his time attending to his lovely career, and I think his remarks about a minister's salary offer an honorable exit for his brief political stardom," the director Joao Batista de Andrade wrote in a manifesto circulating on the Internet.
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As a native of the state of Bahia and a black man, Gil may also be the victim of a regional prejudice with a certain racial subtext. Other Brazilians tend to regard people from that northeastern state as disorganized and indolent, to the point that one slang term for a midafternoon siesta is bahiano.
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A ditty called the "Culture Rap," also circulating on the Internet, pokes fun at the bohemian ways of musicians and suggests that Gil may lack the commitment to put in a full day's work.
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Newspaper editorials have raised the same issue with Gil's determination to continue offering live performances and speculated about potential conflicts of interest in corporate sponsorship of such shows.
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But Gil is no newcomer to politics or public administration, as Veloso was quick to remind critics when he came to the defense of his fellow Tropicalista.
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In 1988 Gil was elected to the council in his home city, Salvador, and has also served as secretary of culture in Bahia and run an environmental foundation called Blue Wave for more than a decade.
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That is not to say that Gil has suddenly become a stickler for formality. When da Silva introduced the cabinet to the Brazilian public last week, Gil had his hair plaited and was dressed in simple white pants and shirt, chosen because white is the color of peace in the Afro-Brazilian religion that he follows.
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"The breaking of protocol and conventions is part" of the style of the new government, "which permits a certain freedom for the public servant," he said. But he added, "I've already worn jacket and tie in a lot of situations, and if I have to do it again in order to carry out my duties, I will."
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Gil has indicated that he wants to meet with his critics. But if they are expecting him to endorse their plans for greater intervention by the state in cultural affairs, additional disagreements probably lie ahead.
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"We have to free ourselves a bit from the idea that the responsibility of the Ministry of Culture is to produce culture," Gil said. "I don't think so. I think the role of the ministry is to create the conditions in which culture can be made and improved and to act as a bridge between those who make culture and those who consume it."
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