Dário BORIM, Lusotopie 2004 : 181-189

Black Tropicalist in Power

From the Margins of Counterculture to the Stage of Change

The legacy of Tropicália or Tropicalismo1 is a widely discussed topic.

The subject of this study2, however, is to examine Ministro da Cultura

Gilberto Gil's rocking career, not as a guitar man but as a key political figure in Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's government, a man with the power to request and distribute funds for the development of the arts and culture. The focus will be on the relationship between Gil's nine-month performance as the glowing bureaucrat of Lula' s government and the underpinning concepts of the movement launched in 1967 by Caetano Veloso, Tom Zé, Gal Costa, Gil himself, and others. The central query is the extent to which Gil's positions, proposals, and actions in office suggest the persistence of tropicalist art concepts and political views. Academic literature, newspaper reports, and television news programs constitute the principal source of information for the analysis of the Minister's exploits (which will be featured in chronological order).

In reality, Gilberto Gil's counterculture activities in the second half of the 1960s were not at all marginal. He already was a famous pop singer by 1968 and had directed two weekly television shows before the end of that year. A couple of decades later, his art had even become "canonical", to use a term of Liv Sovik's to describe today's status of tropicalist art (113-114). The term seems quite apt. This is so despite the fact that Gil was a radically innovator musician formerly jeered and physically hurt by conservative nationalists. Considered a politically subversive artist, he was jailed and sent into a two-and-a-half-year exile because of his debunking of bourgeois values and religious symbols and his protest against a reigning draconian federal government. But since January 2, 2003, this former renegade has been Brazil's full-time Minister of Culture.