(((I keep hearing that he's *stopped* being Brazilian culture minister for reasons of health, but apparently ol' Gilberto here has just plain got more Brazilian culture than anyone else.)))
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/arts/music/26gil.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin
Link: Music Review - Gilberto Gil Performs at the Nokia Theater - Review - NYTimes.com.
Gilberto Gil’s show at the Nokia Theater on Tuesday night started with his band’s arrangement of the famous Nokia cellphone ring tone. If corporate mediation of cultural events puts you on edge, hearing that particular melody in that particular place might make you especially nervous.
Gilberto Gil, who when not making music is Brazil’s minister of culture, in concert at the Nokia Theater on Tuesday night.
Mr. Gil seemed the least nervous person in the room. His set was a deep fusion of pop and folk culture: he used lots of variations on samba and baião, two root elements of Brazilian popular music. Before the songs began he described their rhythms with specificity; then he let them loose in a generalized, amiable pop, with overriding tastes of reggae or disco or rock. And over them he crooned, holler-chanted like a roots-reggae singer, turned sideways and flirtatiously moved his hips like a female samba dancer.
The name of his band, Banda Larga Cordel, means broadband, and Mr. Gil’s communications-technology thoughts lie somewhere between cybertheory and metaphorical poetry about practical things. He’s not necessarily interested in the status or time-saving aspects of, say, cellphones; he’s an artist, the opposite of a salesman. But he is also the minister of culture for Brazil. In interviews, and in songs like the new “Banda Larga Cordel” and the old “Pela Internet” (“On the Internet”) — a tune from 1996 that he played on Tuesday — he casts broadband technology as an empowerment issue, a cheap way to have an entire country, and ideally an entire world, included in political and social discussions.
Brazilians have long been obsessed with the past and the future at the same time, a double consciousness that has helped produce a lot of good music over the last half-century. Mr. Gil in particular made peace with popular culture before many of his contemporaries did; the tropicália movement, which he helped build in the late 1960s, was playfully anti-nostalgia and ferociously anti-purist. He is the same as ever, a man of big ideas....
