Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

Today's Front Page Traffic Reports Web Cams Yellow Pages Maps & Directions SITE SERVICES Advertise RSS Feeds News by Email News by mobile About Us Site Map Past Articles PARTNERS Culture Shock Miami Broadway Across America Florida Grand Opera UM School of Music Arts Beach 2nd Thursdays Cultural Connection (-Price Theater Tickets) Culture Shock Miami ($5 Student Tickets) Herald Events politically charged rappers, creating a cultural property rights in the digital age. dialogue with "We were projecting on the future screen then. Some of the ideals and expectations and what we were trying to produce are getting results now. The fruit is ripe. Environmentalism , the peace movement, the intercultural processes - It's the talk of the town now." And then he quotes the title of a book that few government bureaucrats would know but is classic for an old hippie: Timothy Leary's The Politics of Ecstasy Africa; and reimagining intellectual Gilberto Gil's life story embodies the changes in the region from a culturally rich but economically strapped entity that struggled, sometimes violently, to assert itself in a sphere still shrugging off European control to an increasingly self-empowered voice It's a global leadership role that Gil says he has always found antithetical to his humble disposition, and which he wields with enviable aplomb. Gil was born in 1942 in Bahia, the province where Brazil's connection to Africa is most pronounced and some of the greatest music in the world has been made. He says he was a reflective and introverted youth, which made his transition into generational spokesman and agent provocateur difficult. "One of the things that really bothered me was the sense of bothering others," he says. "This really is uncomfortable for me, even if it's true, if I'm right, even if I'm doing good. I was bom to be agreeable, to please." Gil and his friends and collaborators, including Caetano Veloso, Os Mutantes, and Jorge Ben were making a scene in Sao Paulo. When they started playing psychedelic pop on a national TV show, they outraged the left as well as the right. It was the South American equivalent of Bob Dylan playing electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. Except Dylan never was jailed, interrogated, and thrown out of the country Tropicalia has become a widely romanticized movement, embraced worldwide by hipsters and intellectuals. It was the subject of a London artexhibit last year that then moved to Berlin, New York and Chicago. But for Gil, it was a painful, confusing time, marked by tumult, self-doubt, and brutal punishment. "It was agony," he says. In jail, Gil turned to meditation. He recalls thinking, "Now I'm here, what do I do with my life? What do I do with my time? What do I do with my boredom? What do I do with being lost in terms. Where is the light substance, how can I grasp it and spiritual and substantial , I ?" . The study of Eastern philosophies he began then has shaped his music since. It was the focus of a '99 book on Gil by artist Bené Fonteles that was accompanied by a CD. That CD, GII Luminoso, was recently released commercially. Gil sings 15 songs from his past accompanied only by himself on guitar. It's a spare, beautiful, reflective album full of poetic musings, such as on 75's Retiros Espirituais (Spiritual Retreats): "How having problems can be the same as resolving not to have them/ Resolve to have them is to resolve to have to ignore them." Gil has brought his experiences as a creator of culture to bear on his post as a policy-maker. He's used his unique position to become a world leader on the issue of intellectual property nights, a point of friction between developed and developing nations. He advocates a flexible approach to copyright in which some works of art may be universally owned, while others are still individually controlled. Gil has offered a handful of his songs up to anyone who wants them. At SXSW, Gil said it's a philosophy that dates back to Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that the intellectual domain is the least adjustable to the concept of property Gil is a big picture kind of guy. He's a wide-ranging, well-read thinker who turns discussions into philosophical points, albeit sometimes with the elliptical vagaries of a Leary-quoter (compounded by the strange translations of a Latin language into a Germanic one) "It's very important that philosophy inform action. Despite the pragmatic demands of life, it's this philosophical mapping that really gives you the possibility of being sufficiently humble to accept life and difference and the other, the non-you. I've been dedicating my life to this kind of research." In jail, Gil learned to accept that, as the Vedic scriptures put it, "all life is suffering." That gave him a serenity that he now calls the soft power," and a psychologist might call passive aggression. If he has learned to have grace in the face of that he cannot change, beneath lies a well of courage to change what he can. **This is the challenge of the future, how to create a new form of totalizing. The visit of President Bush to Lula is one of those things. It's more than the summing of each side's interests. The outsiders are gaining from their gain." It's strange to see an icon of antiestablishmentarianism celebrating the visit of an unpopular American president Gil has his critics, including old friends who think he's sold out. But he sees his new role as a triumph and a vindication of his old views. "Are you still a hippie?" someone asked him at the end of the SXSW press conference. "Definitely," Gil smiled. "Now it's not just preaching in the desert, as it was then," the minister of culture -- or is that counterculture? - told The Miami Herald later, at the hotel. "Now it's politicizing, it's the citizen saying it, not me. It's street talk, not the private agony of a crazy boy at home. Now it's easy." SUBSCRIBE TODAY GET HOME DELIVERY OF THE MIAMI HERALD REAL Cities About Miami Herald.com About the Real Cities Network Terms of Use & Privacy Statement Copyright About the McClatchy Company All Rights Reserved