From Cazuza to Caetano Veloso, from Paul McCartney to Lynyrd Skynyrd, a flag is never just a flag when it is in the hands of an artist.
During the samba on the Brazilian flag at a weekend show, Bebel Gilberto immediately felt he stepped on the flag and the ball for giving, as she herself put it, a “crazy far right to distill her false patriotism”. He regretted it, he sincerely apologized and did not even attempt a semiotic discussion, timely but very attentive to the urgencies of social networks (and perhaps for Bebel herself), regarding symbols re-signified by time and context. The same Brazilian flag held in a football stadium contains different ideas of a flag used as clothing in demonstrations on Avenida Paulista. The first expresses devotion to a football team, regardless of the degree of patriotic sentiment of a fan who may not even know how to sing the national anthem but who if he loses his team bursts into tears. The second, belonging to a political group. By rejecting the symbol in open space, Bebel was not desecrating the flag itself, unquestionably sovereign, but the idea that carried them.
For some time, artists and flags have fostered a public relationship of love and hate. Love or hate not for the colors or shapes drawn by the philosopher and mathematician Raimundo Teixeira Mendes immediately after the proclamation of the Republic, in 1889, it is worth saying a hundred times, but for the sensations they express and transform themselves with each story beaten by arrest. On October 18, 1988, already seething with AIDS fever and in rebellion at realizing that José Sarney’s Brazil didn’t seem to change much, Cazuza provoked spitting on the Brazilian flag during a concert while touring his album Ideology, directed by Ney Mato Grosso. There was not yet a direct association of the flag with defined political fields, but rather with a general idea of the country. There was a protest among intellectuals and the art class itself, with journalist Humberto Saad reiterating that the nation should not admit such a crime. Cazuza wrote his response in a letter and asked his father, João Araújo, to deliver it to the press, but João decided to spare his sick son and kept it. Weeks after Cazuza’s death in 1990, João took the letter to Globo.
Cazuza wrote: “There was a controversy, a scandal, as JB (Jornal do Brasil) says on Tuesday 18 October, with the fact that I spit on the Brazilian flag during the Brasil song in my Sunday show at Canecão. Actually spit on the flag, and twice. I don’t regret it. I knew very well what I was doing after a fanatic threw the flag at me from the audience. ” Further on it read: “Young Americans have burned their flag in protest against the war in Vietnam, they have burned the flag of a country where everyone has the same opportunities, where there is no impunity and a president is deposed for “the simple fact of after hiding I wonder if people are aware that Vietnam is right there, in the Amazon, that Indian children are being bombed and killed with the same slanted eyes? That South Africa is here, in this apartheid disguised as a democracy, where more than fifty million people live on the fringes of Order and Progress, illiterate and hungry? “
And he concluded: “I know very well what the Brazilian flag is, I wrapped it up Rock’n’Rio (in 1985) along with a crowd that believed this country could really change. The flag of a country is the symbol of nationality for a people. Let’s love it and respect it on the day when what is written on it becomes reality. For now we are waiting “.
Years before the political reopening experienced by Cazuza, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso were arrested in 1968, 14 days after the entry into force of the AI-5. The National Security Act was in place with all provisions guaranteeing the regime to incarcerate anyone who cursed not only the flag but also the national anthem. Incidentally, a parenthesis is worth mentioning: according to the law of the time, anyone who spat or stepped on a flag should have the same fate as those who wore it as a cloak on their clothes in public events. “Article 31: It is considered a manifestation of disrespect for the national flag, and therefore forbidden: to use it as a dress, curtain, napkin, table ornament, cover of stands, or as a cover for plaques, portraits, panels or monuments”.
Caetano and Gil had already created a lot of unease in the regime up to that point, and imprisoning them was a matter of time and an alibi. After having already learned through a complaint that they were doing an exhibition with the Mutantes at Boate Sucata, in Rio, using an image of the plastic artist Hélio Oiticica who said “be a marginal, be a hero”, the military said they had they were also informed that they had publicly profaned the national anthem, which was never confirmed by the artists. The alibi is born and the following story is one of those tragedies born behind the so-called patriotisms: Caetano and Gil are arrested in Sao Paulo, taken in a van for five hours to Rio and imprisoned for a month in unhygienic and dietetic bread base. In January 1969 they went to separate barracks and, finally, learned the reason for the arrest: the lack of respect for two national symbols. They go under house arrest, but are forbidden to appear in the media, participate in acts, perform and make public statements and are forced to leave the country. They went to London in 1969, and then returned to live in Brazil in 1972.
Other flags, or the ideas they carry, can become problems precisely because they are flaunted. Some rock and roll groups that emerged in the southern United States, called soulthern rock, still use as a symbol a red background image with two intertwined bands and studded with white stars that North Americans call the Dixie Flag and the world of A. Confederate flag. A classic case of two meanings can explain one of the most enduring clashes of semiotic culture in rock history. While surviving members of Lynyrd Skynyrd, as well as the Allman Brothers and many other bands, say they wear it out of pride for the land they were born in, much of the planet is disgusted by the same image for everything it stands for aside from southern patriotism. The Confederates wanted to separate from the United States to, in short, continue to be slavers. After the end of the civil war, between 1861 and 1865, which among other things they lost, the same flag was used by the white supremacist and criminal group Ku Klux Klan.
The curious thing is that such a flag is still hoisted at the bottom of the concert stage of small and large rockabilly bands and used by people who ride custom Harley Davidson-style motorcycles, without necessarily letting their riders know the legacy of hatred. that carries your stars with you. But ignorance can be costly. The great Tom Petty, a rocker who died in 2017 who was not born in the South but who had it as a musical reference, used Dixie Flag to promote his 1985 album without knowing, he said, what it meant. “I wore it on stage during that song and regretted it very quickly. When we went on tour two years later, I noticed that people in the audience were wearing the flag like headbands and things like that. One night someone got them. threw one on stage. all and gave a speech on the subject. “I’d rather no one ever carry the Confederate flag to our shows again,” he told the audience. The stain has never been erased from its history.
Wherever he is, Paul McCartney, a lover of flags, returns to do all the encores of his tour holding the pennant of the country in which he performs. Only recently, when he opened the post-Covid return tour in the United States, he returned with the Ukrainian flag and did not sing Back In The USSR. It was the beginning of the Russian invasion and he then said which side he was on. Back in Brazil, and giving it more semiotics, the context reconstructs its meaning again. Paul McCartney uses the colors green and yellow not to support any specific political group, but to accommodate a naive but still moving idea of the entire people. Just as anyone who sees him accepts his Puritanism, Paul, unlike Bebel, has no idea where he is going.
Source: Terra
Emily Jhon is a product and service reviewer at Gossipify, known for her honest evaluations and thorough analysis. With a background in marketing and consumer research, she offers valuable insights to readers. She has been writing for Gossipify for several years and has a degree in Marketing and Consumer Research from the University of Oxford.
