Gonzaguinha (1968-1985): um intelectual público na música popular brasileira

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the artistic and intellectual trajectory of the singer and composer Luiz Gonzaga do Nascimento Jr., known as Gonzaguinha, between 1968 and 1985. The work investigates the composer's insertion into the field of Brazilian Popular Music (MPB) from the perspective of Cultural and Political History, arguing that Gonzaguinha acted as a “public intelectual”. The research demonstrates how the artist, forged in the tension between a popular habitus (originating from the Morro de São Carlos favela) and middle-class university sociability, used his work as a privileged space for critical elaboration on the Brazilian reality during the military dictatorship. The study examines how Gonzaguinha engaged with and reelaborated the “national-popular” political culture, navigating between denouncing social inequalities and resisting authoritarianism. Based on the analysis of phonograms (lyrics and musical parameters), press interviews, and biographical material, the thesis identifies three structures of representation of the popular in the composer's work, named “poetics of anguish”, “poetics of insubmission”, and “poetics of communion”. These categories reveal the modulations in the artist's discourse regarding the period's conjunctural transformations, ranging from the hardening of the regime in the “years of lead” to the hopes and contradictions of the political opening. Gonzaguinha, by asserting the legitimacy of his suburban origins and negotiating/tensioning with the market, built an artistic praxis inseparable from that of a public intellectual, advocating for the protagonism of the working classes in the country's redemocratization.