THE DIFFERENCE OF ARTIST AND ENTERTAINER

By Alexandre Figueiredo

US and UK press recognize that there's an expressive difference between entertainers and artists. Brazil media have not this notion, and the word "entertainer" have no brazilian portuguese translation.

Entertainer is the term used to define performers who aren't necessarily committed to product culture and art values. In music, an entertainer is just a singer, musician or a group who works for the consumption music products, and generally includes superfluous elements to call the crowd attention in the easiest way.

If the entertainer is a singer, as we see in a typical example like Madonna, there's so much dancers around, a little bit more of backing vocalists, so much synthetisers supporting the singer and a big visual spectacle, a very impactful wardrobe and makeup, everything made to hide the weak music quality.

If the entertainer is a vocal group, they must to be also the dancers group. But if the entertainer, in other case, is a musicians group, they must to be accompanied by attractive backing vocalists and the stage must to be served by sensational illumination structure.

There's some examples. There's others. But it helped to understand that the entertainer doesn't want to do art and bring culture, but make the public to spend fun time as a mere consumption process. Nothing to make spirits grow, not to bring any condition to the social and cultural progresses.

An artist works to posterity, an entertainer works to the present situation. Art is knowledge, social progress, cultural beauty, but not necessarily an sensationalist spectacle. True art is a social communication and not a consumption process, because it don't make market products, but social values.

Commercial music is made for during some months, this popularity can be enormous, but then it dissolves as a sand castle, never leaving marks.

Brazilian commercial music, which its most popular example is the axé-music star Ivete Sangalo, is benefited by the confusion about entertainers and artists. Ivete sounds as a brazilian Madonna, but the brazilian singer pretends to work a sophisticated image, that made her to be wrongly known as the "Queen of MPB". It's wrong, although it seems likely.

There's so much brazilian female singers better than Ivete Sangalo, singers who deserve the title "Queen of MPB", as Marisa Monte and Roberta Sá. But the confusion about entertainers and singers can't allow this. And Ivete Sangalo, the brazilian Madonna, gets for free a reputation that have no sense to her, because she's not artistic, she's merely commercial.

But Brazil's a pretentious country. How pretending gold it can be produced in this country...