Thoughts on the opening and closing cerimonies of the FIFA world cup

First, congratulations to the organizers of the opening ceremony for not showing a half-naked woman dancing samba.

This stereotype is doing today as much harm to Brazil as it is doing to one of its most important "trademarks" : SAMBA itself.

But there are some things the cerimony could have done better:

The opening ceremony showed parts of brazilian folclore, such as FREVO, DANÇA GAÚCHA, COCO and CAPOEIRA.

Among these, what came across rather nicely was (the internationally already well-known) CAPOEIRA, with its acrobatic moves.

Unfortunately though on the other hand the less famous FREVO wasted this opportunity to impress the spectator: The dancers did not show any of the sometimes acrobatic, sometimes subtle, but always spectacular and unique moves that are so characteristic to FREVO. I do not know why, this might be due to the difficult surface on which the dancers had to perform, or simply, the dancers selected for the show were not good enough.

This is a shame, because without these moves, FREVO is reduced to some "hopping around" in circus-like costumes - in short, it looses its essence.

The last part of the show featured three singers (two american and one brazilian): world famous JENNIFER LOPEZ, rather little known PITBULL (whose most brazilians learned about during the cerimony) and CLAUDIA LEITTE.

The choice of PITBULL and JENNIFER LOPEZ for the official song has already surprised most brazilians, even more the choice of the opening song.

After all the song was an american song with an american rhythm, instrumentation and sound, sung by two americans, with only “a participation” of a brazilian singer at the end.   (The only attempt to relate this song to the host nation, by the way)

There was some attempt at giving it hispanic flavour as two of the singers had Spanish surnames, and one of them even sang part of it Spanish.

But even with this Spanish touch the song is deeply rooted in the musical culture north of Miami:

One should not confuse Hispano-American culture with Hispanic-American culture born in the U.S. The latter has a strong influence from other popular currents of U.S. american music (such as afro-american hip hop). PITBULL is such an example, after all he is a rapper...

I do not think this was an attempt to approximate brazilian music with north-american hispanic music. FIFA knows very well that hispanic-american music and brazilian music are two different pairs of shoes, such as FRENCH CHANSON and BRITPOP.

I also do not think it was an attempt to produce a song with internationally well-known artists or with an international flavour (in this case FIFA could have asked MICHEL TELÓ or GUSTTAVO LIMA).

I assume that it was simply a concious choice to feature two U.S. artists, with a song aimed at the U.S. public. After all the U.S. is very large market and “soccer” has a lot of potential to grow there.

Similarly the closing cerimony featured two non-Brazilian artists, WYCLEF JEAN and CARLOS SANTANA and ALEXANDRE PIRES.

Again the U.S. american influece in the music of WYCLEF JEAN was very obvious. He is called a haitian artist, but I do not know what of haitian music remains?

I think it is only dangerous selling U.S. music for music from other countries, it can kill diversity.