[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":220},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-sunil-perera":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":182,"description":183,"died":184,"era":185,"extension":186,"heroImage":187,"imageCredit":188,"imageLicense":189,"imageSource":190,"meta":191,"navigation":192,"notable":193,"path":194,"roles":195,"seo":199,"sources":200,"stem":218,"translated":192,"url":190,"__hash__":219},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fsunil-perera.md","Sunil Perera",1980,1952,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":174},"minimark",[11,15,18,23,26,29,37,41,44,101,104,107,111,114,117,124,130,137,141,164,171],[12,13,14],"p",{},"At weddings and dinner dances in the last decade of his life, Sunil Perera used to come on in national dress with a cushion stuffed under it, playing a politician. The audience knew the routine before he opened his mouth. He would work the crowd with the fake belly and the practised handshake, and then the band would start, and whatever he sang next would be about them — about the country, about who had promised what and had not delivered it, about the difference between what Sri Lankans say in public and what they say at home.",[12,16,17],{},"That was the act, and it was also the argument. Sunil Perera spent fifty years insisting that a dance band was a perfectly good place to say serious things, provided you were funny enough that people stayed on the floor.",[19,20,22],"h2",{"id":21},"class-b-first-in-class","Class B, first in class",[12,24,25],{},"He was born in Narahenpita on 14 September 1952, one of ten children, and educated at St. Sebastian's College, Moratuwa, and then St. Peter's College, Colombo, where he joined the school band. He picked up a guitar at eleven. His academic record was, by his own cheerful telling, a disaster: St. Peter's streamed the studious into class A and the rest into class B, and he was in class B — \"but I was first in this class,\" he liked to say. Pushed through tuition and a repeat attempt at his O levels, he scraped four credits and no further.",[12,27,28],{},"His father Anton Perera had wanted a doctor. Having established that this was not going to happen, he did the next best thing and built his sons a band. Sunil left school in 1969, joined the Gypsies as its lead voice, and never had another job. He learned guitar under a teacher his brother Piyal remembers as Winston Jayawardene — English Wikipedia gives the name as Vincent Jayawardane — along with George Ferdinando, and took voice training under Loren Abeysekara, Lylie Godridge and Marianne David: a formal apprenticeship that is easy to forget when you only remember the clowning.",[12,30,31,32,36],{},"He was named Sri Lanka's Showbiz Personality of the Year in 1990, and under his leadership the Gypsies were Dance Band of the Year in 1989 and 1990. Somewhere along the way the country started calling him ",[33,34,35],"strong",{},"Baila Chakrawarthi",", the emperor of baila.",[19,38,40],{"id":39},"satire-with-a-dance-beat","Satire with a dance beat",[12,42,43],{},"Baila had always carried a streak of mockery — it comes out of the kaffirinha and chicote traditions of the coast, where humour and satire were part of the form. What Sunil Perera did was aim it upwards, at the people who normally decide what may be said.",[12,45,46,49,50,54,55,49,58,61,62,49,65,68,69,72,73,49,76,79,80,49,83,86,87,49,90,93,94,49,97,100],{},[33,47,48],{},"සිංඤෝරේ"," ",[51,52,53],"em",{},"Signore"," is sung in the voice of a defeated politician berating the ungrateful voters who threw him out. ",[33,56,57],{},"අයි ඩෝන්ට් නෝ වයි",[51,59,60],{},"I Don't Know Why"," is about corruption, and about the national habit of shrugging at it. ",[33,63,64],{},"සයිමා කට් වෙලා",[51,66,67],{},"Saima Cut Wela"," takes a hysterical young wife convinced her husband is fatally ill when in fact he is simply drunk, and lets the comedy do the sociology. ",[51,70,71],{},"Uncle Johnson"," is a wedding anniversary party collapsing in slow motion. ",[33,74,75],{},"පිටි කොටපන් නෝනේ",[51,77,78],{},"Piti Kotapan None",", ",[33,81,82],{},"ලුණු දෙහි",[51,84,85],{},"Lunu Dehi"," and ",[33,88,89],{},"ඕයේ ඔජායේ",[51,91,92],{},"Oye Ojaye"," are dance-floor standards that most Sri Lankans can sing and few examine closely. ",[33,95,96],{},"ලොවේ සැමා",[51,98,99],{},"Lowe Sama"," drops the comedy altogether and asks plainly for peace between the island's communities.",[12,102,103],{},"He was equally direct about the things Sri Lankan public figures do not discuss. He talked openly about sex — \"People come and ask me, 'Do you read any books?'. I say, 'Yes, I have some books. You might be interested, but the thing is, I read mainly about sex'\" — and about caste and religion, subjects on which a popular entertainer is normally expected to be silent.",[12,105,106],{},"In 2017 he walked into the Department of Inland Revenue and insisted on paying income tax on his full earnings rather than only on his band income — a piece of theatre about civic duty that got exactly the coverage he intended.",[19,108,110],{"id":109},"what-actually-got-banned","What actually got banned",[12,112,113],{},"The censorship that followed him is often described in bigger terms than the record supports, so it is worth stating carefully.",[12,115,116],{},"Baila as a genre was never banned in Sri Lanka. It was sneered at by respectable opinion for decades and kept out of certain kinds of programming, but there is no law, gazette or order prohibiting it, and the claim that there was does not survive checking. Nor is there any documented \"banned songs list\" of the kind that circulates in retellings.",[12,118,119,120,123],{},"What is documented is narrower: ",[33,121,122],{},"specific Gypsies songs were kept off the state broadcasters"," because of what they said about the government of the day. That is a real, repeated and consequential thing, and it happened under more than one administration. Sunil Perera was a vocal critic of the Rajapaksa governments in particular, and said in 2015 that he feared becoming a target of the family. In an interview at his Ratmalana home in February 2021 he asked the journalist not to print anything about politics at all, because he was facing threats — and then, in the same conversation, explained why the politics had got into the songs in the first place:",[125,126,127],"blockquote",{},[12,128,129],{},"\"When politics came into our music it was like a natural phenomenon… At events or parties, people talk politics because the country was going down the precipice. When there is dissatisfaction there is a lot of discussion, and we could not avoid such discussion coming into our music. If the country was doing very well, these discussions would never have taken place.\"",[12,131,132,133,136],{},"People periodically urged him to stand for office himself. His answer was one word: ",[51,134,135],{},"\"Pissuda?\""," — are you mad?",[19,138,140],{"id":139},"the-last-years","The last years",[12,142,143,144,147,148,151,152,155,156,159,160,163],{},"In his final decade he worked constantly with the singer Ronnie Leitch, known to everyone as ",[51,145,146],{},"Thattaya",", as a comedy-through-song double act at weddings, dances and outdoor concerts; Leitch died in 2018. He recorded ",[51,149,150],{},"Koththamalli"," in 2017 and ",[51,153,154],{},"Buongiorno"," in 2018, the Gypsies' first hit in four years, and in 2019 sang for the film ",[51,157,158],{},"Jaya Sri Amathithuma",". His last big collaboration was ",[51,161,162],{},"Sarame",", a comic song about the sarong made with Annesley Malewana, Desmond de Silva and Rajiv Sebastian. He also turned up every year, without being paid and usually without being asked twice, at a concert for children with special needs at the Dilmah Centre in Moratuwa.",[12,165,166,167,170],{},"He tested positive for Covid-19 in August 2021. Rumours of his death circulated on social media while he was still alive and recovering. He was readmitted to hospital with pneumonia on 5 September and died in the early hours of 6 September 2021, eight days short of his sixty-ninth birthday. The BBC and the ",[51,168,169],{},"New York Times"," both carried obituaries — an unusual thing for a Sri Lankan musician, and a fair measure of how completely his songs had saturated the country.",[12,172,173],{},"He was working on twelve new songs when he died. \"No, there is no politics in these songs,\" he had said in February, laughing, \"but we hope to launch an album soon.\"",{"title":175,"searchDepth":176,"depth":176,"links":177},"",2,[178,179,180,181],{"id":21,"depth":176,"text":22},{"id":39,"depth":176,"text":40},{"id":109,"depth":176,"text":110},{"id":139,"depth":176,"text":140},"14 September 1952","The Gypsies' frontman and Sri Lanka's Baila Chakrawarthi, who put caste, religion, corruption and hypocrisy into dance songs and kept singing them after the state broadcasters stopped playing them.","6 September 2021","1960s-2020s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fsunil-perera.webp","Sunday Times","Unverified — fallback source","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F210912\u002Fplus\u002Fno-more-noproblem-perera-454878.html",{},true,false,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fsunil-perera",[196,197,198],"Singer","Composer","Musician",{"title":5,"description":183},[201,203,206,209,212,215],{"title":202,"url":190},"No more 'No-problem' Perera — Sunday Times, 12 September 2021",{"title":204,"url":205},"Sunil Perera: Sri Lanka's larger than life music legend dies at 68 — BBC News, 6 September 2021","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.bbc.com\u002Fnews\u002Fworld-asia-58458764",{"title":207,"url":208},"Sunil Perera — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FSunil_Perera",{"title":210,"url":211},"Baila Music from Sri Lanka: The Gypsies — Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art","https:\u002F\u002Fasia-archive.si.edu\u002Fpodcast\u002Fbaila-music-from-sri-lanka-the-gypsies\u002F",{"title":213,"url":214},"Popular singer Sunil Perera passes away — Ada Derana, 6 September 2021","http:\u002F\u002Fwww.adaderana.lk\u002Fnews\u002F76698\u002Fpopular-singer-sunil-perera-passes-away",{"title":216,"url":217},"Piyal goes down memory lane — Sunday Times, 25 February 2024","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F240225\u002Fmagazine\u002Fpiyal-goes-down-memory-lane-549637.html","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fsunil-perera","uoFyJJK3NXp3ScKOAKlP8bwFXntm35UrM2iUq6klFLY",1787999333806]