Music legend Gilberto Gil's new album is about typical Brazilian themes --- the Internet and quantum physics.
__ In 1969 Gilberto Gil decried the coming of the digital age in his song "Cerebro electronico." Now he's singing its praises - his 1997 CD, Quanta, was preceded by an advance track, "Pela Internet," first released on his Web site. At 56, Gil is the undisputed king of Brazilian pop music. A prolific songwriter and consummate instrumentalist, he has performed with countless international artists. In the late 1960s Gil emerged a leader of tropicalismo, a xenophilic movement that revitalized Brazilian arts. His global outlook, however, forced him into exile in 1970. He returned two years later, serving as minister of culture in his home city of Salvador. Lyrically, Gil addresses a range of topics including African and Oriental culture, social inequality, religious syncretism, and technology. He envisions a future of connectivity and tolerance, of environmental awareness and cross-cultural pollination, borne by an "infotide" washing over the planet.
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Wired: "Pela Internet" is based on an old Brazilian tune about technology, correct?
Gil: Yes, from a song called "Pela telefone" (By telephone), written by Ernesto de Santos Donga in 1917 and considered to be the first recorded samba. I adapted the main stanza and the refrain of the song using terms related to the Internet. For the rest of the song, though, I wrote new music and new lyrics. IBM and Embratel, the Brazilian telecommunications company, made it available for online broadcast.
As more artists get online, how will music evolve?
The development of music corresponds to the popularizing of new technologies. Electronic keyboards and synthesizers have had a great impact on music; interchanging through planetary networks will only increase that process. The networks have also established new commercial markets for musicians. Prince has sold more than 2 million records through the Internet. It's remarkable. New kinds of commercial sales will establish different forms of music as well as new ways of recording. With the Internet, music will become something else; I wouldn't dare say what.
Still, the Net has become a sophisticated collaborative tool for the international musician.
Yes. One of its immediate applications is for enhancing a work of music. For instance, I have a young friend making music in a group through the Internet. He has one musician in Los Angeles, another in London, and another somewhere in Europe. They all have their Internet devices and the appropriate instruments, and they've been making music through the networks.
These networks enable us to communicate more easily, yet it seems we have less of an effect on politics. Why?
Because at the same time we are giving the population access to vote and to freedom of speech and so on, we've narrowed their power. It's being given from one side and taken from the other. That's amazing to me - and frightening, also.
Frightening? How so?
Decisions are made by the corporations, and the politicians represent them. In Brazil, in the United States, in France, in China - it's the same. That sense of the politician as a representative for universal interests has been replaced by the politician as a corporate representative.
Meanwhile, you've said that musicians such as Youssou N'Dour and Ray Lema can do more for informal diplomacy in Africa than any bureaucrat; the same for Rubén Blades in Central America.
As artists become popular, they also become referential to people all over the world, and, in trading music, they create the possibility of international interchange. By selling records and traveling and putting on concerts, by getting on the Internet, they become the real diplomats, the real representatives of cultural exchange.
Are young Brazilians still moved by tropicalismo and its sense of "cultural exchange"?
Tropicalismo is experiencing a renewed interest, especially in schools and universities. We are going through its 30th anniversary, with lots of commemorations and analytic reports about what it was, what it meant, and who was part of it. It's become a cultural theme concerning various types of expression - music, theater, literature, and so on. Bossa nova, for instance, is a kind of music: a style. But tropicalismo is an attitude, an open mind to innovation, an artistic philosophy.
So, how does tropicalismo fit into the new worldview?
The possibilities of sharing and having access to new things is good and bad. Computers and telecommunications have become available to larger parts of the population and provide a means of interaction and interchange. But at the same time, material values instead of spiritual ones tend to prevail. Individualism is becoming more important than solidarity and cooperation. The war industry and the production of weapons is still the largest industry in the world. Violence is still very much a part of life. The evolutionary process goes both ways, progressing in some and getting weird and dangerous in others.
It is interesting how tropicalia and xenophobia can both exist so healthily in the same world.
It's amazing. We're becoming global in one sense, and at the same time, clashes - between languages, between countries, between different cultures - are intensifying. Europe has been trying to keep Africans and Asians from coming in. Elsewhere, you have proliferation of laws against foreigners. I think it's going to continue for a long time.
Quanta refers to this delicate interconnectedness - of good and bad, dark and light ...
Yes, using metaphorical elements borrowed from quantum physics. The CD is about that paradox - the interconnection between the observed and the observer, between space and time. It's about that universal search for unity and the fact that everything manifests itself through the combination of two equal, opposing forces - like relativity, for example. If unity is possible, it's always made up of twos.
Or at least of 0s and 1s.
Or of 0s and 1s. Welcome to the digital world.
