Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

Gilberto Gil Hears the Future, Some Rights Reserved - New York Times 03/11/2007 09:36 AM More than 145 million works have been registered with Creative Commons licenses, including videos, photographs, written texts, blogs and of course music. Because Brazil is “a country that has music in its genetic code,” to use Mr. Barlow's phrase, and because Brazilian music has become a global force, the idea of loosening the automatic control of artistic works by a handful of conglomerates headquartered a hemisphere away has resonated strongly here. "Look at remixing on music sites, which has become a core of creativity on the Internet and produced a huge archive of legally usable music," said Lawrence Lessig, the author of "Free Culture" and founder of Creative Commons. "That has allowed a whole bunch of people to display themselves as artists and be picked up by record labels and Web sites, and all of that began because Gil got us to think about what kind of freedom was necessary for music." As culture minister Mr. Gil has also sponsored an initiative called the Cultural Points program. Small government grants are issued to scores of community centers in poor neighborhoods of some of Brazil's largest cities to install recording and video studios and teach residents how to use them. The result has been an outpouring of video and music, much of it racially conscious and politically tinged rap or electronica. Since Brazilian commercial radio, which is said to be riddled with payola, will not play the new music, the creators instead broadcast their songs on community radio stations and distribute their CDs independently, at markets and fairs, rather than through existing record labels. With that project, "you're now creating freely licensed content and demonstrating the creativity latent in the society," Mr. Lessig said. Brazil's official stance on digital content and intellectual property rights is in large part derived from Mr. Gil's own experience. In the late '60s he and his close friend Caetano Veloso, along with a handful of others here and in São Paulo, started the movement known as Tropicalismo, which blended avant-garde poetry, pop influences from abroad and home-grown musical styles then scorned as corny and déclassé. In a way, the Tropicalistas engaged in sampling before digital sampling existed, using cut-and-paste, mix- and-match collage techniques that are common now but were considered bizarre at the time. In recent years their music and approach has been embraced by pop performers as diverse as David Byrne, Nirvana, Beck, Nelly Furtado and Devendra Banhart. When "world music" first appeared in the United States and Europe and Mr. Byrne, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel and others began incorporating Brazilian rhythms into their work, Mr. Gil was initially skeptical of he phenomenon, complaining of “cultural safaris" by adventurers in Land Rovers “looking for all the rare špecimens.” But thanks in large part to technological advances, he said, that practice has changed completely," and pop stars are now “more respectful" of other cultures. Today the hegemony of the North has, in a certain form, been broken," he said. “Local tendencies are illowed to manifest themselves and adopt their own languages and forms of packaging. It's no longer that rision of transforming some regional raw material into a single, standardized product. Today you have all p://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/arts/music/11roht.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print Page 3 of 5