Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

Paul Westerberg/ Looking Up in Heaven The former leader of the Replacements owns no computer. He doesn't do email. And he famously hates answering machines. So what's he think about technology in music? Paul on file-sharing: "Anything that leaves my house ends up traded or sold. Solt I figure once it's out the door that's where it's going." Paul on ProTools: "Now that everybody has the capacity to make a perfect record, it seems redundant to make one. A lot of great rock and roll is not recorded properly or well. heed that." Paul on fan sites: "It's a gathering place for people I don't want to talk to. I want to see fans at shows." Paul on if he'll ever embrace technology: "I like wood and dirt." - T.G. :11 Chuck D with Fine Arts Militia/ No Meaning No Caught, now in court 'cause I stole a beat This is a sampling sport But I'm giving it a new name What you hear is mine Chuck D's take on sampling hasn't changed since he rapped those words in Public Enemy years ago. "If you're taking bits of music and organizing them in a way that makes the result a distinctly personal creation, then I don't feel that you're infringing on copyright," he says. These days, in addition to PE, Chuck raps with Fine Arts Militia. And so the question must be asked: With the tables turned, will FAM balk if their work is sampled and reworked? "No," says Chuck. "Sound should be considered up for grabs." - E.S. much soy. When I explain this to farmers, they go nuts." This analysis goes a long way toward explaining why the Lula government loves free software. Brazil's national IT policy these days can more or less be reduced to two words: Linux roolz. The prime directive of the federal Institute for Information Tech- nology is to promote the adoption of free software throughout the government and ultimately the nation. Ministries and schools are migrating their offices to open source systems. And within the government's "digi- tal inclusion" programs - aimed at bringing computer access to the 80 percent of Brazil- ians who have none - GNU/Linux is the rule. It's one thing for a business to switch from Windows to Linux. It's quite another for a whole country. "We're not just discussing one product as opposed to another here - Ford versus Fiat," says Sérgio Amadeu da Silveira, the institute's director. "We're talk- ing about different models of development." And it's here that the argument takes a peculiarly Brazilian turn - because a model of development is, of course, more than a formula for increasing GDP. The develop- ment path a country chooses tells you not just about its economic sensibility but about the culture it envisions for itself. And Brazil has in its 500 years of existence evolved some curious - and curiously prescient- notions about how culture should work. cannibals as symbolic role models for all of his country's cultural practitioners. Four decades later, his argument inspired a pair of hyperarticulate pop stars named Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. Veloso and Gil formed the core of tropicalismo - a very '60s attempt to capture the chaotic, swirling feel of Brazil's perennially uneven moderniza- tion, its jumble of wealth and poverty, of rural and urban, of local and global. For the tropicalistas, as for Andrade, there was only one way to thrive in the midst of so much contrast: You couldn't flinch from what was alien to you. You couldn't slavishly imitate it, either. You simply had to swallow it whole. Brazil's IT czar attacked Microsoft's tactics as a “drug dealer practice” a "Trojan horse” Mr. Bill went to court. In 1556, not long after the Portuguese first set foot in Brazil, the Bishop Pero Fernandes Sardinha was shipwrecked on its shores and set about introducing the gospel of Christ to the native "heathens." The locals, impressed with the glorious civilization the bishop rep- resented and eager to absorb it in its total- ity, promptly ate him. Thus was born Brazilian culture. Or so wrote the modernist Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, whose interpretation of the incident in a 1928 manifesto exalted the What this meant, in practice, was a musi- cal approach that turned the quiet, seamless sophistication of early-'60s bossa nova inside out, opening its hungry mouth to any and every sort of influence, including that most un-Brazilian of pop forms, rock. Tropicalismo, as Veloso puts it, "was a bit shocking. We came up with new things that involved electric guitars, violent poetry, bad taste, traditional Brazilian music, Catholic Mass, pop, kitsch, tango, Caribbean things, rock and roll, and also our avant-garde, so- called serious music." They cut and pasted styles with an abandon that, amid today's sample-happy music scene, sounds up-to- the-minute - and largely accounts for the fact that early tropicalista records have in the past 10 years become hipster classics in the US and Europe. More than a sound, though, tropicalismo was an attitude. It was, in Gil's words, "no longer a mere submission to the forces of economic imperialism, but a cannibalistic response of swallowing what they gave us, processing it, and making it something new and different. We saw the cultivating of new habits and manners from the outside as a way of nourishing ourselves, not just intoxi- cating ourselves." The military dictatorship that ran Brazil at the time saw it differently, however. "It was