Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

anarchism, it was subversion in sheep's clothing," says Gil, explaining why he and Veloso were arrested in 1968. "It was a social infection of troubling consequences for young people. Those were the reasons they gave." The musicians remained in prison for two months. On their release the military invited them, firmly, to leave the country, and they spent the next three years exiled in London. No charges were filed, but according to Gil, their captors made it clear enough why they'd been singled out: "You represent a threat, something new, some- thing that can't quite be understood, some- thing that doesn't fit into any of the clear compartments of existing cultural practices, and that won't do. That is dangerous." The decades since have been kinder to tropicalismo. That Gil now helps govern the same country he was banished from is just one example of how the movement's ideas have become integral to Brazil's self-image. Those ideas are a feature of the country's intellectual landscape, name-checked regu- larly not just in doctoral dissertations but on television talk shows and Carnaval floats. But what's most striking about those ideas - in fact downright uncanny - is how the globalizing drift of technology and eco- nomics is forcing a similar path on the rest of us. In the production of all manner of cultural goods - from music to software to scientific knowledge itself - the logics of networks, digital media, and global inter- dependence are telling us to loosen up. They're urging us to stretch our notions of authorship and creativity, to let hybridity and flux seep into the tools with which we craft our cultures and ourselves. It's no easy stretch - and the ever more rigid attitudes of the intellectual property industries don't make it any easier. But Brazil has had these moves down for a while and can surely teach us a few if we keep our eyes open. At the very least it can teach us the names for them. Gil and his team, for instance, have coined a word to sum up Brazil's approach to intellectual property in the networked age. The idea, Gil says, is to tropicalize. "To make the digital world join in the samba," Gil says, laughing again and set- tling back into his chair, as if no further explanation of the term was necessary. As indeed none is. Any educated Brazilian, after all, could parse the phrase at a glance: To tropicalize. Verb form of the noun. Tropicalismo in motion. As they did four decades ago, the tropicaliz- ers have their adversaries. Most prominent among them, not surprisingly, is Microsoft Brazil. Generously funded lobbying efforts have bought the company - and proprietary software altogether - a degree of sympathy within the governing party itself that is the despair of open source hard-liners. So, for that matter, has the sheer quantity of Microsoft's business dealings in Brazil, which have done more to nurture the coun- try's IT industry than the free software crowd likes to admit. Nor does it hurt closed source software's public image when Microsoft offers free copies of Windows, as it frequently does, to local governments and to digital- literacy programs for the poor. But when largesse fails to do the job, Microsoft has proved more than willing to turn to the courts. In June, the company filed criminal defamation charges against government IT czar Amadeu. The cause of action? A published interview in which Amadeu said that Microsoft's giveaways were a "drug-dealer practice" - a "Trojan horse, a form of securing critical mass to continue constraining the country." Calling the remarks "absurd and criminal," Microsoft's official complaint placed particu- lar emphasis, without any apparent irony, on Amadeu's assertion that the company's business strategies rely on the sowing of "fear, uncertainty, and doubt." On the advice of lawyers, Amadeu didn't even bother responding to the charges, and in the wake of international online protests mobilized by Brazil's open source community, Microsoft withdrew them. But notice had been served: The world's largest software company isn't about to sit by while Brazil flirts with mortal threats to its business model. Nor, actually, is the world's largest enter- tainment conglomerate, Time Warner, as Gil discovered soon after announcing his decision to rerelease his music under the Creative Commons free-sampling license. Legally speaking, the decision wasn't entirely his to make. Gil retains some rights to his songs, but the rights to the actual The Rapture/ Sister Saviour (Blackstrobe Remix) The Rapture is itself something of a remix. Equal parts punk, funk, and dance, the band's music is inspired by hip hop's mash-up men- tality. "All the groups we grew up listening to used samples," says singer Luke Jenner "People should be able to take whatever they want and use it however they choose." Does that go for file-sharing too? "I don't care if people download our songs. If they like them, they' buy the record." - A.D. :13 Cornelius/ Wataridori 2 Like the Planet of the Apes character he named himself after, Keigo Oyamada is an archaeologist. His dig site is the used-record bin, his lab is the studio, and his field reports are sonic pastiches. Although he starts with digital samples, Oyamada seasons his tracks with acoustic guitars and environmental recordings. Check out the gentle atmospher- ics of "Wataridori 2" for a taste of Oyamada's organic take on electronic music. - E.S. WIRED. 112004.195