Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

Greeted as heroes When they returned from exile in the '70s, Gil and Veloso were greeted as heroes, and their music has remained one of the country's greatest cultural exports ever since. "Tropicalia was about opening the social mentality to changing processes of values: moral values, social values," Gil says. "Now this technological revolution is complementary to what we started then. Tropicalia helped the society to understand the miscegenated side of itself. It is a process that is ongoing, and in some ways we are still coming to grips with it." Indeed, "Banda Larga" is firmly in that polyglot tradition, a typically adventurous mix of samba, reggae, rock and electronic music, with programming from Gil's son Ben. Because of its fluidity, its constant openness to "picking up fragments from the environment around me," as Gil says, the singer's music remains remarkably forward- looking and impossible to pin down. Now Gil is leading another revolution, this time from his position inside the government. "No, I couldn't have imagined this happening to me," he says with a chuckle. "At the same time, I was always attentive to the tides of life. I'm surfing a new wave right now, and I'm part of this institutional world that I once stood outside of. From outside as an artist, I was able to influence minds and hearts, as part of the cultural revolutionary process. But now as a minister, dealing with material things, I've been able to influence lives more directly. I see my role as getting the corporate side of society to understand their responsibilities and to influence the material lives of the people in a positive way. I was dealing with ideas and feelings, and now I'm dealing with projects, Believes in flexibility Not that he has stopped dealing with "ideas and feelings." He still finds time to record and tour (he headlines a rare Chicago-area concert Thursday at Ravinia). As at all his shows, he will allow anyone to record or videotape the performance and upload the content for distribution on the Web. In that respect, he is participating in public policy he helped set when he allied Brazil with the Creative Commons movement several years ago. It allows for individual artists to remove copyright restrictions from their work to make it as widely and freely available as they wish. Gil believes that artists should be paid for their work, but that they should also be allowed to be flexible in dealing with the new possibilities offered by the Internet. "Free use is not a criminal thing," Gil says. "It is wrong to criminalize the users. Artists can still be paid if we remodel the business. Who would pay? The big corporations. They are interested in having music associated with their marketing processes." Depending on corporations hardly sounds revolutionary, but Gil says that such adversarial thinking isn't in anyone's best interest. "Making music got me in trouble with the government before, but not now," he says. "In the past you'd talk about right and left in politics, but they are converging. Now | can use music to build consensus. We all can have a stake in this. We can build a revolution from within."