The size of the “parabolicamará” antenna

But while “Domingo no parque” included this motto in its own form, in “Parabolicamará” it is the content that raises this flag.

The artist wrote a song-manifest, in which the lyrics’ role is to deepen one of the most dear and recurring inspirations in Gil’s work: the study of how past and present can coexist in flux, pointing to the future.

And, in the concept-song “Parabolicamará,” Gil brought back the motto of this debate, in bright colors and with other bases, as he commented in an exclusive interview:

“I wanted to think about this widening of the sense of the world, which we are seeing now, with the internet. This was the intention, to associate the two fields: the field that was properly of the poetic, literary, socioeconomic, political culture etc.…

“... to a technological emergency that became a propitious tool for the enlargement and exploration of all these fields. Their expansion in the sense of access to these fields. ‘Parabolicamará’ was all that.”

Antes o mundo era pequeno / The world used to be small
Porque Terra era grande / Because the Earth was big
Hoje mundo é muito grande / Today, the world is very big
Porque a terra é pequena / Because the Earth is small

“When I use a bit of a phrasing that could easily be associated with popular modes of poetic construction, it was the author/songwriter and his roots,” says Gil.

It all started with the portmanteau—a concept used by to poetically explain the neologisms he creates—“parabolicamará” [a mixture of the Portuguese words “parabólica”, or parabolic, and “camará”, the common lantana bush]. This invented verse is, in itself, a complete verse of concrete poetry, for it fits all his intentions for this music:

“A true concrete invention; a perfect concretion in sound, meaning and image. In it, as a symbol, all the interactions of worlds that I wanted to do were revealed to me.”

“This could well be in a capoeira circle, with the leg moves and all that,” Gilberto Gil acknowledged. For him, the combination of words that resulted in “Parabolicamará” brings “the seminal importance of a fight like that for the emancipation of blacks…

“… The fight against slavery and its violence. All of this serving as a motto for a speculation on modernity, contemporaneity, Technologies—a subject that could also be a capoeira theme,” he added.

In this perspective, music and record come from the artist’s concern with time—not only his flow, but what he reveals of the future and how its inexorability affects humans.

Thus, Gil slowly builds in the song relationships between the step-by-step of tradition and the vertigo of modernity, and how they affect space-time, or time-space, determining the future and what will become of our tragic failures.

“In Parabolicamará I put the existential, psychic time, in opposition to the chronological time—the eternity, the incarnation, and the longing for the raft and the barge, and from these two to the plane—to insinuate the shortening of the time-space…

“… caused by the increase in the speed of the means of physical and mental communication in the modern world-time and by the transforming speeds in which we live,” said Gil, in the book Todas as Letras.

And this youthful fascination with the power of technology over man—and vice versa—didn’t go away, accompanying him throughout his career as a recursive theme, but, beyond that, as a compass.

“The time-cut, the time that cuts, reaps, time-sickle, where something is and is suddenly gone, remembering (...) the death of my son: the situation, one imagines, of him sleepy at the wheel of the car being suddenly assaulted by the accidental event that would lead him to death,” Gil sentenced in a commentary about the verses in Todas as Letras:

Esse tempo não tem rédea / This time has no leash
Vem nas asas do vento / It comes on the wings of the wind
O momento da tragédia / The moment of tragedy
Chico, Ferreira e Bento / Chico, Ferreira, and Bento
Só souberam na hora do destino apresentar / Only knew it when fate appeared
Ê, volta do mundo, camará / Turn of the world, camará
Ê-ê, mundo dá volta, camará! / The world turns, camará!