The size of the “parabolicamará” antenna
Time, space, technology, and humanity find their measure in the song-manifest wrote by Gilberto Gil to thin about tradition x contemporaneity.
By Instituto Gilberto Gil
Text: Ceci Alves, filmmaker and journalist
Parabolicamará Livro com partituras do álbum Parabolicamará, de Gilberto Gil (1992)Instituto Gilberto Gil
This is perhaps one of the most complex songs by the singer-songwriter Gilberto Gil, for ending in its 4 minutes and 30 seconds a compendium of the artist's intentions, interests and passions throughout his life and work.
It's like he is revisiting with the title track of the 1992 album his first great success, the anthological Domingo no Parque (1967), reviving the main motto: the duel between tradition and modernity, based on the thread of time, and having as a stage the space of the here and now
Gilberto Gil em foto do encarte do álbum Parabolicamará (1991)Instituto Gilberto Gil
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.
Gilberto Gil no III Festival da Música Popular Brasileira (Outubro de 1967)Instituto Gilberto Gil
In the 1967 song, Gil made a kind of proto-mash-up between the elements of capoeira, such as the rhythmic swagger, the berimbau cadence and the syncopated phrasing that mark the strong points of music + a psychedelic orchestration, which emulated something of Beatles.
Gilberto Gil durante o show Eletracústico no Tom Brasil em São Paulo (Abril de 2005)Instituto Gilberto Gil
With an incidental film music + the raw power—at the time, apocryphal in Brazilian popular music—of the electric guitars and all they contributed in modernity and vanguard.
Gilberto Gil durante o show Eletracústico no Tom Brasil em São Paulo (Abril de 2005)Instituto Gilberto Gil
It was based on this attempt to join the traditional with the modern, the capoeira with the parabolic, that Gil engendered Tropicália, betting on “Domingo no parque” as the very first song with this intent.
Gilberto Gil com o violão elétrico em ensaio fotográfico para o álbum Fé Na Festa (2010-04-20)Instituto Gilberto Gil
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.”
The same allegorical and concretist poetry of “Domingo no parque” is also found in this song—but now less playful or narrative, more profound and metaphysical. The song’s lyrics say:
LIFE Photo Collection
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.
LIFE Photo Collection
The musician says: “It is me, from Bahia, with capoeira and all that, with my aesthetic commitments associated to my insertion in the world.”
Ato Pela Paz 15 (2023-11)Instituto Gilberto 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.”
Gilberto Gil no lançamento do livro Todas as Letras (1996)Instituto Gilberto Gil
That was the singer and songwriter’s explanation in a commentary on the song for the book Todas as Letras [Every Lyric] (2003), organized by songwriter, journalist, and writer Carlos Rennó.
Also in the book, Gil said his intention was precisely to speak in an accessible and sensorial way about the contrasts between traditional and contemporary times:
“The rural and the urban, the artisanal and the industrial, using a simple language, typical of rudimentary communities, and a cadence of a capoeira circle.”
Gilberto Gil, in Carlos Rennó’s book Todas as Letras
Roda de capoeira durante a visita de Gilberto Gil ao Senegal (2004-11)Instituto Gilberto Gil
This was when it occurred to him to play with the words “parabólica”— which came when he wanted to rhyme “antena” [antenna] with “pequena” [small]— with “camará,” used as a calling in the songs sung in capoeira circles.
Roda de capoeira durante a visita de Gilberto Gil ao Senegal (2004-11)Instituto Gilberto Gil
“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.
And Gil came up with this portmanteau by conjuring a whole ideal that goes back to Tropicália times, when the artist also used concrete poetry to shatter concepts and appropriate them artistically:
“Poet and critic Augusto de Campos, using a category from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology, identified [in Tropicália] a method of bricolage, and Celso Favaretto classified this language as kaleidoscopic.”
Caetano Veloso, in his autobiography Tropical Truth (2017)
Gilberto Gil durante a turnê do álbum Quanta (1998)Instituto Gilberto Gil
Thus, the recently-created portmanteau “parabolicamará” and what it brought of preoccupation with time and space became an “emblem of this concept, not only of the song, but of the whole record,” as Gilberto Gil added in Todas as Letras.
Gilberto Gil em show da turnê nacional do álbum Banda Larga Cordel (2009-04-23)Instituto Gilberto Gil
And this conceptual concern ended up flooding his later discography: it intensified in Quanta (1997) and reappeared in Banda Larga Cordel (2008).
Gilberto Gil no palco do espetáculo OK OK OK em São Paulo (2019-06-22)Instituto Gilberto Gil
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.
Gilberto Gil posa para o Programa Rolex de Mestres e Discípulos, em seu estúdio no Rio de Janeiro (Outubro de 2013)Instituto Gilberto Gil
“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.
Gilberto Gil em ensaio para o show Futurível, em seu estúdio (2010-11-01)Instituto Gilberto Gil
It is as if Gil pondered over the existing “qualities” of Time, as an entity, and how it had to be resized to fit and be contained by new technologies, such as nanotechnology, for instance.
Polish Destroyer (1940-01) by William VandivertLIFE Photo Collection
The technological advance fascinated Gilberto Gil since he was a boy, when, after World War II, he read everything that fell into his hands about the arms industry and its technological prodigies.
LIFE Photo Collection
Perhaps as a child he didn’t yet think about the destructive potential of the tanks, planes, aircraft carriers, and destroyers that populated his imagination.
Destroyer Escort (1943-06) by Dmitri KesselLIFE Photo Collection
But it was from that time that he began to realize how the technology he saw there, in those pages, was able to influence human behavior and choices regarding how to walk, how to progress, where to go.
Polish Destroyer (1940-01) by William VandivertLIFE Photo Collection
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.
For this reason, the poet wanted to make us think about the issues of humanity and the actual human and sociological dimension of technology. After all:
Gilberto Gil em show da turnê Eletroacústico (2004)Instituto Gilberto Gil
Pela onda luminosa / Through a luminous wave
Leva o tempo de um raio / It takes the time of a ray
Tempo que levava Rosa / The time it took Rosa
Pra aprumar o balaio / To straighten out her hamper
Quando sentia e o balaio ia escorregar / When she felt it slipping
As he said in Cérebro Eletrônico (1969), with or without nanotechnology, with or without the “subatomic time of the particle, the subfraction of time, the atom of time” (Todas as Letras), it all depends on humanity, it all goes through it, serves it; it has the power of change. And, as a last resort:
Cérebro Eletrônico
Só eu posso chorar quando estou triste / I’m the only one who can cry when I’m sad
Só eu / The only one
(...)
Que cérebro eletrônico nenhum me dá socorro / And no electronic brain can help me
Em meu caminho inevitável para a morte / In my inevitable path to death
And, finally, the time of death also appeared in the lyrics—another theme repeatedly dealt with in Gilberto Gil’s work, which arose here as a way for him to drain the wound of his son’s death, Pedro Gil, who, in 1990, at the age of 19, lost his life in a car accident. In an instant. And the music says:
Gilberto Gil e o filho Pedro Gil na década de 1980 (1986)Instituto Gilberto Gil
“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!
“Parabolicamará” can be this pamphlet needed for humanity’s fate in the face of its technological paths. It is based on an epic musical base, which styles the sound of capoeira with contemporary instruments such as electric bass, guitar, keyboard, and drums—without, however, erasing the berimbau, an instrument characteristic of capoeira, which came from Angola to Bahia. It is the instrument which, played by the singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist from Bahia Carlinhos Brown closes, significantly, the song-ode by a human before a machine.
Exhibit credits
Text and research: Ceci Alves
Editing: Chris Fuscaldo
Assembly: Patrícia Sá Rêgo
Copyediting: Laura Zandonadi
General credits
Editing and curating: Chris Fuscaldo / Garota FM
Musical content research: Ceci Alves, Chris Fuscaldo, and Ricardo Schott
MinC content research: Carla Peixoto, Ceci Alves, and Laura Zandonadi
Photo subtitles: Anna Durão, Carla Peixoto, Ceci Alves, Chris Fuscaldo, Daniel Malafaia, Gilberto Porcidonio, Kamille Viola, Laura Zandonadi, Lucas Vieira, Luciana Azevedo, Patrícia Sá Rêgo, Pedro Felitte, Ricardo Schott, Roni Filgueiras, and Tito Guedes
Subtitle copyediting: Anna Durão, Carla Peixoto, Laura Zandonadi, and Patrícia Sá Rêgo
Data editing: Isabela Marinho
Acknowledgments: Gege Produções, Gilberto Gil, Flora Gil, Gilda Mattoso, Fafá Giordano, Maria Gil, Meny Lopes, Nelci Frangipani, Cristina Doria, Daniella Bartolini, and all photographers and characters in the stories
All media: Instituto Gilberto Gil
