This is the starting phrase of Parabolicamará (Sound 318 KB), a song that Gilberto Gil recorded in 1992. There are no words more adequate than these to describe the way in which we see the world today, a world created by the Internet that has the exact size of a "parabolicamará antenna". The work of Gilberto Gil, like everything of the best that the pop attitude invented, has always been the description / criticism / celebration of the transformation through which the planet has passed in these last decades. Note: the antenna is not only parabolic. Like every technological innovation of the future, it becomes a part of life and is recreated, transformed into having the resonance of the gourd of the " berimbau" ("Esse tempo nunca passa" - this time never passes / "Não é de ontem nem de hoje - It's not that of yesterday, nor of today / Mora no som da cabaça - It lives in the head of the gourd / Não está preso nem foge - Its not locked up nor will it escape / No instante que tange o berimbau, meu camará" - the moment the berimbau is played, my comrade)(Sound 231 KB). Technology and culture clash, but with all the grace of "Capoeira", where fighting and fun, friendship and rivalry are mixed. Gil knows, with the humbleness of a Tibetan Lama or if a new prophet from the back-country, that in this fight there is no surrender, no defeated, no victors.
At the beginning of his "tropicalist" career, Gilberto Gil already showed this disposition to use technology to transmit / subvert, the "Brazilian way" of being in the world, and to be engaged in this world of eternal and fast transformation. Domingo no Parque - Sunday in the Park (Sound 266 KB) was a mark in the history of popular Brazilian music, the invasion of electric guitars in the territory of a certain nationalist ideological xenophobia (that tried to isolate Brazil from any outlandish contamination). From the time of "Tropicalismo", the possibilities of pop dialogue between Brazil and the rest of the world has multiplied. In one way or another, the Brazilian popular musicians lost their fear of new technology and began to use it following the most syncretic principles of its culture.
The adhesion to the chaotic order of the technological "brave new world" has never been unrestricted, nor, to a much lower degree, subservient. The music of Gilberto Gil, combines in the most varied of forms (I repeat: like in capoeira) not only adhesion but also suspicion. Technology is neither the solution nor answer to all our investigations. In Cérebro Eletrônico - Eletronic Brain (Sound 226 KB), a song from 1969 (still not overcome by the development of the research of artificial intelligence of the past three decades), Gil admits that the computer "commands, demands and countermands" and "does almost everything". But the computer doesn't do everything "Only I can think if God exists / Only I can cry when I'm sad". Or more emphatically ( going against certain "extropical" convictions that gained strength on the Internet). "No Electronic Brain is going to help me on my inevitable road to death".
Gilberto Gil wants to see technology working under a different regime " I want a baroque computer, one that is crazy and un-programs pain (Do Japão - From Japan,1989) (Sound 240 KB). Just as he has done with funk, reggae, baião, rock, samba de roda or juju music (and even with candomblé, zen-budism, concretism, existentialism etc, etc...): all of them have come to work according to the baroque commands of the post electronic mind of Gilberto Gil. In reality what his music does is to miscegenate and syncretize all these elements (which in turn are miscegenated and syncretized), like only one modern Brazilian - from the outskirts of the back-country (and Gil was raised in Ituaçu, in the interior of Bahia, the back-country), and at home with the advancements of technology - can do!
Gil is part of the cyberspace. Cyberspace is going to become the back-country ( or is it the other way around?) As Guimarães Rosa said:" "I carry the back-country inside of me, and the world I live in is the back-country too". Cyberspace (the world that got too big, according to the record "Parabolicamará"), has always had this metaphysic flavor of the vast back-country without frontiers. They now try to have it domesticated with censorship, publicity and lots of money. This seems to be the "natural" way for technological matters. It's a tragic road but a beautiful one too. Gilberto Gil, contemplating the beauty of other tragedies, has already discovered "Refazenda (Refarm) and Refavela (Reslum)". As we cannot escape the WEB, time has come then, to discover "Reteia" (Reweb), or even better - be more "cybersertanejo" (cyberback-country man) - "O Retear" - The rewebing.