What the media calls "word music" - all popular music created and preproduced in Africa, in Central and South America and in others parts of the planet - is born from a collision: the collision between, on one side, the impulses toward emancipation, autonomy and identity on the part of people in the so-called third world; and on the other, the interests of the first world in maintaining its power. We can’t deal with the subject without pointing to the fact.

Access, technology and means of production became avaiable to the peripheral peoples of the world as a consequence of expanding multinacional industrialism. Based in that skeleton of affluence permitted to the populations of large new urban centers like Lagos, Kinshasa, Salvador de Bahia, Kingston, Havana, Johannesburg, Dakar, etc., there appeared new popular artists dedicated to musical production. These artists became the skilled craftsmen of a post-folkloric music whose pre-industrial character required action on the part of the record industry. The industry started to provide to those cities the minimal conditions with which to industrialize, decently, the music. Nice studios were built alongside active, tuned-in offices. (I myself recorded in Kingston, at Tuff Gong, with the Wailers, in ’84, and I remember well Lagos in ’77, when Ginger Baker had just returned to England, leaving behind him a studio in that even now is a legend.)

Those artists were, at first, linked to their local processes. So it was that reggae developed in Kingston; juju and highlife in Lagos; rai spread through Arab cities; the trio elétrico, blocos-afro and discotheques featured the new forms in Brazil; the nueva trova and others forms in Cuba; and so on. At the next stage, artists began developing, supported by the music industry’s expansion and its savvy marketing. Internationally, new genres appeared (lambada, to remember one), new names, new musical styles. It was decided to call all this "world music".

It was a label quickly applied, and of course, as with any label, at once all-encompassing and unsatisfactory. "World music" tries to unite into one signifier many diverse signifieds. Even with much in common among all the musics of Africa and Central and South America - common roots, a history of colonial presence over more than four centuries, slums, hunger and violence, et cetera - they are far too diverse to signify, marketing-wise, a single industrial vision. They represent various shades of race, culture, anthropological and social realities. And so it is that world music happens: together, on the same records, the same concerts, the concerns of Marley, Fela and Olodum against the stablishment, and, having the instruments of the music industry with which to get their message across, trying to provoke with their militant speech in spite of its confrontations with industry. Their message of resistance against the social and economic apartheids, against the domination by local elites, agaist the godfather-control of the means of production, communication and consuption, has to get to the eager masses of oppressed and marginalized people, and for that they need the industry. The industry, in turn, needs the music for its markets and, subliminally or explictly, needs also to send the message that it maintains a grip on political and economic power.

So it’s a contemporary paradox: a Heideggerian world, where we are all victims and perpetrators, controlles and controllers. We work inadvertently for planetary unity and, vice versa, for the growth and proliferation of local diversity that affirms itself in plural mini-realities spread like dust across the globe. The intention of my last album, Parabolic, is none other than to express this function of industrial art, in general, and popular music, in particular: at once unifying and diversifying.

It’s important to emphasize that this inclusive interpretation of international contemporary music doesn’t grant us the luxury of cynical feelings of paralysis, of immobility. To the contrary. We perceive that things move in their own rhythm. The confrontation of opposite forces is what moves us forward. For example: in having to serve the interests of the system to get their message across, Marley and his reggae brethren in Jamaica never found themselves blocked from giving their best to their work. There was no loss of anti-establishment force, with all its revelatory transforming consequences. Some may consider the results undesirable. Reggae didn’t make the revolution yearned for by the fundamentalist Rastafarians who created it. But it has to be counted as one of the sthetic mini-revolutions of irreversible consequences for the future of the world’s popular music, besides having made serious contributions toward political insight on the part of almost all the black and mixed-race people in the world (including in the USA), as did jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and bossa nova, among others.

Following the same line of reasoning, the music of Caetano Veloso, the drums of Olodum, the brilliant work of Carlos Brown with community music, are not definitive answers to the mistery and the backwardness of Brazil, but without them, we would be farther from being able to challenge the historic negligence of the Brazilian elite than we are today.

Today, Youssou N’Dour and Ray Lema can do much more for informal diplomacy in Africa than any State Department. The same goes for Rubén Blades in Central America.

The revolution is not done. It goes on being made every day, malgré le système.

And one has to pay attention to the interactions among the genres at the edge of popular music, among themselves and with the central genres (rock ‘n’ roll, pop, jazz)- an intense exchange, fertile and healthy for each and for all. The work of Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie are exemplary in this sense. Jazz influences samba that creates bossa nova tha reinfluences jazz. Son, rumba, mambo, merengue influence African music. African music is present at the birth of new genres like reggae and samba-reggae, that in turn reinfluence new African musical movements and subsidize rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm and blues as well.

The "beat merchants" went out with their new caravans, transported by neonavigation via movies, radio, records and television, satellites and computers. In the last fifty years they established an intense musical traffic between tha last frontiers of the planet and the Euro-American center, creating a world industrial music that goes far beyond the sector defined for the new genre by the yuppie executives of show biz.

Yes. We have today a true "world music", the result of intensive and extensive exchanges among many peoples of the world, among their artists, their popular movements, their informal diplomacies, their cultural non-governmental organizations, the anthropology and sociology departments of their universities.

This is a real universal meaning that surpasses the superficial intentions of "world music".

This truly universal sentiment, this broad conciousness of popular industrial music as part of a process outside of temporary categories, this understanding of an historic role beyond the short-lived utilitarianism of the more backward parts of the culture industry, is at the root of every second-and third-world artist.

Let’s see: What makes the women of "Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares" sing with such lightness and sublimity? What makes Salif Keita one of the most seductive and compelling singers on the planet? What stamps such authority and such sensation of peace into the singing of Djavan? What gives Mercedes Sosa such nobility and elegance? Behind all this music is the greatness of soul of their people, their ancestors, their ancient tribes, their old gypsies, their slave grandparents.

In this magnificent music of the poor world it is necessary to recognize the strength of the spirit of the times, preserving the light that comes from far away and which all colonialism and oppression could not extinguish. Its strength is the power of cultures that the Crusades and the explorer’s ships could not wipe out.

What is called "world music" is the expression of a greatness that, precisely for having been neglected and covered up, appears clearer in this epoch of walls being torn down. Its greatness is even beyond itself. On the dynamic playing fields of international power, it has in fact, a superiority. "World music" has the superiority of David over Goliath. It has the advantage, now, of the swinging pendulum: what was down, comes up. We are in the popular phase of history and "world music" is the music of the people of the world, more so all the time. And this is better, better than what there was before, when the world was smaler and what happened was less than what is happening now. This is better than what the less intelligent part of the culture industry wanted it to mean.

The music of the world is bigger than "world music". An example of this broadness is what became known in Brazil as Tropicalismo. Here, in this tropical land, almost thirty years ago, we were young people from different parts of the country who understood: we belong to the world and the world belongs to us. We are part of everything and we are in every part. That consciousness pushed us to create a new music that was at the same time the oldest music. We uncovered tradition, we paid tribute to our old masters, we celebrated the new revelation of bossa nova and allowed ourselves to be shaken by the whirlwind of rock ‘n’ roll. We believed that the future was to live in the present.

Tropicalismo might have been much more or much less, who knows? But it was everything we wanted to do and everything we could do at the time. It was here, but it was of the world.

Tropicalismo was for us, here, thirty years ago, what "world music" is now for the "global village": an occasion to pay our dues to history. And to borrow from it again.

Let the lyrics of the song "Parabolicamará" speak for themselves: