To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Arts & Entertainment May 26, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/ent/music/feature/1999/05/26/tom_ze The politics of plagiarism Why Beck, Stereolab, Tortoise, the High Llamas and Sean Lennon are all fascinated by Tom Zé. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Jeff Stark Tom Zé's eyes are large and dark, a pair of polished acorns. He is 62 years old, which you wouldn't know but you can actually kind of tell when you stare at the creases. He smiles a lot, like he's always laughing at his own absurdist in-joke. Sometimes, when he looks at you, his pupils are so bright that you can see a ghost of yourself. Other times he drops his head to consider a question. His features -- the patchy beard, big nose, diminutive frame -- are strikingly human. His eyes never wander. His attention is remarkable. There are a million things happening at once in this shabby Victorian parlor, downstairs in the Irving Plaza concert hall. Later tonight, Zé is performing a rare U.S. show with the Chicago post-rock band Tortoise. Right now, the room is loud and complicated with the kinds of things that have to happen before concerts. A small television crew is interviewing David Byrne about Zé (pronounced Zay), whom the former Talking Head tracked down more than 10 years ago in Brazil. A photographer from a Brazilian newspaper is pacing impatiently, waiting for a chance to take Zé outside in the rain. And a stressed-out record company guy keeps coming into the room and looking over the translator's shoulder. There are things to do. Sound checks. Photographs. Brazilians who need nonexistent tickets. Dinner. Strangers to hug. And Zé's eyes never wander. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Tom Zé, who has made some of the most beautiful music in the world, is not a purist. Purists are boring, especially world music purists. The best contemporary musicians know this. That is why artists like Beck, Stereolab, Tortoise, the High Llamas and Sean Lennon are all fascinated by Tom Zé and Tropicalia, the 1960s Brazilian pop movement that he helped create. Beck et al. have looked beyond American-Anglo pop for inspiration and incorporated elements into their own work. They, like Zé, are not purists either. If world beat is a genre of music loosely based on the idea of marrying native sounds with foreign influences or musics from other cultures, Zé made world beat music long before it went Deep Forest. In some ways, the Tropicálistas -- including principally Zé, the young Gilberto Gil, songwriter Caetano Veloso and a strange, obscure and wonderful band called Os Mutantes -- can be understood as corollaries to the dirty hippies jamming psychedelic music in the States. The Tropicálistas' movement was both political and social, set against injustice, restrictive sexuality and a military dictatorship. (Imagine Nixon's tenure, under martial law.) "We speak about the government, the people that conspire with the government, the big corporations," says Zé, half in English, half with the help of a Portuguese translator. "If you live in a country like that, you have politics everywhere. You can't imagine." Working with Brazil's rich rhythmic heritage -- dense with the music of Portugal, the Caribbean, Africa and indigenous America -- the Tropicálistas layered their pop songs with Brit psych, modernist poetry, found sounds and phrases ripped off wholesale from the Beatles and the Stones. Like most musicians, they were combining influences and reinventing in their own language. At the same time, there was never a question of where the components originated. Listen to the old Tropicalia records and you hear parts connected to parts connected to parts. It's some of the most angular, confusing and ecstatic pop music ever recorded. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Oddly enough, it's the riff from "Smoke on the Water" coming through the P.A. onstage at Irving Plaza. Zé turns to the guitarist and stops the set. There is something that he wants to say to the audience. "I want to make a partnership with you," he says, "to take plagiarism into your home." It is difficult to understand Zé because his English is so poor. He's trying to convince the crowd that the melody of "Hey Jude" is almost the same as the Brazilian national anthem. He has split the audience into halves and has them humming each song separately at the same time. It's hard to know what he's talking about. For Zé, plagiarism is political. A liner-note essay from his 1998 record "Fabrication Defect" explains how the third world can cannibalize the first, settle a score and put an end to the notion of the traditional composer. "The esthetic of the fabrication defect will reutilize the sonorous civilized trash ... It will recycle an alphabet of emotions contained in songs and musical symbols of the first world, that sealed each marked step of our affective and emotional life. They will be put to use in small cells of plagiarized material. This deliberate practice unleashes an esthetic of plagiarism ... that ambushes the universe of well-known and traditional music." Back onstage, the guitarist rips into "Smoke on the Water" again. Conga drums come in. He switches to the Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Zé smiles. The music wanders everywhere, but he is unswerving. As a performer, Zé was the weirdest in a weird movement. The military came down on the Tropicálistas with extreme censorship in late 1968. Some of the musicians were arrested, others banished. Zé went underground. He began recording with homemade instruments, experimenting with atonal riffs and continuing to write political songs. Zé, unlike his Tropicálista comrades who abandoned much of the strangeness of Tropicalia and became stars, lost his audience. He languished for years until David Byrne found his records during a stay in Saő Paulo. Byrne tracked down Zé and arranged to release the Brazilian's older songs on his Luaka Bop record label. The first collection, "The Best of Tom Zé," is a pleasant mix of acoustic guitar melodies, strange sounds and Zé's soft, almost soothing voice. At the same time, it's very, very odd: One minute back-up singers coo lullabies, the next there's the sound of metal milling against a grinding wheel. Odd, and very, very pretty. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Zé in the Irving Plaza lobby: "Politics are in my songs in the same way that to be lovers -- to have a relationship -- is politics, the same way that staring at the moon is politics. For us Brazilians, politics is a very important matter, because politics is destroying us. It's fucking up the country. Politics are in my music because it is part of our food. It is very important." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Tom Zé is jumping up and down onstage at Irving Plaza. There are 1,100 people in the audience and the show is sold out. He is playing percussion by thumping his chest. Behind him, the members of Tortoise plink on vibes and shake rattles and play fuzzed-out guitar. People in the audience are not really dancing: They are listening. When Zé asks them to, they sing entire choruses. Some speak Portuguese, many know the lyrics and sing along. Zé is very pleased with a just-finished version of "Defect 2." He smiles at the mike, gleams at the lights and addresses the crowd. "You know that I no speak English," he says. This does not stop him. "In Africa, I am the slave. In Brazil, I am the slave. In Brazil, the republic is the slave. But here, here I am the boss." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - "Fabrication Defect" (1998), Zé's third record for Luaka Bop, is a concept album of sorts, based around some of the esthetic theories Zé has been toying with since he began studying music at a university in Bahia in the early '60s. An essay in the liner notes explains that Zé believes that people in the third world have been converted to "a kind of android," which allows them to serve "first world bosses." The androids, however, are not perfect yet, they have defects, which include the ability to think, dance and dream. Zé's album then is a celebration of those defects, broken down into 14 different songs, each celebrating a separate defect. It's smart music, obviously, but the ideas never seem forced. The three-minute songs effortlessly segue from one to another. "Defect 1: Gene" is a sprightly tune based around ringing guitar patterns and chiming tambourines. "Defect 2: Curiosidade" is a quieter ballad, its acoustic guitar riffing off "Defect 1," with Zé baby-talking in the background. It's almost suspiciously tight, musically at least. Did Zé ever abandon the album's concept for musical concessions? Is there a difference between the fabrication defect idea and "Fabrication Defect"? "My attempt was to make the record very simple: Defect one, to think, that is the most dangerous defect; defect two can be to love, to study, to dance, to think. These are all defects," he says. "But the songs I get to compose -- like the winds in navigation -- change the direction of the target. My own inspiration changes direction too. It fucked me up." Not too much. There are moments when you can hear Zé's past, like the "vasolina-gasolina" rhyme he rips off from Caetano Veloso on "Defect 3: Politicar." And there are other moments when Zé sounds like the future, or at least hyper contemporary. The record's figurative centerpiece is the loping, accordion-driven finale, "Defect 14: Xiquexique," which flips from found-sound to rhythm sticks, methodically builds new patterns upon each section and crescendos at five and a half minutes with all the different sounds ramming into one another. It's as dramatic and complicated and weird and exciting as the best songs by Beck, Stereolab or Tortoise. Brazilian music, once again, is reaching critical mass in the States. Consider: Luaka is reissuing long out of print records by Os Mutantes this summer. (Talk about beach music!) Beck named a groovy Brazilian-influenced tune "Tropicalia," and named his last record "Mutations," which sounds a lot like a mad shout-out to the Mutantes. A huge Tropicalia box set appeared last year with four CDs' worth of songs. "Fabrication Defect" popped up all over 1998 critics lists for best record of the year; Zé's tour earned stacks of press clippings; and you can still hear his songs in rotation on college radio. Zé's tour-only EP "Postmodern Platos" includes remixes by popsters like Sean Lennon and the High Llamas and sonic pioneers like Amon Tobin, Ui's Sasha Frere-Jones and Tortoise's John McEntire. That damn Banana Republic commercial and its little Brazilian anthem. And so what does it all mean? What were the Tropicálistas onto that still resonates today? For starters, it probably has something to do with the essence of pop: miscegenation and the constant progress that comes with reinventing form by destruction. Then there's the lure of appropriation, the desire to turn a world of sounds into a private playground, and the absurd drama of dada, which allows for laughter in the face of tyranny. And there might be a little political residue, or at least a nostalgia for a time or place where to sing about politics seemed important, when it gave their music force and a reason to exist. Ask Zé what the fuss is about and he'll answer with a bizarre riddle, one that says everything and nothing at once -- the perfect Tom Zé quote. "To respond, I will make a metaphor," he says, speaking quietly, his eyes narrowing in. "The ears of the dollar are more sensitive than the honors of the dollar." salon.com | May 26, 1999