Rhythm machine

song, technologies and cultural critique in Gilberto Gil

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the theme of technologies in the field of popular music, more specifically in song, in their potential for cultural critique. To this end, I analyze the song Máquina de ritmo, by Gilberto Gil, who is an artist with a singular production in the Brazilian cultural sphere, both in its aesthetic and philosophical aspects, and in the attention he has given, throughout his vast oeuvre, to technological themes - which is of particular interest to us here. In an interdisciplinary approach, I seek to explore a discussion not merely in the sense of understanding how technologies have modified the processes of musical composition and production, but above all to bringing another approach - which seems to me to have been little explored - which consists of analyzing how the song has reflected on the technological transformations in culture or, even, within the song itself. The analysis undertaken here has raised issues such as the tension between the traditional and the modern, the acoustic and the electronic, the analog and the digital, the human sensitivity and the processing of algorithms, where we observe what I identify as a dialectical attitude on the part of the artist in addressing a series of contemporary dilemmas in a critical and sensitive way.