"Copyright is a weapon of social exclusion"

By Pedro Alexandre Sanches, in Forum magazine.

“It’s a lonely fight, and a fight even with the artists, those who complain: ‘The world has ended,’ ‘the internet came to screw us over.’ No, no, wait a minute, without the internet we would have been screwed! The privileges are only for those who are in record labels, the rest live in artistic exile.” The confrontation is between Carlos Leoni Rodrigues Siqueira Jr., known artistically as Leoni, from Rio de Janeiro, and his colleagues in Brazilian popular music. He disagrees with his peers located in the obscure structures of Ecad, the Central Office for the Collection and Distribution of Copyrights, and is one of the few who likes to state this publicly.

Leoni is the co-author of a significant number of pop hits from the 1980s: “Pintura íntima”, “Por que não eu?”, “Como eu quero”, “Fixação”, “Nada tanto assim”, “Lágrimas e chuva”, “Garotos”, “A fórmula do amor”, “Exagerado”, “Só pro meu prazer”, “Nosferatu”. He says he receives good royalties from Ecad (Brazilian Society of Authors, Composers and Music Publishers). Even so, after the youthful frenzy passed, he followed a path contrary to that of the elite artists of his age or older, and made the internet his home, business, agora, stage, platform.

“People just complain: ‘You have to charge for everything,’ ‘We’re being robbed.’ No, no, no, folks, that’s not it. Who are we being robbed by? The corporations, the record labels, they’re the ones losing out. Not the artists, especially since there are fewer and fewer record labels releasing fewer and fewer artists. There must be about 20 or 30 privileged people who might lose something. The rest of Brazilian culture was excluded not only from achieving great success, but from having a career.” Now it’s not like that anymore, he affirms.

It's a story of many twists and turns. At 21, with the band Kid Abelha & Os Abóboras Selvagens (later simply Kid Abelha), Leoni became the king of the national hit charts. With his then-girlfriend Paula Toller and company, he released two albums full of pop-rock hits, Seu espião (1984) and Educação sentimental (1985), in a time congested with pop-rock hitmakers: Blitz, Lulu Santos, Marina Lima, Ritchie, Neusinha Brizola, Os Paralamas do Sucesso, Legião Urbana, Ultraje a Rigor, RPM…

Leoni's presence in Kid Abelha ended with Paula hitting her ex-boyfriend in the face with a tambourine, a formula of hatred found backstage while on stage the group was searching for "The Formula of Love" (1985). The banal little story was one of those that enters the mythology of pop. "I find it picturesque, folkloric," he laughs. "It's cool to have a story that's part of the history of Brazilian music, even if it's bordering on ridiculous."

From then on, Leoni continued with a second band, Heróis da Resistência (Heroes of the Resistance). Like the first, it wasn't pampered by music critics who, as a rule, counterbalanced the overwhelming success of artists and bands destined more to produce chaos and fun than to influence thought. “Even Kid Abelha wasn't accepted at first. Later, with time, people started to speak well of them. At the time, they were ostracized, very frowned upon, the 'shorts rock'. It was very difficult to deal with, very difficult indeed. I was a fan of music, not fame. I wanted good reviews.” He couldn't overcome the walls of prejudice and herd mentality, neither in Kid Abelha nor in Heróis da Resistência, and perhaps not even in the solo career he has been developing, intermittently, since 1993.

Right from their debut, Os Heróis created a catchy hit on par with Kid Abelha's, "Só pro meu prazer" (1986). "Night and day complete each other / our eternal love and hate / I imagine you, I fix you / I create the scene I want," dripped seemingly saccharine verses over a love melody. At 51, the author has a peculiar interpretation of his own song: "It has a very strong ironic side, which few people perceive. They think it's a heartbreaking love song, and it's very cruel, reshaping the other person, 'you're a piece of shit the way you are', 'I'll make you just for my pleasure', 'your pleasures and dreams don't matter'. It's not a love song. They say: 'It's the song of my relationship', damn it!", he says, amused, recalling that "Só pro meu prazer" was re-recorded in a sertanejo style by Bruno & Marrone. "People don't grasp the irony, or they think it's natural: 'I'm going to help this person be better.' They don't realize it's a fascist thing."

Perhaps “Só pro meu prazer” (Just for My Pleasure) resonated well because it portrayed a type of love experienced by many, perhaps also a state of mind of the entertainment industry itself in which he was involved. “Unintentionally, our generation was responsible for the first major monomania in the Brazilian music market. Before, people were successful, but it wasn't exclusive. Everyone had their little space on the radio. When we broke through, all the TV and radio programs only played rock. Selling 200 copies was great, and selling 100 was already much more than the MPB generation sold before us. When I joined Warner, the super successful careers of Guilherme Arantes, Milton Nascimento, Caetano Veloso were selling 30, 40 copies. We sold much more.”

Maduro, Leoni realizes what wasn't intelligible in the heat of the moment. “The record labels thought it was cool because we sold a lot and it wasn't expensive. We didn't have to hire an orchestra, arranger, musicians. It was much more economical. But then they discovered that there were other more lucrative fads – axé, pagode, lambada, sertanejo. Why would they stay here selling 100 when the new artists were selling 3 million? We ended up being victims of our own success.”

Leoni's memory traces the before and after of this transition – and the perception of its meanings. Regarding the first phase, he interprets: “It's very difficult to deal with success. In 1982, I was 21 years old and already had a career, money. Suddenly, it seems like you have a divine right to success, that it will never end, that you've discovered the formula. We started feeling too important. We fell from the sky, we had no idea if we were being exploited or not, or what came next.”

Regarding the aftermath, with the Heróis [Os Mutantes], he also gets straight to the point. “In 1988, we went to record the second album in Los Angeles with [producer and former Mutantes member] Liminha. That was an absolute fiasco, because besides the songs not being very good for radio, we spent a fortune. I remember [Warner director] André Midani going there to try to control our expenses. Liminha was thrilled, in Disneyland. 'Want that green 12-string guitar at two in the morning from Monday to Tuesday? Just call and it'll show up.'"

The album, Religio, was a flop. “We had already spent the money on promotion along with the recording, so the record was a flop. Only after selling 100 copies would they think about spending on the record again, but if you don't promote it, you don't sell 100. It sold 20. We ended up with a debt at the record label, and the third album, in 1990, was made under infinitely worse conditions. We didn't have the money from the record label, the payola, to invest and get it played. The record label's disinterest was total, and we were left without a contract at a time when nobody wanted a rock band anymore.” The youth frenzy was becoming real life for the boys of “Garotos,” while the record labels were looking for the next golden geese.

The rise, the fall. And the internet.

The first solo album, simply called Leoni (1993), came through another multinational (EMI), with a hit, the melancholic “Garotos II – O outro lado” (“boys can’t resist their mysteries/ boys never say no”), and an early reflection on the drama unfolding behind the scenes, in the reggae song “Carro e grana”: “I used to have a car and money and a bunch of invitations to go anywhere/ today I only walk/ but I keep walking”.

Leoni re-evaluates “Carro e Grana” (Car and Money). “It’s the realization that failure, or at least lack of success, is also very important for you to understand the world you’re living in. People can’t maintain success forever, it’s not like that. I was still very deluded by the system, I thought that with the success of 'Garotos II' it was done, finished, over, like what had happened with Kid Abelha before. It didn’t happen to me. 'Garotos II' was played a lot, but the album didn’t sell well. When it came time to record the second one, the record label wasn’t interested, and nobody else was interested in me anymore, because a reputation spread that I played well, but didn’t sell.”

This story could end like this, like a moral fable of rise and fall. But then the internet happened.

Apart from a single with the lucid “Tudo sobre amor e perda” (1996), Leoni didn't release anything else between 1993 and 2002. “What I did most during that time was accumulate debt.” In 2002, he financed Você sabe o que eu quero dizer through a small record label. “The means of promotion were the same: newspaper, magazine, television, radio. I didn't have the money to participate in the game nor the stomach for payola. So it didn't get airplay.” The following year, Som Livre, Globo's record label, adapted Leoni to the fashionable format of rerecording hits in acoustic, intimate versions, with special appearances by other more or less faded idols of his generation.

“Som Livre advertised Áudio-Retrato in places that had satellite TV, and we started getting a lot of requests for shows in the interior. It was real guerrilla warfare; it was me, a guitarist, and a producer, without a technician or roadie, we set up and took down the equipment ourselves. It was during that time that I started using the internet a lot,” he recalls.

While more conservative colleagues saw – and still see – the internet as a threatening enemy, the former reckless boy found there the window of opportunity he needed to… well, to continue working, perhaps more and more heavily than ever before. “I had to create some kind of direct contact with the public, which was my concern. I knew there were people who liked my work, but they didn't know I had released something. It was in 2004 that I joined Orkut, saw that there was a small community that talked about me, joined and started talking to those people. In 2006, I released my second independent album, along with the website, one of the first that had a network inside, a discussion forum. It still exists, but today people discuss more on Facebook. I started to focus entirely on being independent, taking care of the internet and shows. Forget radio and TV, whatever comes from that is profit, but I can't get into the fight.”

The new organism learned to organize its own metabolism, slowly but surely. Leoni came up with the idea of ​​releasing monthly virtual singles to keep fans supplied and his own creative desires fueled. He gave his work to admirers to consume freely, for free. “Colleagues, especially those connected to the boards of collecting societies, think it's stupid. [Music producer] Mazzola spoke directly to me: 'People like Leoni, who give away music on the internet, will realize they shot themselves in the foot.' That didn't happen, nor will it happen, because people increasingly need to buy or even download music less. They listen on YouTube,” he says.

He responds to such criticism with other criticisms, addressed to those artists who, for example, outsource their own presence on social media. “If an artist is on Twitter and follows everyone, which is usually the strategy of these people, the fan knows they're not special. They're being followed because everyone else is being followed. The internet isn't a monologue, it's a conversation. If you don't do your part, you don't get much out of it. For me, it's very important to know what people think, to hear their opinions, to encourage them to produce and present what they do as well.”

The discovery of these tools transformed the way the co-author of catchy verses like “tell me to be quiet, make a mysterious face/ take off those shorts, I want you serious/ dramas of success, private world/ guitar solos won’t win me over” views culture, politics, and life. “What started as a survival strategy ended up teaching me a lot about culture, about sharing. What was a simple business position became a political position,” he says.

The politicization that haunted industries of yesteryear has become part of the new composition: “With this neoliberal thing, we had lost the agora, the public space where we could discuss things effectively to change them. With the internet, the possibility of mobilization, of being engaged, has become something else. You can really make a difference.”

Armed with his new discoveries, he transforms his sketch into a finished artwork. “We lived in a time when artists were scarce, because it was impossible not to be. The record labels' ability to release albums was limited, and everything else was outside the realm of history. This scarcity led both the public and the artists to have a kind of caste system, a sense of being chosen. 'We are special,' 'we are crazy,' 'we can do whatever we want because we are artists.' With the internet, suddenly everyone is an artist, there are no castes. I think this is an even more complicated privilege for artists to give up. 'I'm not going to compete with this guy, I'm an artist, who is he?' But before you were an artist, you weren't, you were the same as him. There are many prejudices, a lot of elitism that the artists themselves have.”

The resulting vector approaches the symmetrical opposite of the time when the industry used us – consumers, critics, artists – solely for its pleasure (or profit). “Nowadays, I have a connection with the public that I never imagined I would have, and an artistic freedom that I wouldn't have had at any other time. I don't have to please any artistic or radio director. This has given me a freedom of creation and thought that I never had before.” He says that his captive audience, when asked to help select the repertoire for a show, usually chooses newer songs, which they sing along to in chorus in the audience. “According to the traditional thinking of the industry, this wouldn't be possible.”

More than just an activist for free downloads, Leoni has become a political and cultural activist, one of those who advocates for his profession in the National Congress and actively participates in the Ecad Parliamentary Inquiry Commission – even though the office continues to pay him reasonably well. His differences with the institution are less personal than collective. “One of the cases that most outraged me was that of a public school in the interior that was going to hold a June festival, and Ecad went there to collect royalties for Luiz Gonzaga's work,” he exemplifies. “Since they didn't have the money, the school had to cancel the festival. Who benefited from that? Luiz Gonzaga's heirs certainly not, because they didn't receive any money. Brazilian culture didn't either, because nobody heard Luiz Gonzaga's music. The children didn't either. Copyright is used as a form of social exclusion. And people think otherwise, 'it's my right,' 'an acquired right.' Well, every right is acquired; there is no such thing as a natural right.”

Few boys understand as well as Leoni the differences between natural and acquired rights. He wants them, but prefers to share them with us. And yet there are those who call what he does "shooting himself in the foot."

Watch a video below of Leoni singing "Como eu quero":