Caetano Veloso: First the World, Then Carnegie Hall

"Life here in Brazil is horrible in many ways, but it's beautiful also,' he went on. 'It's strange, but it's different in any case. As a nation we are a child, as big as the continental United States, maybe bigger. We speak Portuguese, we are racially very mixed. We have a historical responsibility of making a new good thing because of that particularity. As far as popular music goes, we have been sketching it. It's a crazy ambition.

'Even if in the future, if we as Brazilians do nothing and we just go on being poor and unorganized and dominated and corrupt, and we slowly disappear in history -- even if this dream is only a glimpse in the ocean of history, till now it is alive, and we live the intensity of this ambitious dream."
Caetano Veloso, The New York Times