Still, Ms. Nicks remains an icon to a lot of women–a low-rent, flaky icon, to be sure, but an icon nonetheless. Sheryl Crow is an acolyte, and she has arrived to do a rehab job on Ms. Nicks along the lines of Bruce Springsteen's work with Gary U.S. Bonds. It is an effective and affectionate intervention, and the album often pulses with Ms. Nicks' old energy.

Ms. Crow produced about half of the songs on the new album, Trouble in Shangri-La (Warner); they're the ones with the clean, driving, rock 'n' roll flea-market sound. "Sorcerer," on which she also sings, starts with an acoustic guitar and drum sound that is pure 1970's Neil Young. "It's Only Love," which is one of Ms. Crow's own straightforward but effective slow songs–think "Strong Enough"–puts you in mind of Joni Mitchell.

The record is a sort of a sequel to the girls' club that started to form at Ms. Crow's 1999 concert in Central Park. Ms. Nicks made a guest appearance that night to sing "Gold Dust Woman." The Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines showed up, too, and on Ms. Nicks' new record she sings a duet on a country number called "Too Far From Texas," which also has a good, spare Crow production. Macy Gray and Sarah McLachlan also appear, though their vocals are mixed almost too low to make out.

And what does Ms. Nicks herself bring to this little slumber party of a record? Her voice is holding up fine, and her phrasing is of the old school, rough and weary and slurred.

Ms. Nicks' lyrics, though, are altogether too airy. It appears that she has traded the rock 'n' roll high wire for a rich lady's life on the road. There are a lot of references to air travel. "There's a plane, it's headed for London," she sings on one song. "Paris to Rome, London to Paris / Always goodbye, I nearly couldn't bear it," she sings on another, missing a leg of the journey for a forced rhyme.

You also get the trademark candlelight-and-gauze spooky atmosphere. And there are acres of standard-issue Lite-FM love-and-longing songs, "I Miss You" and "Love Is" among them. This latter stuff, by far the weakest, could well produce a radio hit.

The title track was inspired by the O.J. Simpson trial and seems another attempt to mythologize the California experience. It's a strong song, with a desperate quality and rock kick not far from "Edge of Seventeen" or "Stand Back." At the same time, though, it's a little hard to take the "Hotel California" subject matter entirely seriously anymore.

Ms. Nicks thanks a lot of people in the liner notes, including her Pilates trainer. The seventh set of "special thanks" goes out to Tom Petty, who declined to write a song for her when Ms. Nicks was feeling lousy. (Recall that it was Mr. Petty's "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" that propelled Ms. Nicks' first solo album, 1981's Bella Donna , off the shelves.) Mr. Petty provided Ms. Nicks, she writes, with "an inspirational lecture over dinner at the Ritz-Carlton in Phoenix, April 24th, 1995." He told her to write her own damn songs.

There is so much to love about this story, not least the very notion of a rock-star summit at a Ritz-Carlton. (The Chelsea Hotel, it ain't.) Hats off, too, to the self-regard that would note and reproduce the precise date of a meal.

The dinner was a turning point for Ms. Nicks. She not only cranked out a bunch of songs for this record, but also wrote some remarkably literal lyrics about her conversation with Mr. Petty. "Can you write this for me?" she sings on "That Made Me Stronger." She continues: "He says no, you write your songs yourself." It's odd, then, given her decision to put Mr. Petty's admonition in the tune's very refrain, that the music that accompanies her lyrics was composed not by Ms. Nicks, but by a couple of hired hands. The trouble in Shangri-La, it seems, is that so much of the experience depends on whether the help is any good.

–Adam Liptak

Autechre: Cold Chaos

In the years since they struck up a working relationship with Tortoise, Autechre have become a sort of gateway drug for rock fans intrigued by electronic music's progressive promise but suspicious of its origins on the dance floor. The British duo of Sean Booth and Rob Brown basically wrote the operating manual for "intelligent dance music," or I.D.M., a genre that approaches all that's alluring about post-human techno sheen without paying much attention to its disco-indebted implications.

Autechre's clinical ways have made relative stars of Messrs. Booth and Brown, who are set to play a two-night stint at Bowery Ballroom on May 4 and 5. But it has also left them in something of a bind.

For starters, their weighty influence threatens to become a burden, with an entire cottage industry of Autechre-like deconstructionists upping electronica's already-high-stakes ante. The now-sprawling I.D.M. scene has even spawned its own reactionary wing, led by Kid 606 and a slew of laptop-crunching nihilists who have made a show of lampooning the movement's humorless, monastically hip-hop-like posturing.

But more pressing than the infighting is the fact that a lot of electronic music's best ideas now are being played out on the pop landscape. Dance-wise, it's all about two-step garage and French house these days, with style-squishing garage producers and groups like Daft Punk rubbing the bellies of both giddy teenagers and heady techno theorists. Then, of course, there's the omnipresent Radiohead, whose Kid A took Autechre's icy template and turned it into actual songs.

It may seem plodding to survey the competition in such detail, but context is everything in electronic music. In a world where sociology-obsessed followers speak earnestly about the "viral spread" of specific drum patterns, every record is a response to its surroundings.

Autechre's response to their environment on Confield (Warp) was to pull their ideological hair shirt even tighter. The album is an exercise in brash minimalism, with brittle beats fractured in all kinds of head-twisting ways. That's basically par for the course for Autechre. But the effect this time out is more menacing, more claustrophobically crunched, than ever before.

The opening (and typically weirdly titled) track, "VI Scose Poise," is morbidly ambient–all minor-key synth sighs and metallic shimmer. It's pretty great, too, for the way it summons overwrought thoughts of rusted buoys and ghost ships bobbing in the Sea of Tranquillity. From there, things get much more harsh. With newly naturalistic drum sounds and a viscerally decayed sonic palette, Mr. Booth and Mr. Brown beat the idea of conditioned rhythmic response into remission. It works well on tracks such as "Pen Expers," when Autechre show off their brilliant ability to layer seven or eight different beat lines into densely percolating overdrive. But other tracks, such as "Cfern," are almost comically anti-rhythmic, with punishing bass kicks and singed snare taps that serve only to show the ham-fisted contortions Autechre sometimes go through to fight the constraints of structure.

Confield is pretty much split between nuanced beat science and directionless, browbeating chaos. At its best, tracks such as "Eidetic Casein" and "Uviol" add up to lots more than their deliberately frayed parts. But ultimately, Autechre's seemingly self-conscious zero-sum game just doesn't bring enough to the table to feed electronic music's endless craving for new ideas.

–Andy Battaglia

Here's to Horn

With her latest album, You're My Thrill (Verve), Shirley Horn reaps the benefits of a strict, decades-long regimen of smoking, drinking and watching TV soap operas. When the Washington, D.C., singer and pianist first broke in the early 60's with albums like Embers and Ashes and Travelin' Light , she had a knack for swinging with as little audible effort as possible. When, after 20 years of near-obscurity, Verve miraculously made her a star in the late 80's, her voice had shrunk to perfectly meet the demands of what had always been a minimalist conception.

Even the difference between the new album, a collaboration with the arranger Johnny Mandel, and 1991's Here's to Life (Verve), the fruit of her first meeting with Mr. Mandel, is instructive. In Here's to Life , Ms. Horn's voice sits halfway between breathy insouciance and mortal gravitas; her intonation and phrasing are so precisely controlled you're hardly aware how limited her vocal range really is. Mr. Mandel, who has been known to follow the grail of beauty to the edge of kitsch, throws recklessly lush strings at her, and still he can't stop her.

You're My Thrill looks to be a similar affair. Ms. Horn's bracingly hip, boppish piano is again empathetically backed up by her regulars, Charles Ables on bass and Steve Williams on drums; this core trio is fleshed out on about half the tracks by the orchestral stylings of the Maestro of Malibu, Mr. Mandel. But in the intervening years, Ms. Horn's voice has lost roundness and taken on a drier, stuffier timbre. When she sings another "Here's to Life"-style optimistic anthem, such as "The Best Is Yet to Come," the effect is quite a bit different, as if she were singing from a bar stool or a hospital bed, no longer expecting to be taken literally but only appreciated for the severe perfection of her work.

To his credit, Mr. Mandel hears all this and backs off. On "All Night Long," his cool deployment of the lower woodwinds is closer to Gil Evans than the cocktail-party classical strings he favored on the earlier album.

If, on the up-tempo tunes, the contrast between the actress and the role can be jarring (in an interesting way), Ms. Horn's voice is still wonderfully suited to the romantic ballad. Indeed, on a tune like "Solitary Moon"–"Once again you share my pillow / making love to me / tenderly"–she hits a note of wistful languor that is almost uncomfortably intimate, even though there's not a shred of cabaret emotionalism in her work. Everything is dreamy, unruffled, a little sad. On "My Heart Stood Still," she's so deeply and statically in the moment that you wonder if she'll ever get out of it. With You're My Thrill , Shirley Horn has created something like an avant-garde trance music for disillusioned, buttoned-down grown-ups.

–Joseph Hooper

Veloso X 2

On April 10, a knot of students with chunky Williamsburg-issue glasses leafed through copies of Drinking With Bukowski close to the red-draped stage at Tonic. By the bar, a blow-dried blonde responded to the advances of a dapper Italian man. "I'm such a New Yorker now, I let my driver's license expire!" she said. The kids and the adults were waiting for Moreno Veloso, Caetano's son and the new new thing in Brazilian music, but few in the audience seemed to have a handle on the artist who was about to perform. The Italian man was one of the exceptions. "His father, he's like an amazing poet, a poet of music," he could be heard explaining to the blonde. "But Moreno, he's doing his own thing. He's not just riding off his father's name."

Moreno Veloso + 2–Alexandre Kassin and Domenico Lancellotti are the two musicians on the other side of the plus sign–just released Music Typewriter (Hannibal), an album that rides through the history of modern Brazilian music and beyond, mixing the classic rhythms of samba and bossa nova with retro-mod electronic sounds, funky bass, and some innovative and insistent percussion (not to mention the occasional whale song). Such a quirky mélange results in music that is simultaneously low-key and stimulating. The more energetic tracks, like "Rio Longe" or the exuberant "Arrivederci," sound like nighttime dancing by a Brazilian beach, while the mellow melancholy of "So Vendo Que Beleza" evokes chaise longues and long, dark gazes.

When Moreno Veloso + 2 get going, Music Typewriter is engagingly infectious, though a few of the songs–particularly "O Livro & O Beijo"–indulge too long in soporific stoner jams.

In concert, the three Brazilians were full of enthusiasm and ready to experiment. Wearing soccer jerseys because "it's the time of the football," they charmed the indifferent audience. They also revealed how much their music depends on a proper sound system for coherence. When Mr. Veloso's delicately androgynous vocals and guitar are properly layered with Mr. Kassin's bass and Mr. Lancellotti's percussion (at one point during the concert, he rubbed two sheets of sandpaper together for effect), the elements blend to produce a complex but seamless sound. But whether Tonic's stage was too small or Mr. Veloso's sound person was having a bad night, it often felt that the three men where having a difficult time making their individual contributions cohere into a single song. When it did work, though, it worked –enthralling listeners and inciting even the more uptight girls in the audience, the blonde among them, to sway and bob their heads to the music.

One of the more successful numbers was "Sou Seu Sabia," a gentle bossa which Caetano Veloso plays on his new album, Noites do Norte . Moreno makes an appearance on his father's album (and vice versa), and though he may not be "riding off his father's name," Mr. Veloso's taste for fusion and experiment is doubtless inherited.

Caetano Veloso was a founder of Tropicalismo, the Bahian mixture of traditional music, rock, jazz and local pop that shot him to fame in the 60's. But 35 years after his explosive debut, he remains as innovative and as relevant as ever. His new album, Noites do Norte (Atlantic/Nonesuch), weaves references to rock ("Rock 'n' Raul"), movies ("Michelangelo Antonioni"), traditional bossas ("Tempestades Solares") and Brazil's history of slavery ("13 de Maio") into a seamless slam-dunk of an album. Mr. Veloso's soft sand voice mixes with heavily emphasized drums, rare trumpet calls and varied, unusual song structures to produce an enthralling album which is at once easily pleasant and compellingly complex. This album may be the apotheosis of Mr. Veloso's explorations in style. It is certainly encouraging for his son's fans. If Moreno and his band manage to realize their concepts as successfully as Caetano does his, they too may one day inspire a Veloso revolution.

–Alicia Brownell

Right now, though, with the release of The Best of Os Mutantes: Everything Is Possible! , the label looks impossibly clued in. With this compilation of the Brazilian trio–along with singer-songwriters like Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Luaka Bop's own Tom Zé, major players in the currently chic movement from 60's Brazil known as Tropicália–Mr. Byrne's label seems to be in the right thing at the right time.

Just before leaving his Manhattan apartment for another trip to Brazil, Mr. Byrne picked up the phone and spoke about Beck, bubble gum and the perils of being a purist.

New York Observer: North Americans have put different emphases on Brazilian pop over recent years, haven't they? Brazil's music is, after all, enormous and diverse.

David Byrne: It's like one of those diagrams with circles, where part of it overlaps with what is hugely popular in Brazil, and part of it is outside of that, too. So the Brazilians sometimes look at us and scratch their heads and go, "Well, I understand why he loves Caetano–but why does he love Tom Zé?" In a way, it's like all the British bands from the 60's playing Chuck Berry and Little Richard songs. The reaction was the same. "Why do they like that stuff?" Because at the time American radio wasn't playing that stuff. Nobody in America was hearing it. And all of a sudden, all these British bands were coming over and playing American songs back to us. They had hand-picked what they thought was special about American music. More recently, the British and Europeans heard house–disco music, electronic stuff, basically played by Chicago and Detroit and New York deejays and mixers and guys who were creating tracks for clubs–and took it a little further. The originals died out, were no longer played in clubs. And in five years– boom –every club in Europe was playing this stuff, but their own version. They then started reselling it to Americans as house and electronica and everything else. It's the same thing; they hand-picked one little niche of creativity they heard in America and said, "There's something special going on here." Then they took it and ran with it. Although I'm not taking it and running with it, the process is that we're picking Brazilian artists we think have may be something in common, but the choice often ranges over a particular part of Brazilian music; Caetano and Tom Zé and Os Mutantes and some of these other acts all rose to national prominence in Brazil at around the same time.

Observer : During the 60's Tropicália moment.

David Byrne: Yeah. They certainly have that in common. But they've diverged, self-immolated, whatever, each in his own particular fashion.

Observer: Do you hear the 60's counterculture stuff as being the precursor to the current collage esthetic–to, say, Beck?

David Byrne: Oh, absolutely. Not that one is the direct lineage of the other. But it's the same impulse. I've talked to Beck; he's a big fan of Os Mutantes. Not that I would say, "Oh, you're just ripping off these artists." But when you find something that somebody has been doing that has a similar approach to you, you gravitate to it, you listen to it, you go, "They're dealing with the same attitudes and way of working that I do and I want to see how they approach this thing." Plus it's great music.

Observer: Do you think your own attitude toward this music–since you did Brazil Classics 1 in '89–has changed?

David Byrne: Yeah. I've become less of a purist. In the beginning I wanted [he laughs] all the Brazilian music I heard to be played on Brazilian instruments with Brazilian rhythms. And then, gradually, I accepted that, no, you can't be telling people that they can't grab the same tools you're using. You can't impose some kind of exotic criteria on these people. You can't say, "Oh, you have to keep as exotic as I want you to be." You can't do that to people. I find that that's where I've sort of changed.

Observer: One gets the feeling that Caetano Veloso, for example, political considerations aside, is fond of people like Antonio Carlos Jobim and Djavan.

David Byrne: That sounds right. I think what's difficult for us in the North to accept is that somebody can be radical politically, culturally and musically, and yet can still be romantic and love a beautiful, sensuous melody. Caetano can pull that off.

Observer: Velososeems within the Latin American literary tradition of luxury as metaphor–sonic, in this case–for freedom.

David Byrne: Yeah, and I think it comes from the African and indigenous part of Latin American culture, too. You're in this lush environment, where the spirituality is very much about nature and natural forces. You see that as being both terrible and beautiful, and that's part of your upbringing, esthetic and spiritual.

Observer: Is the notion of "the pure" in many Brazilians' frames of reference?

David Byrne: They think of it in slightly different terms. They might say, "Oh, well, if you want to hear Brazilian music, you gotta hear very intelligent and beautiful sambas, but with traditional instrumentation." They're kind of not aspiring to be pop songs, whereas the other stuff, their slick pop productions, even Brazilians might say, "Oh, I don't know if we want to hold that up as being our authentic culture." But it is. It's like slick pop productions are part of the authentic culture of North America, too.

Observer: Veloso sustains an excellent balance of writing for the academy and writing … a hit.

David Byrne: Yeah. He pulls it off. Whereas we see an inherent contradiction in those two worlds, lots of Brazilians don't. They're like, no, you can have your cake and eat it, too; you're not fighting two different worlds, two contradictions. They're all in the same world.

Observer: Sounds good to me.

David Byrne: I went to a club last night and saw a bunch of avant-garde videos and things. I had a great time, but in the end I thought, "You know, this is so accessible. In another context, it would be considered vaudeville." Everything was 10 or 15 minutes long and had some element of humor and was definitely entertaining. But it was nutty, out-there stuff. It's all about the context and the way it's perceived. You know: put Andy Kaufman in an art gallery and it's art. Put him on The Tonight Show and it's comedy.

Observer: Where does that leave us in terms of how world music is presented in this country on record labels?

David Byrne: Ah, man, that's a whole thing. We're going through this time where people are starting to know the artist now. Ten years ago, hardly anybody knew who a Caetano was. Or nobody had heard of Mutantes or Tom Zé or any of these Brazilian artists. Now they start to know them by name. If I mention them at a dinner party or to somebody I'm hanging out with, they don't look at me like, oh, he's showing off, naming somebody we've never heard of. They know who I'm talking about. That's a huge difference, because it means that those people are no longer other–no longer exotic primitives, masks of exotic Brazilians. In world music, these artists are no longer being marketed as makers of this exotic restaurant music, but as artists in their own rights.

Observer: Didn't record companies once believe only exotic collections sold?

David Byrne: Yeah. People found it a little bit intimidating to get to know an artist whose name they could barely pronounce. But if they knew that there was this cool record of Cuban music, that was a start. [He laughs.]

Observer: When you were in Talking Heads, you talked about liking bubble-gum pop. Is there any connection between that kind of purely sonic experience and how you heard Brazilian music? Isn't Brazilian pop, for non-Brazilians, virtually pure sonicism? You're probably not going to know the Portuguese; you may not pore over the translations. It's just going to hit you–like an American pop hit might hit you, like "1-2-3 Red Light" in your case, or Backstreet Boys now. True?

David Byrne: It's true. The first things I heard, I was picking up the melodies, the arrangements, the rhythms, all those elements, before the text. Then I realized that not only were they doing incredible things musically, but the texts were really intelligent as well. They could balance an intelligence, a sentimentality, a romanticism in the text, an intellectual rigor in the text–again, they didn't see a conflict there.

Observer: But then there's some Brazilian stuff that's actually quite horrible.

David Byrne: Oh, yeah. They have all the horrible stuff we have here.

Os Mutantes are fun, even delirious fun. Imagine an Austin Powers soundtrack piped through Portuguese headphones, or samples from the Mamas and the Papas matched with Veloso-Gil lyrics like, "But the people in the dining room/ Are preoccupied about birth and death/ I had a dagger of pure illuminant steel made." Maybe only the hard-core postmodernists would accord Os Mutantes megaband status, but their red-carpet reissue treatment portends a shiny American future for the ex-Tropicalists and their second-generation progeny, who are arriving in New York en masse over the next two months.

On May 19, Tom Zé, original Tropicalist and unreformed visionary, plays Irving Plaza with a repertoire drawn from his new album, a fractured classic entitled Fabrication Defect (Luaka Bop/Warner Brothers). (Opening for Mr. Zé is the fine post-bossa crooner Vinicius Cantuária, whose most recent album, Tucumã , is out on Verve.) On June 24, Afro-Brazilian funkster and former Veloso percussionist Carlinhos Brown comes to the Beacon Theater with his new album, Omelete Man , on Metro Blue. June 27 marks the arrival of the great man himself, Mr. Veloso, at the Beacon, singing selections from his folkish, elegant album, Livro (Nonesuch).

If we're all going Brazilian, it's not the first time. In the early 60's, tenor saxophonist Stan Getz's gorgeous interpretation of the bossa nova launched a million bachelor pads. In the 70's, a Brazilian tinge supplied by the likes of singer Flora Purim and percussionist Airto Moreira found its way into perhaps too much of that era's fusion jazz.

For the most part, Brazilian music was perceived by North Americans as an aural vacation, a beachy, bosomy respite from the real-world rigors of hard bop, free jazz and rock 'n' roll. Today, the tables have turned. Hipsters who can't quite handle the in-your-face hip-hop rhythms reach out to Tom Zé as a po-mo visionary. Just to drive home the delicious affinities between Mr. Zé and arty soft-rockers like Stereolab, Tortoise and Sean Lennon, Luaka Bop cooked up an album of remixes from Fabrication Defect by a bunch of these bands; Postmodern Platos will be sold over the label's Web site and on Mr. Zé's upcoming six-city American tour with Tortoise.

At home recently in São Paulo, telephonically connected to the American media via a translator named Theodore, Mr. Zé sounded grateful that anyone is doing anything with his music. Asked whether he was, in effect, the musical godfather of Beck (whose latest album has a tune entitled "Tropicalia"), Mr. Zé replied with evident gratitude: "I accept without vanity. I'm a conduit. I'm the truck driver who carries it along." His is the most intriguing case study of this Brazilian-American po-mo moment since, in his present incarnation, he's almost a gringo invention.

In the late 1960's, though, Tom Zé was one of the gang. He, Mr. Veloso and Mr. Gil were all passionately intellectual university students in Salvador, Brazil. To their right was the Brazilian military government, which did not brook open dissent; to their left, Marxist ideologues who shared with the right a protectionist, purist view of Brazilian culture. Meanwhile, the Anglo-American pop scene was exploding- Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band , Jimi Hendrix, you name it-and the young Tropicalists were determined to get it all into their work. "They were outside the centers of power in the West," said Arto Lindsay, the Brazilian-music producer and downtown singer-guitarist. "That gave them an outsider's perspective. Nowadays, everybody feels a little that way." (Indeed, you get the sense that today's Anglo-American popmeisters are confronting, via loop and sample, the colonizing power of their own rock 'n' roll past.)

The Tropicalists proceeded by indirection and implication. Sonically, they experimented with abrupt segues and juxtapositions. Lyrically, they favored the oblique, which kept them out of jail (for a while) and also placed them within the tradition of avant-garde "concrete" Brazilian poetry with its arty emphasis on words for words' sake. Perhaps the most sublime cut on 1968's Tropicália was Mr. Veloso's slippery take on Brazil's infatuation with pop Americana, "Baby," sung by Gal Costa, in Portuguese, in her best baby-doll voice: "You need to learn English to learn what I know and don't know anymore/ … You need, you need, you need, I don't know, read my T-shirt:/ Baby, baby, I love you."

But things fell apart, as things do. Messrs. Veloso and Gil were briefly jailed at the end of 1968 and they subsequently decamped to London, closing the curtain on the Tropicália movement. After their return in 1972, they shed much of their overt experimentalism, steadily and deservedly assuming their mantle as Brazil's musical laureates. And Tom Zé? Short, wiry and strange, Mr. Zé never fit the part of the pop star, especially when the rest of the 60's carnival shut down and his own music got progressively weirder and weirder. Mr. Zé repaired to his hometown of Irará in the parched northeastern interior and built his own, sometimes monstrously impractical musical instruments. (There was one contraption built of floor sanders, typewriters, blenders and radios that took up most of the house and that later had to be sold to subsidize one of his concerts.)

In 1990, when David Byrne chanced upon an old Zé platter and decided to record him, Mr. Zé himself was about ready to pack it in and go to work for a relative who owned a gas station. With reason. "When I told Brazilians I was releasing a Tom Zé album," David Byrne recalled recently, "there was this feeling-'With all the beautiful, sophisticated music here, this is the guy you choose to represent us, this nut?'"

Mr. Zé confirms: "On the day I traveled to meet David, a journalist published a report-'Tom Zé enemies can start cutting their wrists with razor blades because he's going to meet the guy with the Talking Heads.'"

Several Luaka Bop albums later (regrettably, all but the new one are out of print), Mr. Zé has ridden his American wave to belated recognition in his fickle motherland. Fabrication Defect should certify his unlikely new status-there and here. In a song like "Baby," Caetano Veloso toys with the theme of North American-South American relations in his delicate metapop mode; on Defect , Mr. Zé goes for a surrealistic, cinemascopic blast. To wit: The First Worlders want the Third Worlders to be obedient androids, but the Third Worlders keep screwing up. It's their "fabrication defects"-they dream, they dance, they drink, they fuck. "The wine of open legs/ soaks the offerings on the altar/ screams, sperm and handcuffs/ the fury of pure lavender," goes Defect No. 9, "Juventude Javali."

The truly weird thing is, lines like those, sung in Portuguese in Mr. Zé's warm voice and set to shifting, samba-fied beats, sound just as sexy as the old Brazilian music we liked before we learned to think and listen at the same time.