Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization

edited, with an introduction and contributions by,
Christopher Dunn, Tulane University and Charles A. Perrone, University of Florida

Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization is a multi-disciplinary collection of essays about international aspects of Brazil’s song and dance music, both its projections abroad and the adaptations or appropriations the country’s own music-makers have made of foreign materials. The introduction Chiclete com Banana: Internationalization in Brazilian Popular Music provides historical context for the varied studies that follow, which consider topics ranging from film music, diasporic aesthetics, and contemporary carnival to variants of hip-hop, rock, and heavy metal in relation to local, regional, and globalized forms of identity. Whether focused on the era of radio or the age of the Internet, discussions of urban popular music in Brazil have inevitably involved hemispheric interplay and a multi-faceted dynamic of national and international factors. These essays explore how Brazilian artists and audiences have negotiated meanings in a spectrum of musical situations that may have extra-domestic factors and how geographical or political circumstances may mediate musical communication.
This volume brings together across national boundaries established and emerging scholars who share a concern with transnational aspects of Brazilian popular music. Contributors come from the fields of ethnomusicology, cultural studies, literature, Brazilian studies, anthropology, sociology, and communications. They include about half from the US and half of Brazilian or other origins, who provide fresh perspectives on issues of cultural, political, and personal import in youth music. In contrast to many previous studies on Brazilian popular music in international contexts which focus on Bossa Nova, the present work affords much greater attention to ground-breaking developments in the 1960-70s, and especially to variations, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, of musical discourse in Salvador, Bahia, the center of African-Brazilian culture, and innovations in Brazil’s vibrant northeastern region.
The collection features– indeed is privileged to have– a concise and scintillating article on Carmen Miranda and sixties Tropicalism by Caetano Veloso, the “intellectual pop star” who has been a leading name in Brazilian song for more than thirty years and who has deservedly become an internationally recognized and lauded performer and writer. His own perspectives can be considered alongside diverse analyses in several of the contributions

I’ll only put be-bop in my samba
when Uncle Sam grabs pandeiro and drum…
and understands that samba isn’t rumba
then I’ll mix Miami with Copacabana
Chiclets with banana…

(Gordurinha-Castilho, 1959)
recorded by Jackson do Pandeiro

Popular music stands out as a particularly powerful mode of expressive culture in Brazil. The nation continues to be one of the world’s seven largest musical markets, in terms of production and circulation of goods. Artistically, the Brazilian contribution is, in a certain sense, immeasurable. On the domestic front, urban popular music has been a particularly sensitive register of the construction of national identity since the 1930s in Brazil. The sounds of Latin America’s largest country have enjoyed high levels of international exposure and consumer interest since the 1940s. In the final three decades of this century, analysts of Brazilian musical phenomena at home and abroad — including journalists, independent scholars, and academics– have regularly pondered issues of foreign influences and export quality.