Made in Brazil: Studies in Popular Music ed. by Martha Tupinambá de Ulhôa, Cláudia Azevedo, Felipe Trotta (review)

The purpose of this collection is to provide American scholars and students of Brazilian music an overview of the popular music of the country through the work of Brazilian researchers. The volume is part of the Routledge Global Popular Music Series, which has as an overarching goal the creation of "an international arena for a democratic musicology, through authoritative and accessible books," in the words of series editors Franco Fabbri and Goffredo Plastino. Despite this stated goal of accessibility, the articles that make up the text are relatively uniform in their use of fairly dense academic language, clearly marking the book for an academic audience. The volume begins with an introduction by editor Martha Tupinambá de Ulhôa, which provides an overview of the state of popular music research in Brazil. Her analysis provides useful information such as the uncertain situation of popular music studies within the academy, and even a numeric breakdown of common popular music subjects for doctoral dissertations. Ulhôa's introduction sets up the book specifically as a cross-section of academic research on the subject by Brazilian graduate students, notwithstanding Fabbri and Plastino's loftier goal of an international, democratic musicology. Each of the articles is a distillation of the major topic of the doctoral research of the author. The book is split into four thematic sections—Samba and Choro; Scenes and Artists; Music, Markets, and New Media; and a "coda" which features two articles about Brazilian music as performed and experienced outside of Brazil. Each chapter features a helpful introduction by the editors providing some general context to the broader themes that tie the articles together. The final article is an interview with MPB musician Lenine by the editors, which strikes a tone somewhere between a journalistic article and a more intellectual discussion of the nature of musical creativity, electronic versus acoustic sounds in MPB, and the place of popular music in Brazilian culture.

A central weakness to the collection is its rehashing topics that are well covered by the American literature on Brazilian music. These include the narrative of samba and choro as nationalist musics in the first half of the twentieth century. For American readers, there is already a wealth of research available in English about samba and choro, including the English translation of Hermano Vianna's The Mystery of Samba, as well as Marc Hertzman's Making Samba and Bryan McCann's Hello, Hello Brazil, which treat the issue of Brazilian musical nationalism in great detail, including the attempts of Brazilian musicians, government, and business interests in collapsing both the vertical class differences and horizontal spatial differences that were obstacles to a sense of national identity. For English speaking readers well-read on Brazilian popular music, unfortunately the bulk of this collection will provide little new information. Just the fact that these articles are written by Brazilian authors does not mean that they approach their topics with particularly novel perspectives or theoretical approaches. Conversely, for initiates to the subject, there are other books that are more accessible and more complete, such as Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship, edited by Christopher Dunn and Idelber Avelar, which provide a better general primer in contemporary Brazilian popular music. In addition, because the book is more of a cross-section of Brazilian graduate research in popular music than a cross-section of popular music itself, the articles tend to reinforce the academy's preoccupation with certain cities and music in Brazil, such as samba in Rio, hip-hop in São Paulo, and a handful of Northeastern genres (especially urban maracatu) in Recife. A notable exception is Paulo Murilo Guerreiro do Amaral's article about cosmopolitanism and stigma in Amazonian technobrega—a contemporary genre with only a few scholarly works in English. This exception, however, largely proves the rule that topics and regions already well-established in Western scholarly research are discussed...