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  • Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil
  • David Treece
Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil. By Bryan McCann. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp. x, 296. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $22.95 paper.

The contribution of culture, and especially popular music, to the second phase of Brazil's state-formation, in the middle decades of the twentieth century, is now well recognized. There has been something of a mini-publishing industry on this topic in recent years, which includes an important clutch of titles in English, from Daryle Williams's Culture Wars in Brazil (2001), to Hermano Vianna's The Mystery of Samba (1999) and Lisa Shaw's The Social History of the Brazilian Samba (1999). So how does McCann's Hello, Hello Brazil expand or change our understanding of this crucial period in the country's formation?

For one, it extends the period under consideration beyond the fall of the Estado Novo itself (1945), where other comparable accounts end, to the mid 1950s, therefore embracing both Vargas administrations and the full extent of the national-populist era. Culturally speaking, the more significant watershed is that represented by the deaths of Vargas and Carmen Miranda, within a year of each other. By this time, as McCann argues, a new set of musical practices and themes had been consolidated that would remain in place for the rest of the century. At the same time, the triumphalist national-popular rhetoric represented by the samba-exaltação was already being contested from within by a critical countercurrent of samba de morro; this critical shift arguably paved the way for the explicitly political era of 1960s music-making, when a new youth audience, the rise of television, and a dynamically international cultural and economic scene made a reappraisal of the concepts of povo and nação unavoidable. [End Page 290]

More important than this chronological perspective, however, is the fact that the musical history it embraces is brought alive for us through the medium of radio. McCann's meticulously researched focus on this golden era in Brazilian radio—including the role of individual radialistas, broadcasting and programming policy, the star system, studio shows and fan clubs—opens a wonderfully revealing window onto the actual fabric of everyday musical life during these decades. At every step in his account, the attention to detail casts fresh light on a familiar narrative, as well as adding new dimensions to it, such as the post-War history of choro.

It also makes for a more sensitively nuanced approach than previously encountered to that complex web of relations, articulated by the radio network, between the local and the international, the center and the periphery, and between the community, state and music industry. While justice is fully done to the unifying influence of radio in disseminating and generalizing musical tastes across the national territory, McCann does not conclude from this that the outcome was automatically a homogenous national culture in which the state's agenda and language were all pervasive.

For example, he is able, on the one hand, to account very convincingly for the symbolic function of iconic figures Dorival Caymmi (the ur-baiano) and Luiz Gonzaga (the ur-nordestino) in incorporating regional identities into the national imaginary, bridging the gap between the folkloric-rural and the urban-popular. But on the other hand, he challenges the assumption that samba musicians were co-opted wholesale into the Estado Novo's propaganda machine by its twin policies of censorship and incentives. In fact, he argues, the radio opened up a space for popular agency to be exercised independently of the corporativist state, as the production and consumption of popular music made possible a kind of grassroots, popular "citizenship."

Likewise, McCann does not indulge the simplistic nationalist view of Brazilian popular music's relationship with the U.S. recording industry and Hollywood, as mediated by figures like Carmen Miranda and U.S. producer Wallace Downey. Far from disposing of this relationship as a struggle between assimilation and resistance, he argues, for example, that "Downey contributed decisively to the growth of a domestic popular music industry strong enough to withstand foreign...

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