Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization (review)

This is a remarkably coherent collection of essays, one so unified it does not even need a colon in the title. And the big question hovering over the volume is simple and important. How have the processes called "globalization" affected culture around the world? The case at hand is Brazilian popular music. Has an invasive, market-driven "mass culture" filled Brazil with the sonic analog of MacDonald's fastfood? Or have exciting musical hybridities thrived, instead?

Unsurprisingly—in the pátria of Oswald de Andrade's "cultural cannibalism"—the evidence for musical hybridity is strong. The editors frame it and provide useful historical background in their long introduction to the volume. Everything prior to the twentieth century goes by in a couple of brisk paragraphs, followed by due attention to the 1930s and 1940s "Golden Age of Samba" and to Bossa Nova in the 1950s and 1960s. Next, the editors focus particularly on the musical movement called Tropicalism (founded in Bahia in the late 1960s) because of its specific emphasis on creative fusion of things Brazilian and things international. So far so good. But things slow down too much when we get to the Age of the Internet (my term) in the 1980s and, above all, the 1990s. Perhaps this is a historian's characteristic caveat about the exaggerated importance of the present. Here, though, the extended discussion of this period in the introduction creates considerable redundancy in other chapters.

In truth, the chapters of Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization cluster so tightly as to overlap in several ways, especially at the city of Salvador, Bahia. Three chapters deal with Tropicalism, its leading figures Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, and the movement's vicissitudes and legacy. Veloso himself provides a superb appreciation of Carmen Miranda in a short chapter that nicely sets the tone for reflections on the mutable aesthetics of globalizaton. Five chapters deal with the new carnival music that has blossomed in Bahia in the 1980s and the 1990s. This music has been closely associated with blocos afros like Ilê Aiyê and Olodum, carnival parade groups that mobilize heroic African imagery and have become, in some cases, almost social movements. Bahian axé music, as it is called, is eclectic and has incoporated a very strong influence from Jamaican reggae (the topic of two chapters). It is easy to understand why axé music has attracted so much attention, given its relevance to the culture of the entire African diaspora. And the mark of hybridity is strong on axé music, the term itself being half Yoruba and half English.

In addition, some excellent articles are "outlyers." One, for example, is a careful comparison of the new Brazilian movie Orfeu (1999) with its stunningly influential French-made antecedent Black Orpheus (1959). Another compares dances in Rio and Bahia where black young people gather to enjoy various sorts of African-American music gathered under the term funk. Yet another looks at Brazilian rock (more precisely Brazilian heavy metal music), exemplified by the internationally successful band Sepultura. Recife's mangue beat (another hybrid music with a hybrid name) gets a couple of chapters.

As the outlyers indicate, Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization gains its fine thematic unity, partly at the expense of what it leaves out. I am thinking not so much of Rio-style samba, which has gotten plenty of attention elsewhere, as of genres like forró (hardly mentioned) and, especially, música sertaneja, Brazilian country music, which exhibits influences of U.S. country music and which currently outsells any other genre by a huge margin. Música sertaneja is mentioned in the book exactly once, to take passing note of this fact.

Perhaps it should be said, given this uneven coverage, that the full verdict on globalization and Brazilian popular music is not yet in. But this fine volume of clear, well-edited essays has contributed all...