Contemporary Carioca: Technologies of Mixing in a Brazilian Music Scene (review)

Interest in and knowledge about Brazil and its culture, particularly its popular music, has undergone considerable growth over the last twenty years, a period roughly coinciding with the successful return to civilian government in the early nineties after decades of military dictatorship, and the transition to fiscal policies that managed to eliminate decades of hyperinflation. After the election and suspicious death of Tancredo Neves in 1985, and the regimes of José Sarney (his vice-president) and Fernando Collor de Mello, the latter an embarrassing fiasco even in Brazilian terms, the presidencies of Itamar Franco, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva, and Dilma Rousseff have brought stability, economic development, and social transformation to Brazil, taking up once more the hope that marked the previous period in which music from Rio de Janeiro was an internationally marketable cultural product: the age of the bossa nova and the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek. The last decade or so has seen the appearance of close to a dozen book-length works in English on Brazilian popular music (with a notable void of similar production dealing with the country's ample production of classical/concert music), including studies of the short-lived tropicália phase of the late sixties (cut short by military repression in 1968), the history and regeneration of choro (popular instrumental music similar in its pedigree to American ragtime), the samba (the music of Rio identified worldwide with Brazilian culture), and the local development of the international import, hip hop, among others.

Frederick Moehn chooses an intermediate road between focusing on a particular artist (the appreciation of Brazilian musicians tends to vary considerably between the value given by the internal market, and that assigned by listeners outside Brazil) and expansively examining a particular genre or indeed popular music in general, choosing to look at five musical figures associated with the musical scene of Rio de Janeiro: Marcos Suzano, Lenine, Pedro Luís, Fernanda Abreu, and Paulinho Moska. The city of Rio de Janeiro, formerly the national capital (since 1960, this honor has gone to the planned city of Brasília, planted in the central plateau, far from other population centers), continues to serve as the national cultural capital and the site of the most important television network (Rede Globo), attracting both musicians and economic migrants from other parts of the country. Thus, artists will likely not gain national and international renown and popularity until they have been successful in Rio, even if they are identified with genres that have little connection with the local culture.

Moehn, at this writing a Research Associate at the Institute for Ethnomusicology—Center for Music and Dance of the Universidade Nova of Lisbon, Portugal, spent August 1998 through July 1999 in Rio, a period that provided time for interviews and observation for the material in this volume. He begins with what is to my mind a relatively brief chapter of introduction to Rio de Janeiro, given the prominence the city plays in his title (carioca, functioning both as noun and adjective, means a resident of or something associated with the city of Rio de Janeiro). Given the cultural particularities of the city, this chapter could have and should have been much more informative, and its limitations reveal the narrow focus of the author's view, which does not move far beyond the South Zone (roughly speaking, the beach neighborhoods of Botafogo, Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon) and its middle class, omitting the North Zone and the suburbs, arguably more culturally important and determinant for the growth of Carioca musical culture. Even with regard to the South Zone, the fundamental volumes by Ruy Castro on bossa nova and Ipanema are absent from the bibliography.

Moehn's first chapter is a recycling of an extended paper published in Ethno musicology (53, no. 2 [Spring/Summer 2009]: 276-307), a discussion of the adaptation of the pandeiro...