This book provides an ethnographic account of musical production and cultural politics in Recife, Brazil. While entrepreneurial forms of labor are increasingly promoted as solutions to various socioeconomic problems, the book argues that they instead strengthen intertwining racial and class-based inequalities. Throughout the twenty-first century, multicultural and neoliberal policies have pushed local musicians to sell not only their music but also themselves by upholding institutional and vernacular expectations about what musical professionalism is and sounds like. The book offers an innovative view of contemporary Brazilian music by developing rooted cosmopolitanism, scaling, and voicing into a conceptual ensemble that gives a politically and aesthetically grounded sense of how individuals and groups musically envision their worlds. Each chapter examines different participants involved in state sponsorship: musicians who compete in Carnival and are burdened with the racialized responsibility of embodying local tradition; middle-class musicians who appeal to young audiences and state institutions alike by performing fusions of local and transnational genres but lack financial stability; bureaucrats who want to democratize culture yet act as gatekeepers; and cultural promoters who improvise venues in spaces like offices to compensate for politico-economic shifts that have decreased funding for live performances. These case studies familiarize readers with Recife’s musical diversity while advancing insights into the power relations that structure and arise from contemporary musical practices.

This article compares two musical groups from Recife, the capital of the Northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. The first group, which I call Banda Recifolinda is a professional, middle‐class pop band that combines international styles, such as Afro Beat and rock, with Brazilian rhythms. The second group, Maracatu Afro, plays maracatu, a local carnivalesque genre. The groups integrate musical activities into their community outreach efforts that target young people in Maracatu Afro's marginalized neighborhood. Despite their apparent differences, both groups benefit from state sponsorship because they qualify as cultura, an official category that emphasizes artistic and especially musical expressions of regional identity. I demonstrate how each group constructs its relationship to the discourses of cultura during performances and rehearsals. Specifically, I address how band members’ voicing strategies (Bakhtin, Agha, and Silverstein) construe them as insiders or outsiders of cultura and within Brazilian society, more generally. While Banda Recifolinda primarily aligns to cultura discourses by rhetorically distancing themselves from the commercialized dance music styles which the state does not endorse, Maracatu Afro's alignment to Afrocentric, politicized discourses challenge the ostensibly inclusive premise of cultura, and express their perceived exclusion from Brazilian society. The contrasts between each groups’ voicing strategies reveal that cultura encompasses multiple paths for inclusion and exclusion that shape the ways in which these bands participate in the primarily state managed cultura scene. Since cultura is the combined result of national policies and cultural transformations from Brazil's redemocratization period, investigating how bands orient to cultura discourses not only offers analytic access into how contemporary actors negotiate the increasing objectification of culture (Comaroff and Comaroff, Dávila), but also how cultural participation influences how citizens interactionally envision, practice, and orient to democracy in Brazil (Avelar and Dunn, Moehn).

This chapter examines the alternative music scene in the metropolitan area of Recife, Brazil, to understand how the primarily middle-class musicians involved in it contend with state sponsorship and its neoliberal multicultural discourses. By engaging with music that fuses traditional northeastern styles with transnational genres like rock and jazz, alternative musicians and fans “voice” rooted cosmopolitan scale-making projects that bridge the local and global. They also legitimize their tastes and interests within the realm of state-sponsored music and create forms of belonging and distinction within the middle class. The scene’s participants are seemingly more motivated by friendship and artistic passion than by profit, but their activities are nonetheless influenced by historical social disparities and contemporary neoliberal processes that economize culture and maintain inequality.

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