A Roda’s Rooted Cosmopolitan Groove

Abstract

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.