Bossa Mundo

Abstract

Bossa Mundo chronicles how Brazilian music has been central to Brazil’s national brand in the United States and the United Kingdom since the late 1950s. Scholarly texts on Brazilian popular music generally focus on questions of music and national identity, and when they discuss the music’s international popularity, they keep the artists, recordings, and live performances as the focus, ignoring the process of transnational mediation. This book fills a major gap in Brazilian music studies by analyzing the consequences of moments when Brazilian music was popular in Anglophone markets, with a focus on the media industries. With subject matter as varied as jazz, film music, dance fads, DJ/remix culture, and new models of musical distribution, the book demonstrates how the mediation of Brazilian music in an increasingly crowded transnational marketplace has had lasting consequences for the creative output celebrated by Brazil as part of its national brand. Through a discussion of the political meaning of mass-mediated music in chronologically organized chapters, the book shifts the scholarly focus on the music’s transnational popularity from the scholarly framework of representing Otherness to broader considerations of a media environment where listeners and intermediaries often have differing priorities. The book provides a new model for studying music from culturally rich countries in the Global South where local governments often leverage stereotypes in their national branding project.

Anitta's ‘Girl from Rio’, Digital Fatigue, and Stereotype

“…20 Elsewhere, I argue that this melding of musical and political interests of the powerful resulted in a type of musical branding for the country and that it continued through cultural intermediaries in various guises for decades. 21 These intermediaries effectively curated Brazil's musical brand to build soft power to secure favourable trade deals and international investment. This resulted in the celebration and valorization of certain types of Brazilian music well above others: samba became Brazil's main musical export, and the imagery and music related to samba in carnival became impossible to avoid as part of Brazil's image through the expansion of popular media in the post-war period.…”