From Rio to São Paulo: Shifting Urban Landscapes and Global Strategies for Brazilian Music

Abstract

You need to go to São Paulo," Marcela Boechat of Dubas Música told me in 2007. She and I were meeting in Dubas's offices in the Centro district of Rio de Janeiro and she urged me, "If you really want to know about how the Brazilian music industry is responding to changes in global distribution, talk to the record companies in São Paulo." I had been running around Rio de Janeiro for months, interviewing funcionários (industry workers) to find out how they were responding to changes in the international demands for Brazilian music. At the time, I had good reason to focus my research on Rio de Janeiro. For much of the 20 th century, Rio was the locus of Brazil's most celebrated musical developments and the birthplace of the country's music industry. Urban samba, a genre that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through a mixture of Afro-Brazilian styles with cosmopolitan genres such as polka and tango, famously solidified in the city's Praça Onze neighborhood. 1 By the 1930s, dictator Getúlio Vargas coopted samba and it became the official musical style of the country. Bossa nova later developed in the city's richest beachside neighborhoods in the South Zone before it became one of the most popular styles of the 1960s. To date, many of the country's most celebrated musical stars have lived there. 2 While Rio's place in Brazil's national narrative is far from limited to music, 3 it is the city's musical life that the government regularly touts to tourists; the country repeatedly celebrates Rio as having the best carnival celebrations, and the international airport is named after Antônio Carlos Jobim, the world famous bossa nova composer. From this perspective, the record industry in São Paulo (or any other Brazilian city, for that matter) has for the most part escaped the attention of casual observers and scholars. 4 Yet, by all accounts, the music scene in São Paulo was becoming a hotbed of creative energy and the city was soon the subject of music press attention, nationally and internationally. 5 As I soon learned, the emerging international visibility of the music scene in São Paulo is part of larger strategic changes among independent record labels after years of uncertainty and reorganization. Brazil's international reputation has been in flux ever since the early 2000s. For much of the 20 th century, Brazil and Rio de Janeiro were synonymous in international discourse. Yet, as the country began to court investors and tout its economic strength, São Paulo began to compete with Rio for the limelight. At the height of the Lula (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) administration (2002-2010), Brazil was changing how it positioned itself in the world. When I first arrived in São Paulo in 2008, I witnessed the beginning of a geographic reordering of the interconnections between new music scenes and cultural policy in that city. By the time Brazil was preparing the host the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, those changes had solidified. nation brand, has been contested for quite some tim...

En busca del Sonido Made in Barcelona

“…Dicho perfil plural se reproduce en otras urbes del mundo, como por ejemplo la ciudad de São Paulo, en Brasil. Se trata de otro caso de metrópoli cosmopolita donde, aparentemente, podríamos pensar que no tiene una identidad musical específica, pero que se define exactamente por su característica plural a nivel sonoro/musical (Goldschmitt, 2019). A raíz de estas observaciones, se plantea la incógnita del porqué de esta situación.…”