Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries

Description

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. Title_Pages Dedication Acknowledgments Introduction_Mediation_Attention_and_Brazils_Musical_Brand Copying_the_Bossa_NovaJazz_and_Dance_Fads_in_the_Early_1960s Adult_Contemporary_Bossa_NovaThe_Jet_Set_and_Easy_Listening_on_Record_and_in_Film From_Fusion_to_FunkBrazilian_Musical_Strategies_of_Racial_Affiliation_in_the_1970s Brazilian_Music_as_World_Music_in_the_Late_1980s Remixing_BrazilDistraction_and_Retro_Taste_at_the_Turn_of_the_Millennium Constructing_a_New_Music_IndustryMusically_Branding_Brazil_in_the_2010s Epilogue Bibliography Index