Acknowledgments
The path to completing this book was circuitous, compounded by the precarity of being an early-career scholar. The dedication of librarians has been a vital source of consistency over many moves and upheavals. Much of the historical research for this book was conducted at the libraries and special collections at the University of California, Los Angeles (including Music Special Collections and the Film and Television Archive), which served as a major font of resources well after I completed my studies. I also consulted historical sources at the following academic libraries: University of California, Irvine; Colby College; New College of Florida, University of South Florida, and Ringling College of Art and Design; University of Cambridge; Wellesley College; and Tufts University. A special thank you goes to the staff at the main branch of the Boston Public Library and at the British Library who kept historical music periodicals in excellent condition. At New College of Florida, Caroline Reed helped me to hunt down sources for the first stages of writing. More recently, Carol Lubkowski, the Wellesley College music librarian, helped with some vexing research questions. Thank you.
Many institutions have funded the research that went into this book. As a graduate student at UCLA, these included two Dean’s humanities fellowships from the Graduate Division, a Title IV FLAS and Summer FLAS in Brazilian Portuguese, additional funding from the UCLA Department of Musicology, as well as fieldwork grants from the International Institute and the Latin American Institute. I was also one of the first recipients of financial support from the new Herb Alpert School of Music to attend Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory V in 2008 hosted by Toby Miller, Kate Oakley, and David Theo Goldberg on the topic “Creative Societies, Cultural Industries, New Humanities?” That collection of scholars and policymakers was inspiring and has shaped my increasing investment in media studies that ultimately formed the core of this book. At Colby College, I received travel and research funding as part of my Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship. The Music & Letters Trust in the United Kingdom funded a crucial trip to Brazil in 2015.
I am deeply grateful to my PhD committee at UCLA for nurturing this project from its earliest beginnings. Thank you to Randall Johnson, Tamara
Levitz, Mitchell Morris, and Anthony Seeger for each asking probing questions during my PhD defense to push me to rethink the whole project. I was fortunate to have Timothy Taylor as the chair of my committee, and his ideas still shape much of my thinking. His unwavering support and candid assessment of my work were just what I needed through my years of contingent academic employment.
I have benefited greatly from the conversations and hospitality of many people in Brazil. To my collaborators working in the Brazilian music industries: I have met with many of you over the years, and it still baffles the mind that you entertained so many of my questions. Special thanks to Marcela Boechat, David McLaughlin, Michel Perrin, Pena Schmidt, and Maurício Tagliari for your generosity, enthusiasm about my project, and for challenging my ideas. Numerous scholars at Brazilian institutions have helped me over the years, including Samuel Araújo, Frederico Coelho, Ivan Fontanari, Maria Elizabeth Lucas, and the late Santuza Cambraia Naves. I also benefited from a broader social network that made the practicalities of living in Brazil possible. To Jenée Slocum, Julia Michaels, and Thais Riback, thank you for your friendship and for a base of emotional support back when I was first starting. I also owe a debt of gratitude to everyone who provided safe and welcoming accommodations: Thomas George Caracas Garcia, Michel Perrin, Valéria Monteiro, Ivana Cabral, and Daniela de Sá.
I am indebted to the many who lent me far more support than I ever expected. Thanks to Jeanine Ashforth, Jessica Deschaines, and Ann-Michelle Van Eepoel for embracing my love of researching Brazilian music from the outside and encouraged me to keep going. Special thanks to everyone who taught me the true meaning of “community” during the darkest period of my academic precarity: Aimee Bahng, Bill Bahng Boyer, P. Allen Roda, Steven Shipman, Alice Shipman, Taylor Rothenberg-Manley, and Valentine Conaty. Maribeth Clark showed unparalleled generosity and I benefited from timely advice from J. Griffith Rollefson and Hettie Malcomson. I would not be where I am without all of you.
Early versions of this research first appeared as invited presentations and colloquia. Anupama Jain, Priscilla Doel, and Lily Funahashi gave me supportive comments when I presented the beginnings of chapter 4 as part of the Colby College Humanities Colloquium. Questions from Steven Miles and Heather Love at the New College of Florida Gender Studies “Brown Bag” presentation helped me in the early stages of chapter 1. Geoffrey Kantaris and Rachel Harris urged me to make broader connections when I presented
research from chapter 2 at the Faculty of Music Colloquium at Cambridge and as part of the SOAS Ethnomusicology Seminar Series. Thank you to Julie Coimbra at the Centre for Latin American Studies at Cambridge and Henry Stobart at the Latin American Music Seminar at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of London, for invitations to present in environments dedicated to Latin American research. Thanks to Myke Cuthbert and Rebecca Marchand for the invitation to present at the joint meeting of AMS-NE and the New England Conference of Music Theorists. And finally thank you to Philip Gentry and Russell Murray for the warm welcome at the University of Delaware.
Many people read early drafts of this book. Harriett Barnes-Duke, Allie Kleber, and Schuyler Wheldon deserve a special mention for reading the entire manuscript and serving as sounding boards as I pulled everything together. Allie, in particular, helped to make the manuscript more readable to a nonacademic audience and also helped with image formatting. Marie Abe, Chloë Alaghband-Zadeh, Kevin Fellezs, Shannon Garland, Philip Gentry, Darien Lamen, Andrew Mall, Steven Pond, Michael Birenbaum Quintero, Nichole Rustin-Pascale, Mark Samples, Nick Seaver, Daniel Sharp, Michael B. Silvers, and Benjamin Tausig read drafts of chapters and provided crucial feedback at various stages. You all showed boundless generosity and patience with this project. Finally, I feel especially grateful to Josh Rutner as an editor and indexer. His experience, musical knowledge, and sense of humor made the revision process much more enjoyable.
My colleagues at Wellesley College have given me a scholarly home that provided much needed stability to complete this project. In the Music Department, thanks to Eliko Akahori, Martin Brody, Lisa Graham, David Russell, and Kera Washington for making the music department a stimulating and supportive scholarly home. Special thanks to Gurminder Bhogal and Claire Fontijn for advice on book contracts and publishing and to Jenny Olivia Johnson for camaraderie on broader questions of contemporary music, career, and pacing. Thanks to Isabel Fine, Cercie Miller, and Paula Zeitlin for coming together to invite Luciana Souza for a residency, which provided a massive boost for refining the book’s framing. There are many brilliant colleagues in other departments at Wellesley, but I’ve been especially grateful for conversations with Patricia Berman, Susan H. Ellison, Octávio Gonzalez, Laura K. Gratton, Brenna Greer, Koichi Hagimoto, António Igrejas, Ada Lerner, Peggy Levitt, Irene Mata, Patrick McKewan, N. Adriana Knouf, Petra Rivera-Rideau, Lawrence Rosenwald, and Edward Silvers.
Thank you to Magdalene Christian and Jim Wice for facilitating crucial administrative processes.
Prior to Wellesley, I held many short-term posts, and the ideas herein are due in part to the connections I made at those places. At Colby College, I had many productive conversations with Todd Borgerding, Daniel Cohen, Ben Fallaw, Paul Machlin, Steven Nuss, and Eric Thomas. While I was at New College of Florida, Mark Dancigers was a frequent interlocutor about the sounds in Brazilian music. At University of Cambridge, thank you to: Nicholas Cook, Ian Cross, Martin Ennis, Marina Frolova-Walker, Matthew Machin-Autenrieth, Susan Round, David Trippett, and Benjamin Walton in the Faculty of Music; Stuart Davis, Susan Smith, and Jeremy West at Girton College; Maite Conde in Medieval and Modern Languages.
There is a broad network of music scholars who have helped me to develop ideas while also providing me with a sense of community. They include: Rachel Adelstein, Ananay Aguilar, Jayson Beaster-Jones, Tyler Bickford, James Buhler, Patrick Burke, Andrew Eisenberg, Luis-Manuel Garcia, Sumanth Gopinath, Jack Hamilton, Eric Harvey, Michael Heller, Eduardo Herrera, Sydney Hutchinson, Monique Ingalls, Robin D. James, Elizabeth Keenan, Keir Keightley, Morgan Luker, Noriko Manabe, Elizabeth Morgan, Michael O’Brien, Daniel Party, Marysol Quevedo, Graham Raulerson, Jason Robinson, and Susan Thomas. Charles Kronengold and Darien Lamen generously shared drafts of unpublished work. Eric Weisbard and Theo Cateforis lent me their perspective on pop criticism of the 1980s. In the Boston area, I’ve been fortunate to have collaborative and scholarly friendships with Nick Seaver and Leslie Tilley. Thank you especially to Leslie for the writing dates, ceaseless encouragement, and fantastic food.
In the world of Brazilian music scholars, I have been mentored by Jason Stanyek and Frederick Moehn in an unofficial capacity since my earliest years as a graduate student. I have also had many productive conversations with other Brazilianists, including especially Carla Brunet, Leo Cardoso, Daniel Gough, Michael Iyanaga, Cristina Magaldi, Bryan McCann, Jeff Packman, Suzel Riley, Liv Sovik, and Chris Stover.
Since my first academic post, I have had countless top-notch students, but a few of them asked especially prescient questions that reminded me of my audience. Thanks to Elise Brown, Cosme Del Rosario-Bell, Nick Doig, Elliot Evins, Rachel Frazer, James Gabrillo, Caroline George, Tessa Kim, and Holland Rhodd-Lee. You all make me so proud.
Two anonymous readers reviewed this manuscript for the press and I have benefited greatly from their deep engagement and feedback. Thank you to my editor, Suzanne Ryan, who believed in this project from the first time we talked in 2009 and who entertained numerous developmental meetings over the years. Thanks also to Walter Clark who initially expressed interest for it in the CLAIMS series and to Alejandro Madrid for steering the project through to completion when he took over as series editor. Alejandro has been a mentor and colleague since 2004 and his guidance through this process has been reassuring.
This project would have been impossible without family broadly conceived. Thank you to my parents, my sister Amy, her husband Barry, and Nina and Evan for keeping me grounded. Thank you to Esther, for your enthusiasm and teaching me important things about who I am. To Brett, for all of the music nerdery over the years. Sophie Gamwell has done far more for this project than can be listed here. Although trained in a different field, she never wavered in her support for my ideas and always urged me to state boldly why they matter. Thank you, Sophie, for saying “yes.”
Introduction
Mediation, Attention, and Brazil’s Musical Brand
Much is at stake when a country as musically rich as Brazil must choose a single song to present to the glare of the international spotlight. In the year leading up to the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament, numerous Brazilian musical artists took part in a competition to provide the official FIFA World Cup song for the legions of international football fans descending upon the country. “Todo Mundo,” co-written by Mario Caldato Jr. and the songwriting team Rock Mafia (Tim James and Antonina Armato), was but one of many songs entered into the competition, but its story is useful in uncovering some of the complications of mediating Brazilian music for international audiences. The compositional and recording process of the song is transnational at its core. It also reveals the intersection of Brazilian cultural policy and corporate interest. The official version of the song was called “The World Is Ours”—an inexact translation of “Todo Mundo”—and featured the Carnaval group Monobloco and English lyrics sung by David Correy, a Brazilian American finalist on the second season of the televised talent contest The X Factor. That the song featured Correy so prominently—and that it was part of a cross-section of branding and promotional efforts—makes sense: he was a celebrity at the time, and easily compatible with the international business strategy of the song’s sponsor, Coca-Cola, especially among Anglophone publics beyond Brazil.1 Although “Todo Mundo” did not become the official 2014 FIFA World Cup anthem—that honor went to “We Are One (Ole Ola),” featuring Pitbull, Jennifer Lopez, and northeastern Brazilian star Claudia Leitte—it was eventually released on the official World Cup album and accompanying playlists.
1 I use the word “public” deliberately here due to the fact that many Brazilian record industry workers I consulted for my research emphasized “público,” the Portuguese word for “public” or “audience,” over “audiência,” the more literal translation.
BossaMundo:BrazilianMusicinTransnationalMediaIndustries. K. E. Goldschmitt, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190923525.003.0001
The history of “Todo Mundo” exemplifies some of the compromises and erasures of Brazil’s musical branding. The first iteration of the song was released domestically in Brazil in 2013 and featured Portuguese vocals by Gaby Amarantos. As a star of tecnobrega, Amarantos was subject to some of the stigma associated with her genre’s musical roots. Tecnobrega is an electronic dance music variant of brega (“tacky”) music. During my early research trips to Brazil, in 2007 and 2008, music industry workers described tecnobrega as one of many marginal genres not worth record label investment due to its legally dubious practices and links to musical piracy networks, all of which was meant to circumvent traditional revenue models. It is, in some respects, an “outlaw” genre. However, a number of Brazilian scholars (Lemos and Castro 2008; Guerreiro do Amaral 2009; Vianna 2013) have argued that tecnobrega could also embody the possibilities of a new kind of music industry operating at the periphery. Amarantos’s appearance on “Todo Mundo,” and the song’s links to Brazil’s national branding effort in 2014, was the result of years of tecnobrega shedding some of its stigma.2
There were eventually eight official versions of the song vying for the attention of publics through various media—which is not unreasonable, given the context of a massive international sports event.3 Further, it shows that those involved with the song’s dissemination were all too aware that public focus during such an event is rarely on the music. Motivating this book is the key question of what happens to Brazilian music when it is mediated through different routes to reach multiple publics who are paying attention to many things—not just the music. By investigating that process, this book shows the lasting effects of transnational mediation on the country’s musical brand.
The stories of Amarantos and tecnobrega demonstrate the ephemeral nature and some of the lasting effects of the mediation process. Tecnobrega began to gain traction with taste-making global music blogs starting in 2010. I first noticed the genre’s expanding international appeal when, in early 2010, a non-Brazilian music blogger asked me about one of its variants— tecnomelody—and shared a link to hundreds of MP3s. In June of that year, O Globo, one of the top newspapers in Brazil, described Amarantos’s traction
2 Some scholars prefer the term “nation brand” to describe the process of building and maintaining a country’s soft power through goods, symbolic capital, and prestige (cf. Aronczyk 2013; Dinnie 2015).
3 These included a remix featuring US-based EDM crooner Aloe Blacc and Correy with Monobloco’s drums buried in the mix and a variety that combine Correy singing in English with Gaby Amarantos singing in Portuguese. There were also Spanish, Spanglish, and Portunhol (Portuguese Spanish) versions.
with the Rio de Janeiro public as “cada vez mais popular” (more and more popular) and referenced her nickname, “Beyoncé do Pará” (Calaznas 2010). Tecnobrega was rising in national and international esteem. Soon, global urban music enthusiasts had their pick of tecnobrega acts to place next to other styles in the global bass scene.4 Amarantos’s song “Ex Mai Love” from her solo debut, Treme, had been chosen in 2012 for the opening credits of Cheias de Charme, a telenovela on the Globo network, the television station that commands over 50 percent of the Brazilian market. But her ubiquity in Brazilian media was short-lived. While some sectors of Brazilian society continued to celebrate her successes, taste-making elites moved on to other styles to promote in the international arena—tecnobrega simply could not hold their attention. Thus, like many artists riding the crest of a trend, Amarantos’s appearance in “Todo Mundo” and her subsequent replacement by David Correy in transnational versions of the song reflected the capricious tastes of corporate and national branding.
The successive arrival and erasure of a tecnobrega star in “Todo Mundo” is consistent with the lengthy history of Brazil’s self-promotion through music. Brazil has regularly marketed itself to Anglophone publics through popular music. Like other musically rich countries in Latin America—such as Cuba, Mexico, and Argentina—Brazil has captured the imagination of people in many parts of the world through music, giving the country increased prominence and driving tourism and international financial investment. Brazilian popular music, from its earliest examples in the first half of the twentieth century such as the international waves of maxixe, choro, and samba, was how the country appealed to its powerful allies to the north and across the Atlantic—often through the entertainment industry’s collaboration with politicians.5 As the century progressed, the processes through which Brazilian music did that promotional work changed in step with the expansion of media technology. From its first appearance in the international market, Brazilian music circulated and found new audiences through sheet music, newspaper and radio coverage, ballroom dance fads, musical theater and film, and, to a lesser degree, audio recordings. Later, it would appear in such varied media as film scores, televised specials, video game soundtracks,
4 For more on the history of the term “global bass” see David Font-Navarette (2015) and Garth Sheridan (2014).
5 A good example is the collaboration of producers and politicians to achieve Carmen Miranda’s Hollywood fame in the run-up to World War II (Bishop-Sanchez 2016; Shaw 2013; Mendonça 1999).
trailers, specialist magazines, Muzak programming, and dedicated playlists on streaming music services, among many others.
Through its wide dissemination, music from Brazil became the sound of the country’s international image, or national brand (even before “branding” as a concept encapsulated a variety of marketing and promotional practices in the digital age). Yet the story of Brazilian music (and the strength of the country’s musical reputation) among English-speaking publics is more complex than mere representation due to the exponential expansion of media technologies and the ways in which they have influenced what people hear— even when they are not paying attention.
This book argues that the mediation of Brazilian music in an increasingly crowded transnational marketplace has had lasting consequences for the rich creative output celebrated by Brazil as part of its national brand. Through an emphasis on music as part of the media industries, Bossa Mundo demonstrates the extent to which Brazilian music has played a prominent role in Anglophone culture in the postwar period. In a series of chronologically organized case studies from the late 1950s through the mid-2010s, I show how Brazilian music has seeped into multiple corners of mainstream Anglophone popular culture via mediation. In so doing, it has demonstrated its market durability by fitting into contexts where audiences are not necessarily aware of its presence.
The story I tell sits at the juncture of music, mediation, and attention. In these breakthrough moments, I explore not just what the music in question may have represented, but what it did and how. Through a discussion of the political meaning of mass-mediated music, Bossa Mundo makes the case for shifting scholarly focus from the heightened emotions and attention at the core of vibrant musical scenes to the broader media environment where listeners and intermediaries often have other priorities. By attending to how transnational mediation transforms the potency of music among publics with varying levels of emotional and monetary investment, I argue for a more expansive study of how music changes as it reaches the apex of popular appeal.
Attention of International Publics
A key theme in this book is how the attention and distraction of Anglophone publics intersect with Brazil’s branding project in the second half of the
twentieth century. New scholarship on attention and affect, led by Anahid Kassabian (2013), has thrown into question some of the key assumptions behind work in popular music studies and sound studies. Today, it is nearly a given that mass-mediated vernacular music has social and political meaning and that it has a powerful potential to represent differences in race, class, gender, sexuality, and age. But a weakness of analyses that posit music as a representational text is that they tend to privilege one type of listener—the kind who attends to the particular details that would interest a music critic or fan, or one who engages in what some musicologists describe as “structural listening.”6 The question of what happens to that representational potential when audiences are clearly directing their attention elsewhere requires more unpacking. In the case of international audiences of Brazilian music, they may be focused on the filmic image, on the content of advertisements the music underscores, or on the dance fad on TV that they are trying to emulate. Bossa nova, for example, has also had a lengthy reputation as Muzak often dismissed as “elevator music.”
Critiques of mass-mediation from the mid-twentieth century have dominated scholarly inquiries into listening, effectively casting aside most contexts where publics encounter music. When popular music scholars have attempted to consider audience distraction and attention, they draw primarily on ideas from the Frankfurt school of social research—most notably those of Theodor Adorno, who bemoaned “the regression of listening” surrounding recorded music in a capitalist system (2002: 288). He argued that all commercial music recordings and performances exist to drive sales for venues and media playback devices, thereby degrading the value of listening skills and increasing the degree of commodity fetishism between the audience and musician. He further argued that people who listen to popular music enjoy the status that comes with spending money on the music rather than what they hear. For Adorno, the only type of music of any worth was “difficult music” that required expert listeners to fully comprehend it (Adorno 1976), certainly not music that serves as the background to some other activity.7
Taken with a longer view, it is clear that worries around perception and attention reveal broader anxieties about music and mass culture. As Adam
6 For an excellent critique of this, see Dell’Antonio (2004).
7 Franco Fabbri (2013) points out that background listening is a type of “taboo” for adherents of structural, expert listening.
Krims (2007) persuasively argues, popular music scholars have been united since the 1990s in their effort to write against Adorno, because his ideas—a “foundational trauma in the discipline” (2007: 91)—circulate more than any other Marxist critique of music. Krims observed that many music scholars use Adorno to uncover the politics of musical representation at the risk of getting trapped in familiar hand-wringing about the commodification process. I believe that this problem originates in mistrust of the profit motive in recorded music and audiovisual mediation—commercial enterprises that demand a return on investment. For many scholars and critics, the central problem with the industrialization of music is the contradiction of mass profits and political meaning; publics enjoy massively popular music even as it is clear that profits influence mediation and distribution as well as compositional form, arrangement, recording production, and performance on stage. By its very nature, popular music is shaped by commercial processes. This tension recalls the conflicts over music during the early years of the Brazilian military dictatorship. As Christopher Dunn (2001) and Marcos Napolitano (2001; 2007) recount, that contradiction of the aesthetic and commercial purposes of music came to light during the televised popular song contests and television shows of the mid-to-late 1960s. The competitions often pitted performative protests of Música Popular Brasileira (MPB)—a genre named by leftist cultural elites that was, in effect, a detente between mass culture and the idealized popular classes—against the imported style of rock ’n’ roll. Tropicália’s irreverent use of the two opposing styles was all the more daring because these musicians conveyed their message through multiple forms of media: live TV broadcasts, coverage in newspapers and magazines, film, and, of course, audio recordings. The official reason for the arrest and exile of the tropicália musicians Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil was subversion. They troubled boundaries and were disruptive in how they did it in performances and broadcast media. From the perspective of Brazilian music and social movements, the issues of attention and mediation are central to the story. Without a doubt, the upheavals caused by tropicália demonstrate that music has representational and political meaning, but I contend that scholars need to take into account the multiple levels of mediation and public investment. Only then is it possible to capture how music accomplishes representational and political work. Taking the industrialization and mediation process seriously expands the view of the social and historical role of music beyond the “idealized” versions of listeners and musicians, who rarely appear in the historical archive.
The reality is that attentive listeners are only one small group among the many publics that have encountered Brazilian popular music in the United States and the United Kingdom. Michael Warner describes the proliferation of publics as ways in which strangers come to have a type of co-presence with each other. Publics are not just about personal identity or other demographic data. In his words, “Merely paying attention can be enough to make you a member” of a public (2005: 71); however, Warner does not explain what kind of attention he means. Warner formulated his notion of publics and counter-publics to account for the political activism of various mainstream and minority groups utilizing similar social mechanisms to accomplish their goals. While some ethnomusicologists have expanded on Warner’s notions as they apply to music (Bickford 2012; Dueck 2013), they largely leave open the question of attention and competing sensory stimuli. In his application of publics to recorded audio sermons in Islam, anthropologist Charles Hirschkind (2009) describes the ways that the sounds resonate across multiple sensory registers in addition to the discursive and semantic work they accomplish for religious adherents. Audile publics can be fragile due to their relationship to the demands of the market as well as regulatory institutions and governance. Hirschkind shows that there is a transience about publics that are mediated through audio technology, both for listeners who are invested and for those who are not. These listening publics are even more fragile once we raise the question of direct engagement, consent, and awareness of music and sound. Brian Larkin (2014) shows how residents in Jos, Nigeria, have developed techniques of inattention to religious loudspeakers as a tactic for urban living, thereby refusing that particular audile public in favor of another. One thing that the expansion of sound studies has shown clearly is that music and sound can operate on publics in insidious ways. They can urge people to make certain decisions (via advertising, retail music, acoustic crowd control techniques, etc.) even when they are aware of this fact.8 They can even reinforce new regimes of racism through the creation of sonic barriers and segregation (Stoever 2016). Thus, one task that this book proposes is to reimagine a musical public that includes attention in the plural (including inattention), or a range of possible responses to exposure to Brazilian music in Englishspeaking markets.
8 For more on music and crowd control, see Thompson and Biddle (2013), Goodman (2009), Cheng (2016).
It is nothing new to note varying levels of engagement with expressive culture, whether through the commercial end of its mediation or through attention. Historically speaking, debates about attention as a concept emerge when large-scale changes in industrial culture are afoot. As Jonathan Crary notes in The Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (1999), attention first began to appear as a problem in the cultural discourse in the late nineteenth century alongside advances in psychology and an acceleration in the rhythm of modern, industrialized life. In the early twenty-first century, there is a renewed interest among content providers in talking about attention as its own economy that drives advertisers and content creators to compete, and in idealizing new skills in attention, including multitasking, deep focus, and what N. Katherine Hayles describes as “hyper attention”—deep attention that switches across multiple information streams (2007). In popular music studies, attending to the unique sounds of a recording, video, or event is often what demonstrates the skills of a scholar trained in a music program. When music scholars attend to the relationship between musical and so-called “extra-musical” content—such as a video or an onstage performance—we alternate between two different registers of deep focus with the underlying ideal that a nonspecialist audience cares to pay attention to the same things. However, other modes of attention happen all the time and the reality of popular music circulation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is that attention to all sorts of media is fluctuating.
The literary critic Yves Citton (2017) offers a compelling alternative to the discourse of “attention economy” that helps illuminate the social mechanism through which certain types of media—music included—break through in contexts that have become increasingly sensorially saturated since the turn of the millennium. In The Ecology of Attention, Citton argues that attention is relational at its core. His theory takes into account the asymmetries of who pays attention to whom and what, and how some forms of attention are given outweighed influence, especially in social media (e.g., timeline and recommendation algorithms, best-seller lists). Attention is “transindividual,” forming at the meeting point between individuals and collectives that include people and the machines that they program. What someone likes or pays attention to is constituted by a vast network of others with varying levels of influence also giving that same thing attention. Attention is never neutral: some
powerful users’ attention can translate into something “going viral” or becoming trendy while others have that power only as part of a collective.
An example of this from Brazil was the surprise virality of Michel Teló’s “Ai, Se Eu Te Pego,” a live recording of sertanejo-universitário, a type of rural pop music that is among the most profitable styles in Brazil. The song rose to international prominence between 2011 and 2012 through a combination of its endorsement by soccer star Neymar and its being featured in YouTube algorithms, in social media memes, and, eventually, on terrestrial radio. People encountered the song through a range of listening contexts and attention-driving factors, all of which fueled its popularity. The song reached peak attention when Pitbull released a Spanglish version complete with samples from Teló’s hit. Ultimately, Teló’s recording was the sixth-best-selling single of 2012 throughout the world. That success was the combined result of many types of transindividual attention that lent Teló additional exposure.
Attention can also be manipulated by powerful interests, such as corporations, with the means to place ads or feature artists in top spots in social media. At two different junctures in this book—chapter 1 and chapter 4— I analyze how Brazilian music became entangled in the aspects of the media and cultural industries that perpetuated dance fads. Both in the case of the bossa nova dance craze in the early 1960s and that of the lambada in 1989 and 1990, the success of these fads depended on varying levels of attention, passive and active public exposure, and corporate interests that helped to guide the process. Within this model of transindividual attention for music and sound, we can account for how individuals pay attention to others’ attention. This occurs whether we follow the path of someone’s looks and physical gestures—or digital ones such as “likes” or “shares”—or whether through conspicuous consumption or more formal mechanisms, such as a favorable review, or placement in a film soundtrack or curated playlist. In each of these cases, someone with influence is shaping the experience of how publics perceive new musical content.
Keeping in mind this model of transindividual attention, I focus on the social actors who function as cultural intermediaries in the commercial sphere and direct the attention of publics. These intermediaries operate between Brazilian musicians, the music industry, and the Anglophone market, shaping Brazilian musical exposure for broad swaths of the market. Throughout this book, I often highlight this role, whether performed by record company workers, critics, concert managers, or musicians themselves
who have done this kind of work. Social theorist Pierre Bourdieu (1998: 365) famously described cultural intermediaries as “need merchants” whose ability to shape trends is crucial to the production of consumer tastes and dispositions. Today, one could also conceive of intermediaries as what Tim Wu calls “attention merchants” in his book on advertising (2016)—they control attention flows, not just the circulation of media and content.
Cultural intermediation involves important labor processes. Jennifer Smith Maguire and Julian Matthews encourage scholars to think of the artists, writers, and creatives doing the work of intermediation as streetlevel bureaucrats who “implement abstract institutional policies and operationalize intangible cultural values” (2014: 6). In other words, they are a type of service worker. Their labor is often intangible, but they take part in the production and reproduction of musical values (Taylor 2017; Beaster-Jones 2016).
The period covered in this book (1960–2018) bears witness to the expansion of musical content in the United States and the United Kingdom, and thus, with more content available, the demand for cultural intermediation increases in each case study.9 This intermediation work is less romanticized than other kinds of musical labor (especially composition and performance), but I linger on it because it offers a view into cultural production and circulation in each period when Brazilian music was a powerful force and crossed over to broad publics across class, race, and age spectrums. At many junctures throughout this book, intermediaries championed the musicians and styles in question, sometimes out of admiration and at others as part of a ruthless search for profit. Both types of intermediation merit a closer look because they allowed Brazilian music to reach new publics, with varying levels of engagement.
Since Bossa Mundo takes the role of media industries seriously, it offers a new way to think through how different publics pay attention to the music that they encounter and who or what is shaping that exposure. By discussing listener attention from alternative perspectives, it offers a way to consider what this music does when publics are focused elsewhere. Thus, the book proposes a framework for conceiving of the power of popular music that expands outward from discussions of representation and expert listening to consider these musical publics in the plural.
9 Mike Featherstone (2007) offers specific insight into how the expansion of goods in the second half of the twentieth century leads to the increasing importance of cultural intermediaries.
For English Eyes (and Ears)
For some decades, Brazilian scholars and critics have bemoaned the intermediation processes that Brazilian music undergoes in English-speaking countries. For many, the global commercialization process is hardly limited to a simple critique of capitalism and the mistranslations of expressive culture among new publics—their critiques extend to fundamental fears about the imperialist influence of Anglophone media industries on Brazilian culture. Through the course of my ethnographic and historical research, I encountered numerous Brazilians who echoed variations on the sentiment that “transnational music and media industries corrupt local musicmaking,” but just minutes later they were liable to discuss a desire to benefit from the profitable US market. Such discussions of music express wider anxieties about the sway of the foreign market based in an extended history of influence from the United States and England. While some have argued that other countries (such as France) have had a lasting impact on urban Brazilian culture, it is the Anglophone powers that have shaped the political economy of such goods as coffee, beef, soy, and oil, among others.10 Indeed, the country’s position in the global supply chain as a producer of primary resources and commodities, and its reliance on direct foreign investment and loans from the United States and the United Kingdom, gives those nations considerable influence. Put more simply: Brazil has consistently been at the bottom of the global supply chain, while the United States and the United Kingdom are among those countries benefiting most from the extraction of Brazil’s natural wealth. Thus there have been many moments in the last century alone where interest from the United States and the United Kingdom has had consequences for the trajectory of Brazilian history.11
Clearly, music and other forms of expressive culture do not go through the same refinement process in the global supply as do goods such as coffee. However, the success of Brazilian music in Anglophone markets throughout the last century has found its source primarily in the collaboration of national policymakers who have viewed music as part of the country’s international reputation, or as an asset to the national brand to strengthen its soft
10 For a discussion on the influence of French culture on Rio de Janeiro, see Castro (2004), and for a discussion of France’s influence on samba, see Vianna (1999).
11 Seigel (2009) explores how trade with the United States affected Brazil’s “coffee and milk” politics. General histories of Brazil by Thomas Skidmore (1999) and E. Bradford Burns (1993) cite numerous instances of US and British intervention in Brazil in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
power. The distribution process of Brazilian music through transnational media industries emphasizes major hubs in the United States and the United Kingdom even though investing in Anglophone markets is far from the only route for reaching international audiences.12 Yet as the United States was the dominant political and economic force in the postwar period, trends there often spread significantly, sometimes through the efforts of the State Department, and sometimes through the reach of media industries seeking international profits.
Media industries based in the United States do not dominate simply through sheer force but through penetration into local markets at the ground level. In film alone, the United States has historically taken in a large share of its box-office receipts from international markets and, as Courtney Brannon Donoghue argues, it has done so by localizing and forming relationships within those local media markets (2017). Music, however, has followed a different path in its patterns of industrial consolidation from the local to the multinational level. In places like Brazil, international investors built local record companies.13 In the aftermath of World War II, the Brazilian recording industry experienced its largest period of growth through the investments of RCA Victor, Columbia, Decca, and Capitol—all of which were based in either the United States or the United Kingdom. As radio grew in size and scope, recorded and broadcast media corporations began to consolidate, with many also forming their own inhouse publishing firms.
As of this writing, the “big three” major record companies—Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros.—take in nearly 90 percent of international recording music revenues (with just over 10 percent going to independent record companies). Those majors are all a part of multinational corporations that also produce and distribute television and blockbuster films. All three are publicly traded corporations with ownership and sway from investors all over the world. And yet, the international music market is often stubbornly geared toward trends that will play in the United States. That is part of the reason why Brazilian record industry workers largely view success in Anglophone markets as hugely beneficial—if difficult to crack. To be sure,
12 A separate study could be conducted on the routes through which this music has found audiences in other Portuguese-speaking countries or those that speak romance languages such as French, Spanish, or Italian.
13 For a comparative analysis of the emergence of popular music in major port cities around the world, see Denning (2015).
there is plenty of money to be made outside of the Anglophone market, but its power nonetheless holds in Brazil and elsewhere.
The continued route to international fame via Anglophone markets can inspire cynicism, as exemplified in the work of Marxist nationalist music critic José Ramos Tinhorão. Tinhorão chronicled the internationalizing process on Brazilian music in 1969 in his O Samba Agora Vai . . . A Farsa da Música Popular no Exterior [Samba Is Now Going . . . The Farce of Popular Music Abroad]. In 2015, he published a newly revised and expanded edition, stating in the preface that the period between 1969 and 2015 amounts to a “definitive confirmation, four decades after its first publication, of the implicit irony the title already proposed: the possibility of exporting the popular music of a country does not reside in an artistic object’s better or worse quality, rather in the capacity of its placement in the market as a commercial product” (2015: 7).14 For Tinhorão, this process is part of a larger project of economic domination wherein powerful countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom treat the exported culture of Latin America as a raw material (“matéria-prima”) that only becomes viable in the rest of the world through a process of mediation and appropriation.15 Thus he exemplifies a leftist critique of the extended influence of international market process, especially those from the United States and the United Kingdom.
In Brazilian popular music, at least, that line of critique of US and European influence has been a constant source of biting humor. For example, samba singer Lamartine Babo recorded “Canção para Inglês Ver” in 1931 with a clear reference to the common phrase in Brazil, “para inglês ver,” or “for English eyes.” As anthropologist Peter Fry (1982) notes, the expression is a way of describing doing something to the letter of the law, pointing to the history of the bureaucratic management of the railway system run by the British. The fact that this expression is so common in Brazil indicates just how extensive British and US dominance has been there.16 Following this line
14 “. . . constitui a confirmação definitiva, quatro décadas após seu lançamento, do que a ironia implícita no seu título já propunha: a possibilidade de exportação de música popular de um país não reside na maior ou menor qualidade que possua enquanto objeto artístico, mas na capacidade de sua colocação no mercado enquanto produto cultural.”
15 For some examples of this critique in Latin America writ large, see Dorfman and Mattelart’s How to Read Donald Duck (2018 [1971]) and Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America (1997 [1971]). Both were originally published at the height of US intervention in Latin America.
16 Songs that refer specifically to the effects of the “Good Neighbor” policy include “BoogieWoogie na Favela” from 1945 and “Adeus América” by Geraldo Jacques and Haroldo Barbosa from 1948. For songs that reference other aspects of international influences on Brazilian popular music, see “Falsa Baiana” and “Chiquita Bacana.”
of thought, it is well worth considering just how much of Brazilian popular music has been created with an ear to the Anglophone market. For Tinhorão, it is impossible to untangle the economic power of the United States and the United Kingdom from the fact that many Brazilians desire international acceptance, success, and popularity in a variety of arenas (2015: 12). Authors like Tinhorão critique the coercive power of neo-colonial capital to shape what is popular and celebrated on a national level because they homogenize local traditions.
Beyond Marxist-nationalist invectives, some academics have taken the story of Brazilian music in the Anglophone world as an opportunity to critique the process through which Brazil has been promoted internationally over the last half century. In the mid-1990s, ethnomusicologist Maria Elizabeth Lucas (1996) levied a critique of US-based media industries for the reductionist representation of Brazilian music as “naturalized” in order to make it viable for late capitalist exchange. From her perspective, the transnational media industries have sought to unite all of the various distinct practices and modes of being under the “unified rubric of ‘identity’: Brazilian music.” In a less academic setting, composer and critic José Miguel Wisnik (2012) joined critiques on world music in retail environments (Sterne 1997; Kassabian 2004) in a column for the newspaper O Globo exploring the meaning of hearing the bossa nova song “Águas de Março” in a Whole Foods Market in Chicago. While he saw it as a sign of the music’s viability in international markets, his students viewed it as yet another example of Whole Foods attempting to market itself as a “chic” place with worldly ambitions. In this case, the continued viability of Brazilian music in Anglophone media and retail spaces causes complex problems for national identity due in part to the commercializing process and the extensive history of English-language markets serving as a synecdoche for global success. Indeed, in Charles Perrone and Christopher Dunn’s landmark collection, Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization (2002a), the editors use “internationalization” in their introductory chapter to label their brief sketch of US and Brazilian musical exchange, echoing the ways that Brazilians themselves often conceive of the process.
With this extensive history of intervention and critique in mind, Bossa Mundo tackles the breakthrough moments of Brazilian music in Anglophone markets as a means to uncover the continued process of domination by countries in the North Atlantic. In describing just what this music is doing in Anglophone media industries, I steer clear of some
