Self-Discovery in Brazilian Popular Music

A sense is emerging from the growing body of literature on the relationships between local musics, on the one hand, and musics that are commercialized on a global scale, on the other, that no single set of concepts can adequately explain their interaction. ¹ The diversity and interconnectedness of musical styles, and their reception at both global and local levels, make generalization difficult. Reebee Garofalo, for example, has shown how the concept of cultural imperialism hides as much as it reveals: “In addition to underestimating the power of local and national cultures in developing countries, this tendency [to privilege the role of external forces] assumes audience passivity in the face of dominant cultural power and neglects the active, creative dimension of popular music consumption.” ² Steven Feld has explored the unequal dynamics of musical appropriation in the context of world beat and adaptations of the musics of Central African forest peoples. ³ Mark Slobin has adapted Appadurai's various “scapes” (e.g., ethnoscape, ideoscape, mediascape) and given examples of the interaction of musical sub-, inter-, and supercultures. ⁴ Rather than interpreting local responses to global styles as resistance that stands outside the world-music system, Veit Erlmann views these differences as a part of the system: “It is this tension between a total system and the various local cultural practices that opens up a space for ethnography. Thus, musical ethnographies will increasingly have to examine the choices performers worldwide make in moving about the spaces between the system and its multiple environments.” ⁵ Most recently, Ingrid Monson uses the organizing role of interlocking riffs and repetition in musics of the African diaspora to reconceptualize music and globalization: like the contrasting riffs in a musical texture that combine to form a groove, “[r]epeating social variables, ideologies, and binaries, continue to form layers in the very complex constellations of multiplicity that we observe in our ethnomusicological work. ⁶