This is a major study by Sean Stroud of MPB, the acronym for Música Popular Brasileira (Brazilian Popular Music), the musical-socio-cultural movement that has dominated the artistic scene in Brazil since the mid-1960s. As well as an essentially conservative group of writers and journalists who have ‘exerted a particular influence on public perceptions of a tradition of a national popular music’ (p. 1), Stroud considers the role of other actors, notably the record industry, the broadcasting industry, the state, academics and individual researchers. The main assertion of his work is that the creation of MPB was, to a great extent, the result of a series of nationalistic movements envisaged either by individual critics and/or media institutions imbued with a ‘defensive mood’ of sorts against imperialism. Stroud sees this protective disposition always veering toward tradition at the slightest threat of musical change in original sound principles – that is, rooted in concepts of traditional sound quality. By means of a considerable amount of insider information gathered from various authors of diverse backgrounds, mostly intellectuals writing about specific music movements in Brazil throughout the twentieth century, Stroud shows how and why Brazilian popular music came to be an activity that has involved the whole country. This is an enormous task to undertake, given the gigantic dimensions of Brazil (the size of a continent as much as a country) and its challenging cultural and musical diversity.

The book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1, ‘Musical Nationalism and the “Cultural Invasion” Debate’, analyses how ‘Mario de Andrade's writings on music … informed the debate on values within Brazilian popular music’, and how they ‘influenced ideas about what constitutes the “Brazilian” element’ in it (p. 38). De Andrade (1893–1945) was one of the ‘Popes’ of the 1920s Brazilian modernist literary movement, a polymath: a seminal prose writer, poet, researcher, music teacher and critic. Despite the fact that de Andrade's writings focused on what he termed ‘artistic’ (erudite) music and had little to do with popular music per se, Stroud acknowledges de Andrade's body of work on music with its emphasis on ‘authenticity’ and opposition to mass-mediated music in the 1930s as the lynchpin of the debate on popular music, held mainly among journalists in the mid-1960s. Back then, debate about Brazilian music had little to do with the academia. Indeed, it would be interesting to see how US-Brazilian scholar Gerard Béhague's The Beginnings of Musical Nationalism in Brazil (Reference Béhague1971) would fit in the outcome of this debate. The ‘nationalism’ Béhague refers to is one totally devoted to erudite romantic music dating back to the second half of the 1800s, when the Brazilian intelligentsia felt it knew exactly what the ‘Brazilian element’ was. Of course they did not, and while it is not the same period as de Andrade's work, it draws debates about nationalism in Brazilian music further back in time.

Chapter 2, ‘Inventing the Idea of MPB’, examines the formation of the idea of MPB, offering an overview of how it has managed ‘to occupy such a symbolically commanding role in Brazilian popular culture for so long’, examining the principle architects of its construction (p. 7). While this begs the question of what else might have occupied this ground, all the elements were there, ready to be explored, as the history of the music is retroactive to the 1920s and 1930s which is when the beginnings of MPB can be traced as a ‘field of “large-scale” cultural production’ (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu2003). Thus ‘inventing the idea of MPB’ could be attributed to the various ways in which the direct media such as music score editors, the record industry and the radio learned to exploit it concurrently in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, in conjunction with indirect media, such as Rio de Janeiro's vaudeville (teatro de revista) venues. The abbreviation itself did not appear until the mid-1960s when journalists in Rio de Janeiro started to make use of the acronym at more significant times of MPB history. By this time, a popular music ‘field of “large-scale” cultural production’ was fully consolidated in Brazil, and was stronger than ever.

Chapter 3, ‘Television and Popular Music’, explores the channelling of the production of MPB in the 1960s and 1970s, notably with soap-opera soundtracks. Since 1950s radio days (when incidental music was produced live in the studio rather than pre-recorded), soap-operas have played a tremendously significant part in Brazilian everyday life. TV increased the appeal of soap-opera to the upper and the lower classes of Brazilian society. By offering this summary of TV history within Brazilian urban life and its evolution with MPB until the present, Stroud provides an excellent history for understanding the ways popular music in Brazil has been used to support other media besides the record industry, and vice versa.

Chapter 4, ‘Cultural Imperialism, Globalization, and the Brazilian Record Industry’, considers whether theories of cultural imperialism and globalisation can be successfully applied to the Brazilian situation given that ‘sales of Brazilian popular music … have been maintained consistently over the last thirty years’, and also because ‘the economic control of the Brazilian record industry by foreign interests has not resulted in a concomitant cultural domination’ as has happened in other countries. It also examines the role of the Brazilian record industry in the process of ‘cultural invasion’. As a Brazilian growing up in the 1970s, it was common to listen to and to give more feedback to pop music made abroad (that is, in the USA and UK) than to local popular music. Thus the issue of ‘cultural domination’ is both perceived as actual and still present. This pattern of musical consumption dates back to the early twentieth century: for example, in the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of MPB, an influential artist like Francisco Alves (1898–1952) successfully recorded more than a thousand songs with lyrics in Portuguese, including some hit covers in both English and Spanish that were never heard in their original languages.

Chapter 5 analyses the participation of the Brazilian State as cultural mediator in the 1970s, focusing on the ‘National Policy towards Culture’, FUNARTE (the ‘National Art Foundation’) and the Pixinguinha Project, a national travelling showcase organised by FUNARTE all over the country in which well-known MPB artists share the stage with rising stars. Interestingly, after being discontinued some time ago, the project has now returned in the same format. Stroud could have emphasised that the State acted as cultural mediator for popular music from the early 1900s, notably from 1932 onwards when the federal government officially decreed that radio stations shift from the mere ‘educational’ to broad ‘commercial’ institutions. They were thus able to trade air time, which proved that radio station owners then were more interested in making money than in the local or foreign music their stations played. By the end of the 1920s, forced by circumstances created by the elites who controlled the local subsidiaries of some of the greatest foreign recording companies of the time (Victor, Parlophon, Columbia, Odeon, and Brunswick), the State also played a pivotal role when it acknowledged and approved (in record time!) legal proceedings and statutes to enable the official arrival of these foreign companies in Brazil. What is not known is whether the search for new markets worldwide by these record companies was due to the losses accumulated particularly by US show business during the 1930s' recession. I would argue that the result of these two State ‘interventions’ in Brazil (at approximately the same time Mario de Andrade was writing his classic essay on Brazilian music) changed the face of Brazilian popular music forever.

Chapter 6 offers a comparison between two key sets of recordings: Mario de Andrade's 1938 Folkloric Research Mission and record producer and label owner Marcus Pereira's 1970s Popular Music of Brazil record-series project, in which ‘both [researchers] were guided by the idea of folk music as an authentic “other” to be compared and contrasted favourably with contemporary popular music’ (p. 157). These two initiatives, forty years apart, differed in the way they were carried out and in the technology of different periods with De Andrade's everlasting influence arising from his team's emic sense of ‘authenticity’. Pereira's, orientated towards a broader conception of what constitutes Brazilian popular music, was more up-to-date, although his dreamlike recording enterprise foreshadowed any possibility of going mainstream, creating a mythology within the MPB recording history (with Pereira as demigod). While both projects can be compared, their nature is dissimilar and going mainstream was far from the intention of either.

The final chapter examines similarities between two other musical mapping initiatives covering the whole country: Música do Brasil by anthropologist Hermano Vianna; and Rumos – Itaú Cultural Música, 2000–2001 by a Brazilian banking institution, presented as ‘totally different perspectives on the validity of musical “authenticity” and the role of tradition in Brazilian popular music’ (p. 8). While these initiatives were close in time, Vianna's research seems closer in resemblance to that of Mario de Andrade rather than to Rumos – Itaú Cultural Música. Stroud concludes that: ‘MPB represents the concerted effort of a specific class within Brazilian society to define and express itself. That MPB was profoundly bound up with the history of the Brazilian middle class from the mid-1960s onwards is evident from its consumer profile, its political and ideological importance (during the period of military dictatorship) and the various persistent interventions in support of MPB by actors such as the “musical class”, researchers and critics. At the same time it is important to note that not only is there a striking lack of support for Brazilian popular music at the state, institutional and academic levels but that beyond the confines of the middle class the wider Brazilian public now appears to have minimal interest in MPB as a symbol of national identity’ (p. 186).

Stroud's book is a serious effort by a non-Brazilian to historicise MPB for the world. Intended for an international public unfamiliar with MPB, it offers an in-depth introduction for those in the English-speaking world interested not only in Brazil and MPB but in a major recording and media industry that has received little notice in the Euro-American world. It is a persuasive narrative and one that would be agreed on by many conscientious middle-aged Brazilian readers. MPB encompasses many trends and other Brazilian readers might come up with a dissimilar thesis for the history of MPB. While as a native Brazilian I found myself challenged at times by chronological and non-chronological shifts, it is a welcome addition to the study of one of the most singular music movements of the twentieth century.