K. E. Goldschmitt's first book, Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries, examines the history of post-war Brazilian popular music through the prism of its transnational circulation across global media networks. The historical scope of the study is quite broad with the author focusing on specific watershed moments in the chronology of Brazilian popular music's most significant transnational breakthroughs, spanning from the emergence of bossa nova to our current digital age. The organization of the book is articulated in six chapters, each corresponding to a particular style and/or historical moment with regard to Brazilian music's resonance across global markets. The first two chapters are focused on bossa nova's conquest of the Anglophone world, first through dance and via its assimilation into Latin jazz, and later on as adult contemporary. The third chapter details Brazilian musical strategies of racial affiliation in the 1970s. The fourth chapter documents how the appearance of British and US-American reissue labels in the late 1980s participated in establishing and selling Brazilian popular and folk repertoires as world music. The fifth chapter is dedicated to the remix phenomenon symptomatic of the turn of the millennium, when bossa nova's association with retro taste brought Brazilian popular music back into the international cultural mainstream. Finally, the sixth and last chapter offers insights into the impact of governmental and corporate investment in musically branding Brazil since the 2010s.

In keeping with recent musicological trends in the study of (the) transnational (in) music, Goldschmitt's socio-historical inquiry proceeds from the premise that the international dissemination of music entails that musical objects/phenomena typically undergo a set of transformations in the process of crossing over to new markets and cultures. What is rather novel in Goldschmitt's approach, however, is how the primary analytical focus is not necessarily on the musical work itself but rather on its very modes of mediation (e.g., dance fads, movies, cultural intermediaries, advertisements, video games), and their resulting role(s) in the somewhat dynamic process of musically branding Brazil abroad since the Second World War. This angle constitutes a refreshing and stimulating addition to the increasing body of work focusing on Brazilian music in transit.Footnote ¹

Theoretically, Goldschmitt draws on recent scholarship focusing on the notion of musical attention (and inattention) in order to examine how, especially throughout the last two decades, Brazilian music ‘for export’ has typically competed for listeners’ attention amid multisensory medias where it is de facto relegated to the background. This is of some significance considering that using Brazilian songs as wallpaper music tends to reinforce one particularly lingering stereotype about Brazilian popular music; indeed, the re-invention of bossa nova as piped music dates back to the late 1960s when the Carioca sound became, both in the United States and the UK, the marker of an adult modernity associated with lounge and easy-listening.Footnote ²

Throughout the last two chapters, the author does hint at how Brazilian popular music's often problematic representation in foreign markets frequently led to its own structural alteration and (mis-)representation at home. As a result of this, Goldschmitt remarks in their conclusion that Brazilian musicians have often felt compelled to perform Brazil and brasilidade (Brazilianness) in order to achieve success in the Anglophone world, where culture industries’ re-marketing strategies typically relied – and often over-indulged – in exoticizing Brazil to sell tropical Otherness. This helps in part explain the early adverse critical reception of bossa nova domestically, coming from notable Marxist music critics such as José Ramos Tinhorão, who dismissed the movement as an essentially Americanized phenomenon on the basis of its stylistic connivances with Californian cool jazz. As explained in their introductory statement, Goldschmitt seeks primarily to examine the consequences of global exchange and capitalism on how Brazil is understood by Anglophone cultures, and does so rather convincingly here by offering insightful examples attesting to how the transnational mass-mediation of Brazilian music in the global age has often drastically altered, if not effaced, the socio-cultural meanings initially imparted to one musical style in its original locale.

In the first chapter, which focuses on the US-American commodification of bossa nova in the 1960s, we learn for instance that dance guru Arthur Murray was commissioned to invent a bossa nova dance that would appeal to the youth market in order to follow in the footsteps (no pun intended) of popular Latin dances such as mambo, cha-cha-cha, and pachanga. And if Murray's bossa nova ended up bearing no relation whatsoever to any specific Brazilian dance style, it did manage to sell shoes and dancing lessons, as well as other non-musical derived products. This appropriation, or more so expropriation of the bossa nova brand, obviously skewing the intimate character of Jobim and Gilberto's music – which was never meant to be danced to – was part of larger international commercial processes of adaptation and transformation designed to present ‘the bossa nova’ in ways that would make it best appeal to the different markets set out to exploit its exotic aura. And while the artificial attempt at implanting a bossa nova dance in the United States would not yield any substantial cultural significance in the long run, the bossa nova dance fad did have a considerable impact on the soundscape of 1960s suburban America, by cementing the style's ubiquitous presence in the United States and making it part of the national cultural mainstream.

In the purest ethnomusicological tradition, Goldschmitt understands music-making and music consumption as defining markers of identity. In that respect, Bossa Mundo elaborates on one important point of the author's doctoral research, that is, the notion that ‘the process of performing and selling Brazilian music abroad often reveals as much about the class aspirations of the performers and record label personnel as it does about the audiences who listen to it’.Footnote ³ Although not the central argument of the book, this proposition still informs Goldschmitt's sociological analyses of the musical marketplace in Bossa Mundo. This is again particularly applicable to bossa nova, whose entire aesthetics were embedded in a game of signs by articulating markers of class identification betraying the bourgeois cosmopolitanism of its main protagonists and initial audience: the upper-middle-class youth of Rio de Janeiro's South Side. By the mid-1960s, listening to bossa nova became an index of adult cosmopolitan sophistication in the United States, where it had come to signify, via its codified use in Hollywood film soundtracks, things such as the jet set, international travel, espionage, and sex.

In the end of the first chapter, Goldschmitt evidences how bossa nova's rapid assimilation into the US jazz canon – thanks in no small part to guitarist Charlie Byrd and saxophonist Stan Getz, who kicked off a veritable deluge of jazz-bossa records in 1962 – also encouraged the artificial and frankly specious conflation of bossa nova with blackness in the US musical press, even though the primeira turma (first wave) of bossa nova was almost exclusively composed of white musicians. This was, however, a well-known fact in Brazil, where the idea that bossa nova had emerged from the relatively well-off and predominantly white neighbourhoods of Rio de Janeiro – which meant, as George Lang recalled, that it was to be considered ‘irredeemably middle class [and] the child of privilege’Footnote ⁴ – played a key role in strengthening populist condemnations of the whole movement as a fundamentally alienated fad, because it was non-folkloric sensu stricto.

While bossa nova was deemed an Americanized trend by some 1960s Brazilian music journalists who deplored the bastardization of samba with jazz harmonies, Goldschmitt's first two chapters tell us that a significant portion of their contemporaries amid the US jazz critique saw the jazz world's rapid annexation of bossa nova as a particularly distasteful, because blatantly commercial, gesture. For many jazz critics of the early 1960s, the US record labels’ transparent desire to cash in on the fad went against the cultural zeitgeist and the overall subversive attitude of those avant-garde jazz records of the 1960s that possessed more subcultural cachet – especially as free jazz musicians were becoming more and more invested in the struggle for black liberation during the Civil Rights Movement. In this respect, it is particularly interesting that Goldschmitt found that those critical accounts exemplifying a positive reception of bossa nova coming from African-American press outlets, such as the monthly magazine Ebony, tended to emphasize the movement's stylistic debt to samba and the African diaspora, as well as to exaggerate the role and contribution of those rare black bossa nova musicians – such as guitarist Bola Sete – in the genesis of the movement itself.

Throughout Bossa Mundo, Goldschmitt reminds us that these kinds of fantasized and sometimes overtly ideologized depictions of Brazilian popular music have been commonplace in the Anglophone world from the onset of the bossa nova fad up until now. From Felix Grant to David Byrne and Gilles Peterson, many well-meaning ambassadors and cultural mediators of Brazilian music in the United States and the UK have indeed resorted to stereotypes obscuring the actual social origins of a specific Brazilian musical style so as to better peddle narratives of Otherness. This is a common thread throughout Goldschmitt's book, which tends to expose a stereotypical trope in the musical branding of Brazil in Anglophone markets.

Interestingly, the basis for this systematic typecasting of all Brazilian music under the umbrella of racial difference finds its origin in Brazilian official discourse, and can actually be traced back to the jargon of former president-turned-dictator Getúlio Vargas. Arguably the greatest architect of Brazilian nation building, Vargas was also an important actor in the early musical branding of Brazil by sanitizing and canonizing samba de morro in order to present it as the quintessential embodiment of musical Brazilianness, which also served to cement the myth of Brazil as a so-called ‘racial democracy’. A key principle of Vargas's Estado Novo, the notion of ‘racial democracy’ was alluding to the fact that, in the early twentieth century, the overall fluidity of the racial line in Brazil supposedly guaranteed that class mobility be not restricted to certain racial/ethnic groups – as opposed to what was de facto happening in the United States since the Reconstruction era, with sharecropping in the South for instance. As Goldschmitt very aptly remarks: ‘the durability of samba and mixture as metonyms for Brazil's brand is indelibly tied to perceptions that the country is better than most at race relations’ (17).

Paradoxically, the legacy of this definition of Brazilianness made it so that musical folklore became the object of a certain orthodoxy coming from Brazilian music critics, whose purist and often protectionist rhetoric seemed grounded in a pseudo-essentialist conflation of national identity with blackness, making the latter become a sine qua non condition of musical Brazilianness. Despite its ideological origins, the gradual consecration of a luso-tropicalist definition of brasilidade throughout the nation's official and public discourse has had tremendous consequences on the consolidation of a rather stereotypical Brazilian musical brand abroad. Goldschmitt often laments, perhaps rightly, that the Anglophone world's perception and critical reception of Brazilian music has yet to outgrow some abiding stereotypes with regard to its association with otherness, racial difference, sexuality, indigeneity, and blackness.

One of the many merits of Goldschmitt's approach is its attention to how the dynamic nature of global political realities and technological progress throughout the last six decades factored in the evolution of Brazilian music's main modes of transnational mediation since the end of the Second World War: dance fad for bossa nova in the 1960s; affiliation to music from the broader African diaspora in the 1970s (e.g., Eumir Deodato and Sergio Mendes); world music compilations and (sub)cultural intermediaries such as David Byrne in the 1980s; dance fad again with the lambada in the late 1980s; music supervisors overseeing synchronizations in audio-visual media and electronic music labels negotiating muzak-type agreements with coffeehouses in the 1990s; video game music curators and freelance playlisters in the 2000s; governmental cultural policy, private corporate patronage, and streaming platforms’ algorithms in the 2010s. Goldschmitt's exhaustive review of the multiplicities of strategies that have helped Brazilian popular music's successful crossovers to Anglophone markets since the late 1950s is a commendable pursuit in and of itself, especially from a historical perspective. But while these transnational mediation channels never ceased to evolve, the author certainly acknowledges that, for over six decades, the international musical branding of Brazil stayed mostly true to clichéd notions in circulation since the days of Carmen Miranda (e.g., racial difference, the sexually available female, promiscuous dancing, beaches, soccer).

Goldschmitt's book belongs to a burgeoning stream of Brazilian music scholarship seeking to circumvent the problems inherent to a conventional Brazilianist focus, wherein the history of Brazilian music tends to remain thought of through an essentially national framework.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, while there is much validity in analyzing Brazilian musics through the lens of their national significance and lasting socio-cultural impact domestically, there is certainly a case to be made for the consideration of Brazilian musical styles and genres outside of their place and role in Brazil, without confining the nature of the discussion, and its potential conclusions, to a predominantly national frame. But Bossa Mundo also tackles another important question: that of Brazilian popular music's historical role in furthering (or at times hindering) Brazil's soft power on the global scene, and the extent to which music is consistently invoked in branding Brazil abroad.

By including discussions of some of the less nativist Brazilian music to have recently crossed into the international mainstream (such as Brazilian hip hop or funk, which are considered in chapters 5 and 6), Goldschmitt avoids the pitfalls of a certain brand of ethnomusicological literature by eluding Romantic notions tying the concept of musical authenticity to the sole expression of national, regional, or local folklore. This is not a particularly novel attitude in musicological scholarship but it allows consideration of these Brazilian repertoires, whose very Brazilianness is still the subject of reactionary debates at home. Yet, the conclusion according to which musical hybridity should not be tantamount to inauthenticity is a rather recent one in the record of musicological scholarship, as the author themselves fittingly observed.Footnote ⁶

This is one of the reasons why the conclusions of Bossa Mundo have the potential to resonate with readers outside the Brazilianist and Brazilianophile spheres. In terms of its scholarly contributions and possible applications, Goldschmitt's book could certainly inform the research of any music student seeking to investigate the role that global media industries perform in either fixing or shifting national musical identities. Some of the points that Goldschmitt raises in Bossa Mundo touch upon more universal questions with regard to the representation of otherness and racial difference in musical branding, especially as genres from the Global South penetrate markets in the Global North. While Goldschmitt aptly articulates the particularisms of Brazilian popular music, Bossa Mundo's conclusions are undoubtedly pertinent to other musical traditions beyond the Brazilian scope, making the book's potential destination and readership much broader than it may initially seem.