Prizes

MPB or musica popular brasileira emerged in Brazil in the mid-1970s, toward the end of the military dictatorship. As a genre it was immensely popular, but it has not received the critical attention in the U.S. given to its predecessors: samba, bossa nova, and tropicalia. Moehn, an ethnomusicologist and a musician himself, spent time in Rio, interviewing and playing with some of the top performers in the genre. The central chapters form portraits of these stars, while offering insights into their concern to balance Brazilian and foreign elements creatively in their music.

Reviews

"Contemporary Carioca is an engaging study of musical production in contemporary Brazil that focuses on a group of Rio-based, middle-class musicians who emerged in the 1980s and 1990s and continue to produce innovative work. Among the book's many strengths is its organization around individual artists and the ways that they have approached questions of globalization, national identity, social class, race, and gender. Frederick Moehn succeeds admirably in describing and analyzing the specificity of Brazilian strategies for negotiating global and local musical practices." Christopher Dunn, co-editor of Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship "Frederick Moehn guides us on a scintillating exploration of Brazilian popular music of the 1990s, combining deep critical explication of the work of key performers with sharp delineation of that work's place in the political and commercial context. No previous author has balanced intimate knowledge of popular music as a studio creation with careful exploration of the Brazilian cultural marketplace as successfully as Moehn does here." Bryan McCann, Georgetown University