"Hello, hello Brazil" was the standard greeting Brazilian radio announcers of the 1930s used to welcome their audience into an expanding cultural marketplace. New genres like samba and repackaged older ones like choro served as the currency in this marketplace, minted in the capital in Rio de Janeiro and circulated nationally by the burgeoning recording and broadcasting industries. Bryan McCann chronicles the flourishing of Brazilian popular music between the 1920s and the 1950s. Through analysis of the competing projects of composers, producers, bureaucrats, and fans, he shows that Brazilians alternately envisioned popular music as the foundation for a unified national culture and used it as a tool to probe racial and regional divisions.

McCann explores the links between the growth of the culture industry, rapid industrialization, and the rise and fall of Getulio Vargas's Estado Novo dictatorship. He argues that these processes opened a window of opportunity for the creation of enduring cultural patterns and demonstrates that the understandings of popular music cemented in the mid-twentieth century continue to structure Brazilian cultural life in the early twenty-first.

A study of the foundation of Brazilian popular music and its effect on the formation of national identity and cultural expression

About the Author

Bryan McCann is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Georgetown University.

Reviews
"Hello, Hello Brazil is a fascinating discussion of Brazilian popular culture based on a set of documents virtually unmentioned in English-language scholarship. The topics covered-music, the music market, advertising, and fans and fan clubs-are crucial to understandings of Brazil."-Jeffrey Lesser, author of Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil
"No Latin American country offers more for the study of popular culture through music than Brazil. Bryan McCann's revelation of this neglected source will delight both Brazilian and non-Brazilian readers."-Thomas Skidmore, author of Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought
"[A] good story peopled with colourful characters, and Bryan McCann tells it with scrupulous care. . . . McCann offers food for thought about any country where popular music is concerned with its integrity under American influence, which I guess is just about everywhere."
-- Clive Bell * The Wire *
"[A] sensitive, pioneering analysis that will be required reading for any serious student of Brazilian music, the culture of the era, and the larger issues of Third World popular culture in the twentieth century." -- Jeffrey D. Needel * Hispanic American Historical Review *
"[S]ensitivity to the complexities and contradictions of the period not only makes of Hello, Hello Brazil a fine piece of scholarly research, but also marks McCann's emergence as one of the most authoritative new commentators on Brazilian popular music history. A voice to listen out for." -- David Treece * The Americas *
"All in all, McCann presents a nuanced and eloquent account of the role of Brazilian popular music in the construction of national identity. . . . This book will be an important contribution to discussions about the genesis of 'invented traditions' and 'Americanization' in the western hemisphere, and its multi-faceted approach should assure the wide readership it deserves." -- Corinne A. Pernet * Canadian Journal of History *
"McCann has written an important book, destined to become a classic in the field of modern Brazilian cultural history." -- Christopher Dunn * Luso-Brazilian Review *
"A thorough, fascinating overview. . . ." * Library Journal *
"[A]n entertaining and convincing work that provides new insights on an area of study that has become increasingly familiar in recent years. . . . The book is eloquently written in a lively style that will almost certainly appeal to anyone interested in this fascinating period of Brazilian history." -- Sean Stroud * Journal of Latin American Studies *
"McCann's attention to historical detail is stunning. The sheer magnitude of his archival research at the Museum of Image and Sound . . . is a feat that music scholars with an interest in this period of Brazilian music history will admire." -- Kariann E. Goldschmitt * Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology *
"This could be the definitive book about samba. . . . The book reads with the compulsive insistence that is the stuff of its subject. It is highly recommended and it will have you out there yearning for the clatter and bang, the wiggle and shake, and the irresistible charm that is samba." -- Lawrence Brazier * Jazz Now *
"This is an extremely well-conceived study that effectively considers the central yet complicated role of popular culture in the construction of modern Brazilian identity. It will appeal to a wide readership interested in radio, music, ethnic identity, and the myriad forms of 'invented tradition.'" -- Andrew G. Wood * American Historical Review *
"Well researched and presented in plain, non-academic language, Hello, Hello Brazil is a fascinating study of popular music as both chronicler and instrument of change." -- Fernando Gonzalez * Jazziz *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822332732
Author Bryan McCann
Format Paperback
Page Count 312
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 381g