Contemporary Carioca

Brazilian popular music is widely celebrated for its inventive amalgams of styles and sounds. Cariocas, native residents of Rio de Janeiro, think of their city as particularly conducive to musical mixture, given its history as a hub of Brazilian media and culture. In Contemporary Carioca, the ethnomusicologist Frederick Moehn introduces a generation of Rio-based musicians who collaboratively have reinvigorated Brazilian genres, such as samba and maracatu, through juxtaposition with international influences, including rock, techno, and funk. Moehn highlights the creativity of individual artists, including Marcos Suzano, Lenine, Pedro Luís, Fernanda Abreu, and Paulinho Moska. He describes how these artists manage their careers, having reclaimed some control from record labels. Examining the specific meanings that their fusions have in the Carioca scene, he explains that musical mixture is not only intertwined with nationalist discourses of miscegenation, but also with the experience of being middle-class in a country confronting neoliberal models of globalization. At the same time, he illuminates the inseparability of race, gender, class, place, national identity, technology, and expressive practice in Carioca music and its making. Moehn offers vivid depictions of Rio musicians as they creatively combine and reconcile local realities with global trends and exigencies.

“Contemporary Carioca is a solid scholarly text, and it’s a good read.” - Bill Shoemaker, The Wire, “[A] capable study, particularly useful for its consideration of the music ofLenine, a major musical figure. For all libraries supporting study of popular music.” - Tom Moore, Notes, “This volume is an excellent resource for those interested in Brazilian culture in general and popular music in Brazil in particular. Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates and above.” - K. W. Mukuna, Choice, "Contemporary Carioca is an engaging study of musical production in 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, coeditor 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

Frederick Moehn is Lecturer in Music at King's College London.