Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil

by Bryan McCann

“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 Getúlio 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.

Genres: Music, Brazil, Nonfiction, History

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Mclaughlin175]

McCann does a great job examining the origins of samba, its relationship to other genres, and the history of contact between Brazil and the United States. He picks up where previous scholars left off, analyzing samba not only from its inception through the 1950s but also in the post-Vargas period He also gets at samba's deep connections to nationalism and national identity and demonstrates how samba's rise as the symbol of Brazil is directly linked to the early days of radio there, but also to the increase in U.S. cultural products coming in.

I like the way McCann analyzes individual songs and extrapolates meaning to talk about larger issues of race, racism, classism, xenophobia, and the creation of cultural products and national symbols through markets. My students were able to run with these issues and make strong connections to more contemporary cultural flows. This book is strong.

[Wes Freeman]

Mid-Atlantic academic with familial ties to an advertising industry that exploited the country he loves, sits back, crosses his legs, and tells us about the samba. McCann's done his reading and has got his science right. He talks about intellectual life in Brazil's early 20th century and the attendant nationalism. He talks about their seriously complicated approach to race. He talks about choro, samba and the radio show scene of the 1950s, a scene roughly (really, really roughly) analogous to, like, the Mickey Mouse Club meeting the Beatles in the U.S., with screaming teenagers fainting at bolero singers instead of mop tops and Annette Funicello. It was informative, accessible and has one of the most pimpishly beautiful covers on any book I've seen in a long time.

[Naomi]

I really enjoyed this, despite (or because of) not knowing much Brazilian music or history. I had to look up a lot of the songs to get a better understanding of the development of samba, choro, etc. Interesting and well-researched.

[Vicki]

Really interesting book about nationalism and popular music.

[Blaine Wajdowicz]

An amazingly deep and critical look as to why the image of Carmen Miranda in a hat adorned with fruit is our perception of Brazil