tour took his ensemble and the mozambique to Europe, which included a perfor-
mance at the Olympia Theater in Paris.
The mozambique also took hold in the United States and Puerto Rico. Artists
such as El Gran Combo, Richie Ray, Carlos Santana, Batacumbele, and Bobby
Valentin all recorded original mozambiques or covers of Pello’s tunes, though no
other musician outside of Cuba was more aligned with the rhythm than pianist
Eddie Palmieri (1965). The most prolific in his use and adaptation of the rhythm,
Palmieri’s connection to the mozambique was ultimately controversial. Though at
one point Palmieri actually laid claim to having invented the mozambique, what
was in the end more contentious was the saber rattling directed at Palmieri’s label
268 | Música Popular Brasileira (MPB)
Tico by the Cuban government over royalties that were never paid to Izquierdo.
Tico also faced the ire of extremists in the Cuban exile community for promot-
ing music associated with Castro’s Cuba. Some of these responses included bomb
threats.
By the 1970s, Pello had pared down his ensemble’s size. The mozambique’s
popularity had been somewhat diminished by the numerous dance trends and the
emergence of popular dance bands like Los Van Van. Pello nonetheless contin-
ued to appear in various clubs and cabarets in Havana, and in 1979 his ensemble
played New York’s Carnegie Hall as well as toured Japan. Though Pello continued
to promote the mozambique and find engagements for his ensemble, because of his
stature in Havana’s musical community, he eventually became most utilized as the
musical director and/or contractor for high-profile events and important rooms,
such as the Capri Hotel’s Salon Rojo in the 1990s. After Izquierdo’s passing in
2000, his grandson Omar Merencio Izquierdo (Pello Jr.) released a recording of
mozambiques titled La Explosion De Mi Ritmo (2001).
Further Reading
Moore, Robin D. 2006. Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Discography
Palmieri, Eddie. 1965. Mambo con Conga is Mozambique. Tico, LPTICO1126.
Pello el Afrokán. 1989. Un Sabor Que Canta. Vitral, VCD 4122 (Re-issue of Areito
LD-4122).
Michael D. Marcuzzi
MPB. See Música Popular Brasileira .
Música Popular Brasileira (MPB)
MPB (an acronym for Música Popular Brasileira or Brazilian popular music) is the
generic denomination for a plurality of genres and hybrid musical practices that
have prevailed in Brazilian popular music since the 1960s. MPB is an important
part of Brazilian popular culture, so ubiquitous that its overarching ramifications
are confusing to the noninitiated. Not all Brazilian popular music is considered
MPB: some music styles stand by themselves without being considered MPB, such
as the traditional samba (even if there is much traditional samba in MPB). This acronym was embraced by both audiences and music marketers in the 1980s, 1990s,
and 2000s, and, like axé music or Brazilian rock, has little to do with the music originally made in the 1960s.
Música Popular Brasileira (MPB) | 269
Influenced by bossa nova’s musical and literary sophistication, MPB in the
1960s also embraced the rich and diverse traditional subaltern Brazilian musical
heritage, offering multiple kinds of music and lyrics and appealing to virtually all
tastes. As a result of the combined efforts of bossa nova and MPB, Brazilian pop-
ular music after the 1950s is regarded as a legitimate art form by the élites while
remaining highly pertinent to the subaltern classes. Chronicling and intervening in
every aspect of social reality since the 1960s and combining bourgeois sophistica-
tion with grassroots appeal, MPB became one of the most relevant forms of Bra-
zilian art and culture.
MPB is very important with regard to media studies. Its popularization was
linked to the music festivals that rose in the 1960s (mainly from 1965 to 1968). For
their part, these festivals were the first highly successful product to be sold by the
then incipient Brazilian television industry to the Brazilian masses. An MPB frenzy
developed in these years, as this music became central to Brazilian life and influ-
enced other media. MPB, then, was the first mass-media phenomenon in Brazil.
MPB’s motley character has offered a problem regarding classification. Not
being a genre, and escaping traditional musicological definitions, MPB encouraged
critics and historians to utilize sociological considerations in discussing it, ignor-
ing its musical esthetics: critics associated MPB with leftist middle-class university
students engaged in the promotion of authentic Brazilian music in opposition to the
right-wing military dictatorship that reigned from 1964 to 1985. This interpretation
is not entirely wrong, since it accurately portrays the discourse of many MPB fol-
lowers in the 1960s. But it fails to account for the music of MBP artists such as the
black singer/songwriter Jorge Ben, who released the album Samba esquema novo
in 1963. This MPB production merges bossa nova, maracatu and samba with jazz
and black-tinged American pop music elements. Ben was also the creator of the
samba -rock hybrid style in the 1960s. His music was clearly not protest music; his
main objective was to get people out on the dance floor, and while his utilization
of Afro-Brazilian esthetics relates to political debates about race, it supersedes the
traditional left–right dichotomy suggested by traditional MPB critics. The first
Brazilian artist to use American soul music, Ben inspired other MPB artists who
would later follow the same route, including Wilson Simonal, Tim Maia, Cassiano,
Gerson King Combo, and Ed Motta. MPB’s sound was central to its practitioners,
and what made its cultural, political, and social commentary possible; attention to
musical style must be at the center of any discussion of MPB.
Critics also failed to attend to the gender discussion implied in the choice of di-
verse musical elements in the work of MPB artists such as Nara Leão and Maria
Bethânia. Leão, an upper-class white singer from Rio de Janeiro who was cherished
by some of the most important male composers of bossa nova as the inoffensive
muse of the movement, broke with this group to record modern arrangements of
traditional samba songs by composers of Rio de Janeiro’s slums like Cartola and
270 | Música Popular Brasileira (MPB)
Nelson Cavaquinho, who were, until then, ignored by the middle classes. Approxi-
mately at the same time, Bethânia (a dark-skinned, lower middle-class singer from
upstate Bahia) was doing the same with then forgotten composer Noel Rosa. Leão’s
musical eclecticism, which is tied to the artistic and personal freedom she pursued,
combined Brazilian traditional genres with jazz elements like blue note inflections
as in “Nanã” (Moacyr Santos) in her first album Nara (1964). Bethânia and Leão’s
renovated approach to Brazilian music was considered regressive at the time, but
after some years, such modernization of older classics became tacitly accepted as
one of MPB’s trademarks. Their musical commentaries, derived from the meanings
<
br /> of different styles, equate to a dialogical gendered discourse.
Both Leão and Bethânia acted in the protest musical Opinião (Rio de Janeiro,
1964), which also gathered composers João do Vale and Zé Kéti, representing re-
spectively the impoverished northeastern migrant and the urban slum dweller, to
create an allegory of Brazil. The immense success of this antidictatorship mani-
festation among university students helped form the reductionist idea that MPB is
all about traditional political binaries. Suddenly Bethânia saw herself defined and
limited by the protest tag, and she struggled hard until she succeeded in affirming
her independent artistic and personal styles. Other composers and/or interpreters
who helped define MPB during the 1960s are Elis, Edu Lobo, Geraldo Vandré,
Quarteto em Cy, Nana Caymmi, Chico Buarque, MPB-4, Milton Nascimento, and
Paulinho da Viola, not to mention the artists linked to tropicália , which appeared
after 1967: Caetano Veloso, Torquato Neto, Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé, Gal Costa,
Mutantes, and Rogério Duprat, among others.
After the rise of tropicália in 1967–1968, rock, soul, funk, and American pop
music overcame the marginal condition to which they had been relegated by the
intelligentsia and became mainstream. These styles continued to have a strong im-
pact over MPB. Rock, reggae , and virtually all transnational or international styles
also came to be considered MPB, even if sung in another language.
In the 1970s, the high level of musical and literary creativity in MPB continued
with another talented new generation formed by Raul Seixas, Djavan, Belchior,
Fagner, Ednardo, Novos Baianos, Ivan Lins, Gonzaguinha, João Bosco, Aldir
Blanc, Jorge Mautner, Walter Franco, Ney Matogrosso, Alceu Valença, Elba Ra-
malho, Zé Ramalho, Luiz Melodia, Itamar Assumpção, Rumo, Premeditando o
Breque, Ná Ozzetti, Vânia Bastos, Leila Pinheiro, Eduardo Gudin, the Clube da
Esquina collective (Milton Nascimento’s collaborators: Lô Borges, Márcio Borges,
Fernando Brant, Beto Guedes, Ronaldo Bastos, Tavito, Wagner Tiso), among many
others. In the political realm, violent repression subsided after 1972, following a
gradual distension.
The next decade saw the end of the communal utopianism of the 1960s (which
had been kept alive by the struggle against the dictatorship ending in 1985) and the
rise of a pragmatic Brazilian rock. Disenchantment with direct political activism,
Música Popular Brasileira (MPB) | 271
Veloso, Caetano
Caetano Veloso (b. 1942) is an MPB (Brazilian popular music) artist, a co-
founder of the Tropicália movement and composer of many famous Brazilian
Carnival anthems. His music is characterized by lyrical melodies, an original
and masterful poetic style, and, in his guitar playing and vocals, a dominance
of bossa nova.
Veloso began his musical career as a composer for fi lms, television, and the-
ater. In the mid-1960s, Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and others founded the Tropicália
movement. The controversial productions of the tropicalistas challenged Brazil-
ian musical traditions and criticized the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–
1985), resulting in Veloso and Gil’s exile to London from 1969 to 1972. Veloso’s
innovative blending of rock, pop, Brazilian, and Latin American music styles
into MPB subsequently redefi ned the genre. He has been strongly infl uenced
by the Brazilian concrete poets and issues of Brazilian life. As a result, his com-
positions represent both popular and intellectual Brazilian thought fi lled with
inventive wordplay and modern urban images. Veloso reached the height of his
popularity during the 1980s and continues to record and tour internationally.
Further Reading
Veloso, Caetano, and Barbara Einzig. Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolu-
tion in Brazil. New York: A. A. Knopf, 2002.
Thomas Rohde
however, did not prevent Brock artists, who claimed to be part of MPB, from pro-
testing against government and politicians’ corruption and commenting on other
Brazilian social problems, even if they resorted to sarcasm rather than exhortation.
Some of the groups that appeared in this period were Blitz, Titãs, Barão Vermelho,
Os Paralamas do Sucesso, and Ultraje a Rigor e Legião Urbana.
The 1990s had as one of its greatest musical movements the so-called Mangue
beat, innovated by Chico Science & Nação Zumbi and Mundo Livre S/A, who
were followed by Mestre Ambrósio, Cascabulho, and others. This movement fused
contemporary international pop tendencies with traditional music such as mara-
catu, coco, ciranda from the impoverished northeastern Pernambuco state. New
MPB names continue to appear every day; the style entered the 21st century as
strong as ever, assimilating diverse musical subcultures, while keeping their differ-
ences within the same denomination. In this sense, musical and cultural plurality,
272 | Música
Sertaneja
diversity, and respect for difference continue to be the best characteristics to de-
fine MPB.
Further Reading
Crook, Larry. Brazilian Music: Northeastern Traditions and the Heartbeat of a Modern
Nation. ABC-CLIO world music series. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005.
Dunn, Christopher. Brutality Garden: Tropicalia and the Emergence of a Brazilian
Counterculture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Stroud, Sean. The Defence of Tradition in Brazilian Popular Music: Politics, Culture,
and the Creation of Musica Popular Brasileira. Ashgate popular and folk music series. Al-
dershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2008.
Larry Crook
Música Sertaneja
Música sertaneja is commercial rural music from Brazil ’ s Central-Southern re-
gion (see also dupla caipira ). It is highly produced, instrumentally electric and
electronic (electric guitar and bass, drum-kit, and keyboards) and is sung by male
duos that are usually two brothers. Its lyrics exhaustively explore loss and sadness.
More specifically, they reflect on a bygone time of wholeness that is no longer ac-
cessible because the singer’s true love has left, and/or the singer has had to leave
the countryside for the city. The longing for a country past filled with love results in
the split-subjectivity of the singing voice in the present. In música sertaneja, right
now can only ever be partial. Singers obsessively mull over the intensity of their
emotions and the impossibility of controlling them. This inverts conventional ex-
pectations for masculine behavior by putting raw male sentiment on show. Whereas
other Brazilian musical genres such as samba postulate an empowered male who
finds a new love quickly, the singing voice of música sertaneja wails. This earns the
genre a host of epithets from its detractors, most of which focus on the absurdity of
masculine vulnerability. Such slurs reveal the music’s cultural intimacy (see Cul-
tural Imperialism ), in part resulting in its erroneous classification as lower class
in much scholarship.
The term sertaneja means of the sertão, or of the backlands, but this is not
the northeastern sertão made famous by Euclides DaCunha in his classic wo
rk of
nonfiction, Rebellion in the Backlands, which describes the destruction of a late
19th-century religious movement in the state of Bahia. Instead, the musical use of
the term here refers to a more amorphous rurality, and, musically, dates from fa-
mous producer and performer, Palmeira, in his attempt to describe modernizing
música caipira in the early 1960s. The updated caipira sound incorporated electric
guitar, bass, and drum-kit, and increasingly treated the theme of romantic love.
Música
Sertaneja
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273
“It’s no longer just caipira, ” Palmeira is reported to have said; “these days, it’s all
sertaneja. ”
Despite its regionally focused base of production, música sertaneja is one of
the largest selling genres in the nation, accounting for somewhere between 10 and
15 percent of national sales in the late 20th and early 21st centuries The growth in
popularity of this music is tied up with an increasing turn to the rural in the sphere
of public culture, indexed by the popularity of rurally themed soap operas, and the
explosion of a form of rodeo that mingles long-standing Brazilian traditions with
American-style bull riding at locations such as Barretos, Americana, and Jaguari-
una, in the state of São Paulo. All of this is taking place as the region becomes in-
creasingly urbanized. Música sertaneja, which provides the sonic accompaniment
to this turn to the rural, is most closely associated with the careers of three brother
duplas : Chitãozinho & Xororó, the late Leandro & his brother Leonardo (currently
enjoying a solo career), and Zezé di Camargo & Luciano (the subject of one of the
highest grossing films in Brazilian history, Francisco’s Two Sons ). Recently, dupla
Cezar Menotti & Fabiano have also enjoyed considerable success.
The current popularity of música sertaneja within the context of an augmented ru-
rality in the urbanizing Central-South may be read as a means of responding to, and
shaping neoliberal reform in social, economic, and political domains. The longing
for the past evidenced in this genre flies in the face of the linear progress narratives
on which the economic miracles of the dictatorship years were based (1964–1985),
Encyclopedia of Latin American Popular Music Page 47
