The book examines the domestic and international careers of seven of Argentina's most prominent and successful twentieth-century musicians: Oscar Alemán, Gato Barbieri, Lalo Schifrin, Astor Piazzolla, Sandro, Mercedes Sosa and Gustavo Santaolalla. It focuses on how these artists’ artistic and commercial trajectories were shaped by constraints linked to Argentina's peripheral position in the transnational music industry, as well as the country's shifting internal socio-political and cultural dynamics and conflicting relationship with other Latin American countries. The study convincingly demonstrates how these artists were able to use these circumstances creatively to generate bridges between cosmopolitan trends and local audiences and propose innovative ways of understanding national and ethnic identity.

The first three chapters look at the impact of jazz as a signifier of North American modernity in the Argentine music scene between the 1930s and the 1960s, and the implications of this in the various appropriations and hybridisations produced by Alemán, Barbieri, Schifrin and Piazzolla. Chapter 1 shows how Alemán's African phenotype and international experience allowed him to capitalise on jazz's associations with black modernism, excitement and authenticity. In the Buenos Aires jazz scene, Alemán came to embody a cosmopolitan blackness shaped by Euro-American primitivist understandings of race and, as a result, he was positioned simultaneously inside and outside the national community. Chapter 2 looks at the international careers of Schifrin and Barbieri, focusing on how both created hybrids that imaginatively used North American views of Latin American identity and culture as homogeneous, exotic and exciting to their advantage, even if these preconceptions did not correspond to their own identitarian conceptualisations. The case of Piazzolla, examined in Chapter 3, exemplifies exactly the opposite situation: the book shows how he systematically failed to impress foreign audiences in the 1960s precisely because his ‘nuevo tango’ did not accommodate to these preconceptions about Latin-ness that Schifrin and Barbieri had exploited so successfully. Ironically, the chapter shows how this allowed Piazzolla to circumvent the creative limitations of the artists above – and of other Latin American genres like bossa nova and Latin jazz. Locally, his music captured the cosmopolitan aspirations of the Buenos Aires middle class during the early 1960s and, in the 1980s, connected with a widespread nostalgia for that very same period, framed as a sort of ‘age of innocence’ before the horror of the Proceso dictatorship (1976–83). During those years, changes in the global market of music and the consolidation of the label ‘world music’ – which precisely aimed to move away from familiar ideas about the Other in search for more exotic products – finally granted Piazzolla the international success that had eluded him for so long.

The last three chapters look at the development of pan-Latin American genres from the 1960s, when the position of multinational record companies in the region, already pre-eminent, strengthened even more. Chapter 4 looks at Sandro's transformation from local Elvis emulator to the key artist behind ‘balada’, a new genre characterised by accessible melodramatic and hyper-romantic songs influenced by Italian, French, Spanish and North American pop music. Building on the regional audience constructed over the decades by bolero artists, Sandro attracted millions, from Argentina to Puerto Rico, creating in the process a style that presented itself as distinctively Latin American without necessarily drawing on any regional or national musical tradition – including Argentina's. Matthew Karush correctly points out how Sandro's physical appearance and self-associations with an idealised gipsy identity allowed him to distance himself from his Argentine background and embrace an ambiguous form of Latin American identity that was nonetheless crucial for his continental success. Chapter 5 looks at Mercedes Sosa, another figure who went on to become a Latin American icon. Contrary to Sandro, Sosa's regional appeal came through her close associations with folkloric traditions – though refined and modernised by the incorporation of highbrow lyrics and foreign musical influences – and with an intangible, essentialist indigeneity that responded both to Euro-American primitivist notions and to 1970s Latin American revolutionary discourses. The final chapter examines Santaolalla's role in the development of ‘rock latino’ during the 1990s. It shows how, in a context of accentuated globalisation where Latin America occupied a disadvantageous position, Santaolalla – and the artists he produced – created a form of rock music that was both distinctively Latin American yet diverse and cosmopolitan.

Taken as a whole, Karush's book identifies three clear patterns in which Argentine musicians interacted with transnational and national influences: appropriation of foreign genres for their differential consumption by domestic and international audiences, hybridisation of local and international musical forms for publics in Argentina and abroad, and development of new genres aimed at audiences across Latin America. Karush argues for moving beyond simplistic analysis of the impact of the globalisation of music industry in societies such as Argentina, which are on the ‘periphery’. Rather than seeing globalisation as an agent of US-led cultural imperialism that leads to the homogenisation of local cultures, he points out the productive dialogues between the local and the global, and the agency of musicians to navigate the ever-changing conditions of the transnational music business. At the same time, he acknowledges that, in the history of twentieth-century Argentine music, the dominant role of North American multinational companies cannot be understated. If anything, the artists featured in this book exemplify how the constraints posited by Argentina's marginal position in the global music industry could be used innovatively.

Karush's work impresses through the agility with which the author moves across musical forms, and from close reading of musical texts (lyrics and composition) to sociological and historical analysis – though, as expected, he performs noticeably better in the latter. Furthermore, the book is written in a clear and engaging manner, and its website includes a selection of some of the songs discussed. At a time in which there is a renewed interest in the study of Argentine identity(ies), Karush's book constitutes an excellent addition that will surely establish itself as a reference for the study of twentieth-century Argentine popular music and its relationship with nation-ness.