The core of Stroud's timely study is a consideration of how notions of what constitutes Brazilian popular music have been constructed since the mid 1960s, with a particular focus on the pervasive tradition known as MPB (Música Popular Brasileira). The author provides an informative overview of the scope of this rather nebulous acronym in the Introduction, along with a valuable exploration of the symbolic role that MPB performs within Brazilian culture in a wider sense. He traces the evolution of popular music in Brazil in this contextualising chapter, highlighting the influence of the concepts of legitimacy and tradition, and how these have shaped the reception of MPB artists. This book brings a fresh approach to this musical movement, which has tended to inspire authors to analyse the lyrical and musical creativity of its key players. Instead, Stroud's focus is how and why MPB has earned such canonical status within Brazilian popular music, in spite of relatively modest record sales, and why the notion of musical tradition, with which MPB has become synonymous, has been defended with such vehemence for over forty years.

The book is divided into seven chapters, the first of which presents the crucial theme of musical nationalism, ‘an underlying ideology that has acted as an ever-present backdrop to discussions about Brazilian popular music since the 1920s, and one that has been an important factor in the creation of the concept of tradition in the field of popular music’ (p. 7). The author provides a very detailed and informative overview of how issues of national identity and authenticity have dictated views of and attitudes towards certain styles of popular music throughout the twentieth century, not least those expressed by influential journalists and writers, which in turn have molded the tastes and opinions of the public. Stroud's exploration of the processes which gave rise to the creation of Brazil's mythical ‘golden age’ of popular music of the 1930s and to the veneration of Rio de Janeiro's samba as national symbol is particularly insightful. Chapter two focuses on the formation of the idea of MPB and on those who have been responsible for its creation and longevity. As the author writes, ‘due to a variety of interconnecting factors the original significance attributed to the acronym shifted away from its original connotation in the mid 1960s and has developed over the intervening years into a type of shorthand that alludes to a series of values and assumptions about popular music in Brazil’ (p. 39). He, nevertheless, goes on to successfully establish the parameters of this slippery term, giving due consideration to the role of the recording industry in the 1970s in helping to create its mythical dimension and the aura of ‘authenticity’ around its artists. Overwhelmingly a middle-class creation since it first emerged at the beginning of the 1960s, MPB has been marketed as a ‘superior’ product, whose links with Brazilian literature, particularly poetry, have been emphasised for a bourgeois consumer. Stroud points to an emphasis on the part of critics and marketing executives on the ‘cerebral’ rather than the ‘corporal’ aspect of MPB, in marked contrast to so-called brega or música cafona (literally ‘bad taste’ music), which has been virtually ignored by journalists and ‘almost completely airbrushed out of all “official” histories of Brazilian popular music because of its associations with a “socially inferior” public’ (p. 43).

Chapter three examines the relationship between television and popular music in Brazil, particularly the tradition of televised song festivals and the vital, and often overlooked, role of music in the telenovela or soap opera. As the author astutely comments, ‘One of the most important, if not the most important means by which popular music has been disseminated within Brazil since the early 1970s, has been through the use of music as the soundtrack to telenovelas’ (p. 80). As well as analysing the impact of soap operas on the development of MPB, Stroud looks at the influence of MTV Brasil, which has recycled the careers of older MPB stars. In the following chapter, he considers the role of the Brazilian record industry within a theoretical framework of cultural imperialism and globalisation, including a very informative section on musical piracy, a crucial issue in Brazil which ranks second only to China in terms of the volume of pirated material (p. 96).

Chapter five examines in depth two examples of key state interventions in the realm of popular music instigated in the 1970s, namely the creation of FUNARTE (National Art Foundation) and the Projeto Pixinguinha. The latter was a particularly fascinating attempt on the part of the state to take ‘the best’ of Brazilian popular music to a poor and previously excluded mass audience, and as Stroud observes, it ‘certainly increased the aura of importance surrounding MPB by promoting the idea that this type of music merited being supported, cherished and defended, and as it was a national project it propagated that notion around the country as a whole’ (p. 130). Both initiatives signaled the attempt of the military dictatorship to dialogue with civil society via popular culture, particularly music, in the mid 1970s. Chapter six focuses on two ground-breaking projects which sought to ‘map’ the popular musics of Brazil: that of Mário de Andrade in the 1930s, and the lesser known efforts of Marcus Pereira in the 1970s, in which issues of purity and authenticity were central. In the final chapter, Stroud considers two more recent ‘mapping’ projects which endeavoured to continue this important work, namely those of Hermano Vianna and Itaú Cultural, the cultural section of a major Brazilian bank. Stroud shows how all four projects have been essentially concerned with musically mapping the nation in an effort to bring the nation closer together in a cultural sense via popular music (p. 178).

This book is an important scholarly addition to the existing bibliography on Brazilian popular music, and will be essential reading for those studying this field. It is underpinned by original research and rigorous analysis, and is accompanied by a very useful bibliography. A glossary of the many Brazilian musical forms referred to in the text would have been helpful, but this (along with a few typographical errors) is the only minor criticism that can be leveled at this excellent study.