Remixing Brazil

Abstract

The success of Brazilian music in a climate of increasing inattention and overstimulation altered the image and brand of Brazil in the global marketplace in the early twenty-first century. This chapter focuses on the contrasting examples of Bebel Gilberto and Seu Jorge, and how they approached their careers in Brazil and abroad. Both artists found their most enduring success through new distribution and licensing channels that privileged cut-up and remixed Brazilian music with clear references to iconic images of a Brazilian past in the international imaginary, especially bossa nova of the 1960s. The strategy of licensing recordings to accompany other forms of consumption is shown to have exaggerated the challenges of musically representing Brazil to an increasingly connected and sensorily crowded world.