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Brazilian Popular Music: Caetano Veloso and the Regeneration of Tradition.

Article Excerpt
Brazilian Popular Music: Caetano Veloso and the Regeneration of Tradition. By Lorraine Leu. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. [xii, 180 p. ISBN 0-754-63655-0. $79.95.] References, index.

Reflection is an action involving the efforts and desires of individuals caught equally in the fictions and histories of their respective epochs. The mindful imaginations responsible for innovative, creative culture, while existing in the socio-historical world, can seem distanced from collective tradition and the ideologies shaping "reality," though these worlds, of artistic intentions and values, of expression via symbolic play, and of technical innovation, remain clearly linked to experience. Author Lorraine Leu foregrounds music, performance, and expression, searching for relationships among them, and meanings between them and popular Brazilian musical tradition as culture and as a set of social values. In seeking artistic meaning in popular song she has focused on the worthy and aesthetically rich profile of Brazilian cultural icon Caetano Veloso and in doing so places this prolific, often controversial singer, songwriter, and author as a recognizable player in the regeneration of tradition. Leu does an admirable job of linking Veloso's reflections, explosive innovations, and provocations in the popular music world with the epoch that enveloped his early career, and the ocean of twentieth-century Brazilian musical tradition. The hybrid nature of Veloso's output, though, requires one to realize that he was a primary member of bossa nova's second generation, an exemplary composer, performer, and interpreter of the genre, while repeatedly positing himself as a sort of carnivalesque chameleon provocateur whose aim was often...

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