Paul McCartney's Give my Regards to Broad Street opened in New York City (and in 319 cinemas across the USA) on 26 October 1984, following the most intense publicity campaign that the McCartneys and 20th-Century Fox could mount. Apart from a wave of magazine interviews with Linda and Paul, a new video, No More Lonely Nights gave a cute synopsis, and the song itself was released as a single; a soundtrack album was produced and McCartney's own company, MPL Communications, put out a songbook including music and pictures from the film plus a forty-eight page screenplay (McCartney 1984). Despite all this, and an $8,000,000 investment by Fox the movie quickly sank like a stone and was withdrawn from distribution after a couple of weeks. Most people have never seen Give my Regards to Broad Street.

Patricio Manns (b. 1937) is a Chilean singer, songwriter, writer, poet, novelist and journalist. He was one of the group of singers who came together in the Peña de los Parra, the club founded by Angel and Isabel Parra in Santiago in 1965 which became the crucible where neo-folklore metamorphised into nueva cancíon (‘New Song’). Manns' relationship with nueva cancíon has been a fundamental, although at times an ambivalent one. Unlike many of the other musicians he has constantly involved himself in non-musical and political activity. Recently he has been the European spokesperson for the Chilean resistance movement, the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, which claimed responsibility for the assassination attempt in October 1986 on President Pinochet.

Writing about popular music in 1977 from what I would describe as a ‘classical’ Marxist perspective, Steve Chapple and I proclaimed unequivocally that:

The position of the music as an increasingly important cultural commodity within a consumer economy weakened any of the explicit anti-materialist content of the music.… Musicians and the creative personnel within the industry were integrated into an entertainment business now firmly part of the American corporate structure. (Chapple and Garofalo 1977, p. 300)

In 1981, four short years later, British sociologist and music critic Simon Frith described the structure and functioning of the music industry in much the same terms that Chappie and I had put forth, but his analysis shifted the emphasis considerably. Declared Frith:

Cultural commodities may support the contemporary power of capital, but they have their civilising moments, and even as the most effortless background music, rock is a source of vigour and exhilaration and of good feelings that are as necessary for the next morning's political struggle as for the next day's work. My argument is that rock fun is as much a quality of the music's use as of its form. (Frith 1981, pp. 264–5)

Attempting to avoid what he saw as an economically reductive position, Frith de-emphasised the role of monopoly corporations in controlling the marketplace and shaping popular culture. In the tradition of ‘cultural’ Marxism, he focused instead, and somewhat optimistically, on the power of the consumer to reappropriate the music in unintended ways, to ‘resignify’ its meaning, if you will.

Ever since the first systematic study of Peruvian music (d'Harcourts 1925), musicologists have puzzled over the relationship of pentatonic, or five-note music, to other modes of music in the Andes. At that time the enquiry was related to the general musicological debate over whether the pentatonic was the universal form of primitive ‘scale’, from which all other musical scales have evolved. This debate was enmeshed with the hypothesis of nineteenth-century anthropology, that this most basic form of musical system could be derived from a human physiological capacity to distinguish the consonances of the intervals of the fourth, the fifth and the octave. Within this evolutionary paradigm, the accumulation of examples of pentatonic melody from the Peruvian Andes was easily interpreted as further evidence of the universality of this form among primitive people.

With its blends of Amerindian, African and European sources, Brazil has one of the richest and most diverse musical cultures in the world. Primitive tribal musics flourish in the Amazon, rural and urban regions practise many folk/traditional forms, and cosmopolitan art music has been produced since before the time of Villa-Lobos. Various musics that can be considered popular reflect both this wide national spectrum and the impact of international mass media pop music. Here, a description of the major tendencies in contemporary urban popular music of Brazil will be followed by bibliographical and discographic indications for further study or research.

This bibliography is designed to complement the article by Pablo Vila. It contains recently published academic books and articles, but excludes journalism. The discography covers significant recent music in the fields of national rock, tango, folk and ‘fusion’.