Constructing contemporary art and culture: an analysis considering Zeca Baleiro’s work

Abstract

MPB (Brazilian Popular Music) is deeply rooted within its specific environment and time. MPB retains the marks of the transformations undergone by its society, and has recreated such transformations into peculiar aesthetical forms of artistic expression. Deriving from worldwide spread international music genres, MPB establishes a good dialogue with globalized movements, while creating its own identity within the gaps. From the Nineties onwards, MPB artists hold a means of artistic creation and a kind of authorship well inserted into this new world context where the frontiers have been erased and identities have been blended. Their music travels through different places and genres, recycling and translating the places they come from, with their usages and traditions, in a way inserting these places within a globalized culture, giving them a cosmopolitan scope, without ever losing their peculiar means of expression. Therefore, the focus of the study is the musical production of the 1990’s, and, especially, the aim of this paper is to analyse the creative work of Zeca Baleiro. KEY WORDS: Brazilian Popular Music; Cultural translation; Hybridity; Cultural Recycling; Zeca Baleiro.