This article explores a music production setting centred in a relatively privileged neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro known as the ‘South Zone’, where the author conducted participant-observation field research and interviews during 1998–9 and in 2007. It focuses on the meanings and uses of specific metaphors about cultural mixture and mediation associated with modernist discourses of Brazilian national identity first formulated in the 1920s and 30s, but persistently evoked today to describe Brazilian music-making. It proposes to explain this persistence by reading practices of, and discourses about, musical mixture as ‘allegorising’ the ways in which middle class subjects experience modernity in this setting. It further considers how these dynamics inform the career and music of Fernanda Abreu, known for mixing funk, disco and samba styles, and a number of her collaborators in this music production network.
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