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Joni Mitchell - A Case of You

By the mid 1960s, popular music in Brazil had been influenced by, and or at least had incorporated some elements of rock and roll... blues influences such as the famed blue note broadly to address a few examples in Brazilian music. However, this does not mean that Brazilians had been playing the blues, far from it. In fact, Bossa Nova music... popular in the late 1950s and 1960s among the Brazilian upper socioeconomic cohort, hardly fit into the musical genre universally recognized as blues. That is, Bossa Nova and its musical and sociocultural frameworks... were worlds away from blues culture and from the musical landscapes of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, or Howlin’ Wolf for example, former cotton sharecroppers who in turn, had a specific tonality, instrumentation, with different musical and cultural languages and styles inherently tied to the African American Mississippi Delta blues world or the Chicago blues world. Among other Brazilian artists and bands... were not blues musicians, despite being influenced by African American funk and soul music.

The introduction of blues in Brazil perhaps dovetails with the perception that American musical traditions, i.e.; folk, country, blues, ironically, which origins stemmed from the lowest socioeconomic U.S. demographic cohort, originate from a place that carries a strong or high cultural cachet as opposed to the perception that Brazil’s national popular music carries low cultural capital... That is, Brazilians suffer from a Periphery Complex, and despite that MPB, Música Popular Brasileira, Brazilian Popular Music, has long been tied to Brazil’s nationalistic sentiments, the processes of cultural imperialism and the Americanization of Brazilian music... possibly stems from a long Brazilian obsession with U.S. culture, music and mores. The perception that Brazil was and is, and will always be, the country of the future, has perhaps led many Brazilians to believe that by listening and/or playing música americana, American music they may have a chance to participate, imagine, and even belong to the modern world. However, playing music from a foreign country, sung in a foreign language, and from an alien culture, comes with its own predicaments. One of them, is the notion of authenticity.


Joni Mitchell - A Case of You
Written by: Joni Mitchell
Genre: Jazz, Pop/Rock
Released on: June 22, 1971

"One of the most influential singer songwriters to emerge from the 1960s folk music circuit, Joni Mitchell became known for her starkly personal lyrics and has received many accolades, including ten Grammy Awards and an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997."

See previous Song of the Day

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Location: United States

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