Great music in Rio: Bon Jovi, Rush and Dave Matthews Band....

Last Sunday, I saw a large number of young dudes wearing new, clearly pirated Rush t-shirts...I guess in preparation for the concert which, I suppose, was that night.

Each of these bands listed above received a full page of coverage in Rio's main paper, O Globo, last week. I was in awe! 

But this is normal.

Crappy American music gets full coverage....Brazilian music gets far less. What gives in a country with so much great local music, that total crap from the USA (and other countries) gets royal treatment in the press?

This is not new, it has been like this since I first started visiting Brazil in 1980.  Record stores also reflect this strange bias against Brazil's extremely fertile music scenes. Most stores carry and feature far more American music than their own product.

And this makes me very sad. It's bad enough that at home I am bombarded by this junk, but to arrive in such a rich, musically speaking, place such as Rio and find so much attention to this "lixo" (trash), well, it just doesn't make sense. To me.

If the press here devoted as much attention to their local musicians as they do to musicians from afar, well, Brazilians themselves might learn more about their own, and might actually spend more money supporting samba, choro, MPB and other forms of Brazilian musical expression. As it is, the support is not great, record companies maintain very little in their back catalogs, so, a record that, say, came out a year ago might never be seen again. Very sad.

I'll bet I can go into any record store in Rio and find ALL of Madonna's records in stock.

This makes me sad. Very sad....