Between 1976 and 1983 Argentina witnessed the full development of a phenomenon which has come to be known as rock nacional (‘national rock’). At first sight it might appear no more than a matter of musical consumption, fashioning its participants simply as ‘artists’ on one side and ‘public’ on the other. But it has proved an original form within which the young create and inhabit a space of their own, relatively protected from the assaults of the military dictatorship (which had made them its principal victims), and has come to constitute, with the passing of the years, a counter-culture and a social movement.

Late at night, in a discotheque in a Latin American country whose political system is dominated by the military and is not particularly known for its respect for human rights, a crowd is dancing salsa, a generic term covering Caribbean dance music. The song is Willie Colón's ‘El general’. It starts with a roll of drum beats and a sarcastic description of the general getting up in the morning to put on his uniform and dictate orders to the president. A thrill of fifes follows and a stentorean shout: ‘To the right!’ The verse describes citizens as delighted not to have a free press and a dangerous democratic system with its tricky politicians. The military gazette is very enjoyable and it is reassuring to have a regime which puts men with strange ideas behind bars. In the discotheque, the crowd continues dancing. The next stanza says the general is rumoured to be about to retire: What will happen to the country and the people without him? ‘For a long time I've wanted to thank you,’ is the refrain, ‘goodbye and thank you, my general.’

Among the ever-growing body of publications on popular music, all but a small minority have tended to deal exclusively with the capitalist world. The relative neglect of the workings of popular music in socialist countries has led to an unfortunate lacuna in descriptive studies and, perhaps more importantly, a potential bias in theoretical studies. Popular cultures in socialist states may share many features with their counterparts in the capitalist world, but they are also likely to differ in several important aspects, including, for example, the role of the market, of the bureaucracy, of state cultural policy, the limits on commercialism and the entire ideological climate fostered by socialism. Consequently, many of the theoretical generalisations about popular music, based on studies of the capitalist world, must be revised or qualified when socialist countries are considered.

The term ‘protest song’, which became so familiar in the context of the anti-war movement in the United States during the 1960s, has been widely applied to the songs of socio-political commitment which have developed out of traditional folksong in most of the countries of Latin America over the past twenty years (see Pring-Mill 1983 and forthcoming). Yet it is misleading insofar as it might seem to imply that all such songs are ‘anti’ something: denouncing some negative abuse rather than promoting something positive to put in its place. A more helpful designation is that of ‘songs of hope and struggle’, enshrined in the titles of two Spanish American anthologies (C. W. 1967 and Gac Artigas 1973), which nicely stresses both their ‘combative’ and their ‘constructive’ aspects, while one of the best of their singers – the Uruguayan Daniel Viglietti – describes his own songs as being ‘in some measure both de protesta and de propuesta’ (i.e. as much ‘proposing’ as they are ‘protesting’). The document with which this article is chiefly concerned uses the term ‘revolutionary song’, which clearly covers both those aspects, but such songs may be seen to perform a far more complex range of tasks than any of those labels might suggest, as soon as their functions are examined ‘on the ground’ within the immediate context of the predominantly oral cultures of Latin America to which they are addressed: cultures in which traditional folksong has retained its power and currency largely undiminished by the changes of the twentieth century, and in which the oral nature of song (with the message of its lyrics reinforced by music) helps it to gain a wider popular diffusion than the more ‘literary’ but unsung texts which make up the greater part of the genre of so-called ‘committed poetry’ (‘poesía de compromiso’) to which the lyrics of such songs clearly belong (see Pring-Mill 1978, 1979).

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.

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’.