MPB

MPB (Música Popular Brasileira, "Brazilian popular music") is the songwriter-led popular music that grew out of bossa nova in Brazil in the mid-1960s. It combines sophisticated harmony and poetic Portuguese lyrics with the rhythms of samba, the music of Brazil's Northeast and, from the late 1960s, rock, soul and jazz. It is a tradition of carefully written song more than a single sound.

Below: how the label was born in the TV song festivals, how Tropicália blew it open, how its artists wrote under military censorship, what an MPB record typically sounds like, the artists and albums to start with, and how it differs from bossa nova, samba and Brazilian funk (covered in our post what is Brazilian funk). To see where a classifier places a Brazilian song, run a clip through our free AI music genre detector.

Taken literally, "Brazilian popular music" could mean anything recorded in Brazil. In practice the abbreviation MPB names a specific current: urban, middle-class, songwriter-centred music that emerged after bossa nova and became, from the late 1960s on, the prestige tier of Brazilian pop. It is the music of composers whose lyrics are studied as poetry, and of interpreters (singers such as Elis Regina, Gal Costa and Maria Bethânia) who built careers on choosing and reshaping other people's songs.

Most MPB has three habits in common:

• Song first. Melody, harmony and lyric come before the beat or the production. Most MPB songs work with nothing more than a voice and a nylon-string guitar (violão).
• Brazilian roots under foreign borrowings. Samba, bossa nova, the baião of Luiz Gonzaga, frevo, maracatu and choro are usually somewhere underneath, with rock, soul, jazz or psychedelia on top.
• Lyrics with a point. Songs address love and everyday life but also politics, inequality and Brazilian identity, often obliquely, a habit learned under censorship.

Because the label is broad, record shops and streaming services also use it as a marketing category for adult-oriented Brazilian pop. Sertanejo, pagode, axé and funk carioca are usually treated as separate genres, even when they top the charts.

From bossa nova to "MPB", mid-1960s. After the 1964 military coup, a younger generation of songwriters began to feel that bossa nova's cool, intimate style was too detached from the rest of Brazil. They drew on regional folk, the samba of Rio's hillside communities and protest song to write music that was still harmonically refined but more direct. The label MPB came into use for this post-bossa music around 1965–1966, and its starting point is usually placed at Elis Regina's "Arrastão".

The TV festivals, 1965–1968. The new music found its stage in televised song competitions. At the first TV Excelsior festival in 1965 Elis Regina won with "Arrastão" by Edu Lobo and Vinicius de Moraes; her single of it became the best-selling Brazilian record to that date, and she soon co-hosted TV Record's show O Fino da Bossa. At TV Record's 1966 festival, Chico Buarque's "A Banda" shared first prize with Geraldo Vandré's "Disparada" (by one account, at Chico's own insistence). Audiences cheered and booed like football crowds, and the festivals launched most of the generation now filed under MPB.

Tropicália, 1967–1968. At the October 1967 TV Record festival, Caetano Veloso ("Alegria, Alegria", which took fourth prize) and Gilberto Gil ("Domingo no Parque", performed with Os Mutantes) appeared with electric guitars, angering nationalist purists who saw rock as foreign. The movement they led, Tropicália, mixed bossa nova, Brazilian folk, the Beatles, psychedelia, avant-garde poetry and kitsch. Its manifesto album, Tropicália ou Panis et Circencis (1968), brought together Caetano, Gil, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes, Tom Zé and Nara Leão, with arrangements by Rogério Duprat.

Under the dictatorship. In December 1968 the regime issued Institutional Act No. 5 (AI-5), suspending civil liberties. Caetano and Gil were arrested that same month, held for months and then released on condition that they leave the country; they lived in exile in London until 1972. Chico Buarque left for Italy in 1969. Songs went to state censors before release, and songwriters learned to hide meaning in wordplay: Chico's "Apesar de Você" (1970) slipped past the censors before being banned, and "Cálice", written with Gil, plays on cálice (chalice) and cale-se (shut up).

The 1970s. With the big festivals over, MPB moved onto albums. In Belo Horizonte, Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges led the Clube da Esquina collective, whose 1972 double album, recorded in late 1971, blended Beatles-era rock, church harmony and regional music. Jorge Ben, Novos Baianos, Gal Costa, Maria Bethânia, Ivan Lins, João Bosco and Aldir Blanc, Djavan and Northeastern songwriters such as Belchior and Fagner all released major albums in that decade. Elis Regina and Tom Jobim recorded Elis & Tom (1974), and Elis's 1979 recording of João Bosco and Aldir Blanc's "O Bêbado e a Equilibrista" became known as the "amnesty anthem": the Amnesty Law was passed that August.

After 1985. With democracy restored, MPB became the established tier of Brazilian music. New artists such as Marisa Monte (debut album MM, 1989), Adriana Calcanhotto and Lenine carried the tradition on, Gilberto Gil served as Brazil's Minister of Culture under Lula (2003–2008), and a "nova MPB" generation in the 2000s and 2010s, among them Céu, Seu Jorge, Tim Bernardes and Liniker, brought in indie, soul and electronic production.

MPB has no fixed tempo, beat or instrumentation, but most records share some of these traits:

• Harmony from bossa nova: extended chords (sevenths, ninths, altered dominants) and smooth voice-leading, played on the nylon-string guitar or piano.
• Brazilian rhythms underneath: samba and partido-alto patterns, the syncopated baião, the fast frevo, ijexá from Afro-Bahian tradition, and the gentle bossa groove.
• Exposed, conversational vocals: lyrics are sung clearly, often softly, with little vibrato, so the words carry.
• Mixed ensembles: violão, piano, bass, drum kit, Brazilian percussion (pandeiro, surdo, cuíca, agogô), strings or horns, and from Tropicália onward electric guitars and synthesizers.
• Wide tempo range: from slow ballads around 60–80 BPM to samba- and frevo-based songs well above 120 BPM.

The table below shows how the main strands differ:

• Chico Buarque: the most literary of MPB songwriters. Start with Construção (1971), whose title track is built from twelve-syllable lines that all end in proparoxytone words, reshuffled across three sections.
• Caetano Veloso: co-leader of Tropicália with Gil; Caetano Veloso (1968) and the London-made Transa (1972).
• Gilberto Gil: guitarist, songwriter and later minister; Expresso 2222 (1972) and Refazenda (1975).
• Elis Regina: the interpreter whose "Arrastão" is often taken as MPB's starting point; Elis & Tom (1974) with Tom Jobim.
• Milton Nascimento: a soaring voice and the Clube da Esquina album (1972) with Lô Borges.
• Gal Costa: one of the Bahian founders of Tropicália, from Gal Costa (1969) to Fa-Tal (1971).
• Jorge Ben: samba-rock and soul; A Tábua de Esmeralda (1974).
• Os Mutantes: Tropicália's psychedelic rock band, with Rita Lee.
• Novos Baianos: Acabou Chorare (1972), mixing samba, choro and rock.
• Marisa Monte: the leading MPB singer of the generation after 1985, and a member of Tribalistas with Arnaldo Antunes and Carlinhos Brown.

Because MPB absorbed so much, the borders with its neighbours are blurry. A rough guide:

MPB reached international listeners in waves. Jorge Ben's "Mas que Nada" (1963) became a worldwide standard through Sérgio Mendes. David Byrne started his Luaka Bop label in 1988 after making cassettes of his favourite Tropicália tracks for friends, and its compilations and Tom Zé reissues introduced the movement to indie audiences; Beck's "Tropicalia", from Mutations (1998), is a nod to it. Milton Nascimento was the featured artist on Wayne Shorter's Native Dancer (1975), and the record made his songs known to jazz listeners outside Brazil.

Record collectors now hunt for original 1970s MPB and samba-soul pressings, and the chord-rich arrangements of those records turn up in hip-hop and R&B samples. Tropicália is also a common reference for psychedelic rock revival bands.

MPB is one of the hardest Brazilian styles for an audio model, because its identity lives in the songwriting and the lyrics, and those are not a fixed beat or timbre. What the model can hear are the Brazilian percussion patterns, the nylon-string guitar, extended jazz chords and Portuguese vocals. A samba-based MPB song gives the clearest signal; a slow piano ballad or a Tropicália rock track gives very little that is specifically Brazilian.

Try a few seconds in the Genre AI music genre detector and compare a bossa-flavoured song with a rock-flavoured one to see how much the label depends on arrangement. Our guide on why songs have multiple genres explains why MPB is a classic case.

What does MPB stand for?

What is the difference between MPB and bossa nova?

Is Tropicália part of MPB?

Who are the most important MPB artists?

Is Brazilian funk the same as MPB?

Why was MPB censored in Brazil?