and their audience, above all, who forged the link between samba and national identity. This leads to the second aspect of Frota's argument, concerning samba, race, and inequality. In his most stinging allegation, Frota suggests that the racial politics of the "semi-official history" were lifted wholesale from the U.S. Civil Rights movement and misapplied to Brazil. The notion of a pure, popular, African-inspired music subsequently co-opted and exploited by white elites may or may not work for blues and jazz, he suggests, but it surely cannot work for samba. This criticism is overheated-while Frota uses the term "semi-official history" to refer to a generation of researchers, his characterization of the political theory underlying that history only fits the work of Tinhorao-not coincidentally the most ardent nationalist of the group, and the one who will find charges of undue U.S. influence most galling. Ironically, Frota's own understanding of Brazilian popular music, with its emphasis on the self-serving machinations of "the big media," is not far from that of Tinhorao. The fundamental difference is that where Tinhorao laments the loss of national musical purity, Frota finds no purity to begin with, replacing Marxian theories of exploitation with Bourdieusian theories of inescapable cultural logic. In Frota's view, popular music flourished because media titans needed a product to sell, and acquired its broader cultural meanings because middle-class consumers needed a way to obscure the divisions between haves and have-nots through nationalist celebration. This has the advantage of drawing our attention to the multiplicity of actors who collectively created the golden age of Brazilian popular music, ranging from humble sambistas to conservatory-trained arrangers, foreign producers and commodity salesmen. Frota skillfully sketches the importance of each sector within the dynamic field of popular music. But like Tinhorao before him, Frota underestimates the ways in which composers, performers and fans operating within the confines of a commercial industry could reinterpret pat nationalist themes to craft inquiries into the shortcomings of the nation. Towards the end of his book, Frota analyzes "Laranja Madura," ("Ripe Orange"), a 1967 hit by the Afro-Brazilian sambista Ataulfo Alves. Frota persuasively reads the samba's lyrics as an implicit indictment of disguised racial exploitation, revealing the ways in which samba, oft-imbued with nationalist meanings, could also serve to counter dominant national narratives. This rewarding approach is lacking from the rest of the book, which concentrates too much on the dynamics of musical production and not enough on the product itself. Ultimately, this book corrects the romantic myopia of the "semi-official history," but does not dismantle that history. Frota's work relies heavily on the research of Cabral, Tinhorao and company, and firmly ascribes to the canon those authors helped construct-while emphasizing its constructed nature. This may be the enduring lesson of the book, demonstrating that the field of musical production that blossomed in the 1930s, with all its deeply embedded inequalities, its nationalist pretensions, and its commercial foundations, continues to contain those who aspire to explain it. Bryan McCann, Georgetown University