Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Music

Advisor

David Grubbs

Committee Members

Agustina Checa

Anaar Desai-Stephens

Joseph Schloss

Christopher Dunn

Subject Categories

Ethnomusicology

Keywords

sampling, hip-hop, Brazilian music, música popular brasileira, vibe

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the trend of musical borrowings of 1970s MPB (música popular brasileira) by contemporary American hip-hop producers, especially in terms of what they have called a “Brazilian vibe.” A lot has been said about sampling already from legal, sociological, and historical points of view, but less has been said about its aesthetic procedures, and even less about the wider implications of a tendency for using transnational sources. In the case of MPB, hip-hop artists seem to understand the music they sample through an often vague, intuitive representation, which fuses qualities of those recordings with an intersubjective mood, a sense of presence, and a series of perceived markers of racial and national identity, be they inadvertent or not. What is the function, within American hip-hop, of samples from Brazil? How do some genres, periods, places, people, and technologies represent a more authentic “vibe”? What does “vibe” even mean, in this case?

The goal of this dissertation is to trace a map of the relations between American hip-hop and 1970s MPB by understanding the causes of their connection, and then to develop the notion of “vibe” that is implied in this connection towards a plural, interwoven signification. The dissertation considers particularly the jazz rap scenes associated with labels like Stones Throw and Jazz Is Dead, which have openly declared admiration for Brazilian music and consolidated this sampling tendency through paradigmatic releases. With the hope that this aesthetic coalition can be analyzed as it happens and through its own participants, the research resorts to a multi-sited, grounded-theory-based ethnography that, via this specific case study, provides broader insights on the encounter between the two countries.

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