‘The Girl from Ipanema’ – or, in Portuguese, ‘Garota de Ipanema’ – is without doubt the song that turned bossa nova into a household term the world over. It was written by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes one afternoon in 1962, as they sat in the Veloso bar – now renamed ‘Garota de Ipanema’ – on Montenegro Street, where they had watched the young Helô Pinheiro walk past them on her way to Ipanema Beach. The song was first recorded in 1963 by Peri Ribeiro (Odeon) (Machado 1971), and since then over 300 other recordings have appeared on the market, both in Brazil and abroad (Cabral n.d.c, p. 10). When it was first launched in America on the ‘Getz/Gilberto’ album (Verve), interpreted by Astrud and João Gilberto in 1964, ‘The Girl from Ipanema' posed a serious challenge to the Beatles’ hegemony over the charts, rapidly moving to second place. With 4.2 million registered performances, it was only in the last four years that its ratings began to fall, but it is still among the world's most widely aired popular songs (Anon 1994c, pp. 124–5).

Scholars of popular music in the 1990s are increasingly aware that traditional musicology has failed to recognise commercial pop music as a legitimate academic area of study. Intransigence on the part of many Western music institutions towards recognising the field of popular music study is attributable to issues that have been heatedly debated and discussed in most disciplines of popular music study. Even withstanding the expansion of critical approaches in the 1970s, which paved the way forward to the emergence of new musicological discourses by the late 1980s, musicologists engaged in popular music research have continued to feel some sense of isolation from the mainstream for obvious reasons. The implications of consumerism, commercialism, trend and hype, with the vigorous endorsement of modernist ideologies, have repeatedly curtailed any serious opportunity for studying popular music in Western music institutions. To start accommodating this area of music within any musicological discourse, scholars active within the field of popular music have had to branch out into new interdisciplinary directions to locate and interpret the ideological strands of meaning that bind pop music to its political, cultural and social context. Musical codes and idiolects are in the first instance culturally derived, with communication processes constructing the cultural norms that determine our cognition and emotional responses to musical sound (Ruud 1986). Any proposal of popular music analysis therefore needs to seek the junctures at which a range of texts interlock with musicology. Similarly, the point at which consumer demand and musical authenticity fuse requires careful consideration; it is the commodification of pop music that continues to problematise the process of its aesthetic evaluation within our Western culture.

For many, art is a product: the painting to be observed and contemplated, the concert to be heard and enjoyed. There is, however, another conception of art – art as activity – and it is in this context that Howard Becker (1984) develops his concept of art worlds. Art worlds, Becker argues, include more than the artists who create the work which the public commonly defines as art. Any given art world will consist of the network of people whose co-operative activity produces that art world's certain type of artistic product (Becker 1984, p. x). Organised according to their knowledge of the art world's goals and conventions for achieving those goals, the art world includes five basic categories of people: the artists who actually create and produce the art; the producers who provide the funds and support for the production of the art; the distributors who bring the art to the audience; the audience who purchases and collects the art; and finally, the critics, aestheticians and philosophers who create and maintain the rationales according to which all these other activities make sense and have value. These rationales, however, are not merely descriptive but prescriptive. For despite the efforts of those who would keep an art world static in its products and function, art worlds are dynamic. Changes in the art world are often made in response to changes in the rationales - i.e., the philosophical justifications for an art world's art - which identify the art world's product as ‘good’ art and explain how that art fills a particular need for people and society (Becker 1984, p. 4).

Calypso is an art form that laughs at pain. That's the way we deal with our blues. We begin to heal ourselves immediately, through our culture and our music.' (David Rudder, Trinidad, New York Times, 31 March 1991)

When you see me laughin', I'm laughin' to keep from cryin', but the laughter of these songs, implicit or overt, as often as not absorbs the tears.' (Langston Hughes 1966, p. 97)

In recent years, interest within popular music research in describing, analysing and discussing the music itself, the sounding object, has considerably increased. To the English speaking world, the most well known example perhaps is the work of Allan Moore (1993). At my department in Gothenburg, however, by the middle of the 1980s already several dissertations were being written taking the structure of popular music as their starting point to analyse the functions and meaning of popular music in society (Åhlen 1987, Björnberg 1987, Lilliestam 1988). The only problem with these dissertations, as well as with my book on the tin-pan alley tradition in Sweden (1989), is that they are all written in Swedish (although the dissertations have summaries in English or German).