Ahead of the upcoming men’s football World Cup there has been a Pop World Cup running on Bluesky. The 48 teams are the same as the football world cup, each country is assigned a manager, and people nominate tracks to ‘compete’ for each country. I was assigned Brazil to manage, and as manager my only role was to nominate one Brazilian song myself (Os Mutantes), and choose the order of play for that song and two other Brazilian songs that had been nominated.

So, I didn’t really need to listen to a load of Brazilian music for my role as manager, but I felt I ought to. Very little Brazilian music had found its way to me previously, just the occasionally Brazilian artist who had broken through to English ears in particular genres, such as metal (Sepultura/Soulfly), drum and bass (DJ Marky) and indie-rock (CSS). I’d never made any effort to listen to Brazilian music in particular.

Even with some relatively minimal searching of streaming services and internet listicles I’ve managed to put together a playlist of 50 excellent songs across all kinds of genres, so I can only imagine what I could have/will find if I go a bit deeper. There are genres such as bossa nova and samba, which people perhaps think of as specifically Brazilian, but also tracks from the worlds of hip-hop, disco, jazz, pop and more. What’s interesting is the way those traditional Brazilian sounds and rhythms seep into the music regardless of genre, which becomes really apparent when you listen to the playlist as a whole. Even Soulfly, which sticks out like a sore thumb otherwise, has percussion which is notably different from your average non-Brazilian metal band

Some of my favourite new discoveries on the playlist are the disco of Tim Maia

Hip-hop from Urias & Major RD

And the drag queen pop of Pablo Vittar

Putting together this playlist (and the Pop World Cup in general) has reminded me how Anglocentric my music listening usually is, and how much wonderful music is out there from other countries if I only go look for it.

The full playlist can be found below (on Spotify as it is the easiest to embed and remains the most popular streaming service), but should you use another streaming service, as I do, you can use this link to convert the playlist to the streaming service of your choice.