2023 Playlist

After a couple of years of just listing stuff until I got bored, this year I limited my playlist to 40 songs. I also emphasized tracks from albums that won’t make my top ten list, albeit those albums had to land some songs here because I loved them so much. But I’ll note that my top two albums of 2023—I’ll let you see the list in a week or two; I’m still testing it to see if it holds—don’t land a song on here, and only six of the 15 or so albums I graded A- or higher place here. I stand by all 40 tracks here, however. Two hours and 18 minutes of delight.

And, sure, you got your bossas and sambas and post Baden Powell guitar pyrotechnics, but you also have R&B and hard rock sung in English and early ’80s post-punk DOR homage and crazy Sun Ra tribute and disco and loads of globopop (to steal a term from Semipop Life). In other words this playlist is a healthy reminder that music from Brazil doesn’t always fit the strictures anglophones try to impose when we talk about Brazilian music. Brazil and its culture is too deep, too wide, too mutable for outsider ears to make sense of it. For instance, even here you won’t find any sertanejo (Brazilian country music, only that barely makes sense of the style), one of the most popular styles of music in Brazil itself.

So dive in. Listen on shuffle even though the ones toward the very top are sorta ranked. Enjoy. Get a sense of how deep and wide and mutable music from Brazil actually is.