COLUMN ONE
In Rio, Funk Is a Way of Life
The Brazilian music craze captures the contradictions of a
city that seems both
blessed and cursed. Giant dance parties are tied to crime by
some, to social
integration by others.
By SEBASTIAN ROTELLA, Times Staff Writer
RIO DE JANEIRO--DJ Marlboro hurtles into the
Friday night dance
circuit, talking fast and driving faster. His
green Chevrolet
Blazer--plastered with decals of his production
company, Big
Mix--shudders and swerves along a dark curving road
on the frontier
between working-class asphalt and dirt-street slums.
DJ Marlboro looks casual in maroon sweatpants
and a white jersey; he
has nothing to prove. At 34, this smooth, boyish
producer is the prince of
funk, a pioneering impresario of the wildly popular
Brazilian version of the
musical genres known in the United States as rap and
hip-hop.
DJ Marlboro's hands flutter off the wheel,
conducting and arranging
melodies, dialing his cellular phone, reaching into
the glove compartment
for a second phone. He hums, he nods to the rhythms
in his head. He
expounds: The world identifies Rio de Janeiro with
samba music, but that
is ancient history.
"Samba moves this city for a few days during
Carnaval," DJ Marlboro
says. "Funk moves this city all year round."
Brazilian funk is a cultural craze, a way of
dressing and talking, living
and dying. The sound thunders through Rio every
weekend as an
estimated 1 million young people make an epic
pilgrimage to hundreds of
dances. The phenomenon has attracted the interest of
multinational
recording companies and sociologists in recent years.
Police chiefs try to
ban funk dances; political candidates use them as
campaign stops.
Funk has clearly been influenced by the music of
U.S. inner cities, and
the sound and gritty origins are comparable.
But Brazilian funk is ultimately a product of
this startlingly beautiful city of
bays, beaches and lush green mountains, where the
lights of the
favelas--the slums--sparkle like diamonds on the
hilltops and the gunfire
echoes day and night.
Funk captures the contradictions of a city that
seems simultaneously
blessed and cursed. And a night with DJ Marlboro on
the dance circuit
reveals Rio's charm, violence, creativity, injustice
and racial harmony.
"They say this is cultural colonialism, American
music," says Manoel
Ribeiro, an architect and intellectual who is an
authority on funk. "No. It is
an expression of the international black diaspora in
the era of globalization.
The artists . . . produced something that is
authentically Carioca [from Rio].
And as the middle-class kids go up into the hills to
the dances, today funk
is an instrument of social integration."
As DJ Marlboro arrives at a dance at a soccer
stadium in the Pena
district, fans and groupies buzzing around him, the
surrounding favelas are
disgorging crowds of youths.
The neighborhood platoons are known as galeras,
which translates
roughly as "crews" or "posses." They trek on foot or
in buses rented by
promoters to dances in nightclubs, plazas, abandoned
factories. They fork
over $3 to $8 apiece for admission; women often get
in free.
"We go all weekend," Leandro Dias, 17, a
funkeiro from the favela of
Juramento, says with a toothy grin. "I have been
going to the dances since I
was 11."
A hundred strong, the homeboys from Juramento
pour into the
cement-walled soccer stadium whose exterior resembles
a gloomy jail or
a battle-scarred fort. Inside, the whole world is
swaying. The sea of
dancers shimmers with the many colors and ethnicities
of Brazil, waves of
humanity rocked by the tectonic thump of
howitzer-strength amplifiers.
The galera from Juramento enters chanting its
melodic war cry: "The
blood of love flows in my veins / From Mutua to
Koreia to Pombal:
Juramento!"
The chant is a defiant pledge of allegiance to
the neighborhood,
explains Dias, an aspiring singer.
By day, he goes to high school and works
repairing industrial ovens. By
night, he hits the party scene decked out to catch
the eye of the ladies with
funkeiro finery: Basketball shoes, low-slung jeans
with embroidered fringe,
a loose button-down shirt, an earring, a baseball cap
decorated with
emblems of Tweety Bird and the Orlando Magic.
"Bermuda shorts are real popular too," Dias
explains. "They have to be
big and baggy. And Nikes and Reeboks. American
basketball stuff,
American football stuff. At funk dances, everybody
gets together, middle
class, upper class. It's a fever. And it keeps
growing."
On stage, the group Movimento Funky Club churns
out tunes that
intersperse Portuguese with English phrases such as
"party people in the
house." The rotund lead singer wears dark glasses; he
resembles a
number of portly U.S. rappers. Three striking female
dancers writhe in
shorts and halter tops to Rio's reigning hit: Eu Sou
Maluco! (I Am Crazy!)
The galeras do their thing in the dirt field
below: They jump up and down
in unison, they snake through the crowd single file
in lines known as "little
trains." And the rival groups continually face off
and stare each other down.
They stake out turf in a tribal ritual of solidarity
and confrontation, while
hulking security guards line the middle of the dance
floor, forming walls of
muscle between prospective combatants.
The dances are a volatile cocktail: the rival
neighborhood groups, the
pounding music, the cocaine and marijuana that some
kids use to get
cranked up for the night. It can get, to say the
least, rowdy.
"Kids have died," says Rafael Carlantonio, 15.
"I myself become violent
sometimes. I can't explain it. Not only guys, the
girls fight too."
The media and the police associate funk with the
raging street crime
that makes Rio one of the most violent cities in
South America. There have
been rumbles in which busloads of party-goers
exchanged gunfire. In the
toughest slums, it is no surprise that the drug lords
control funk concerts
as well as just about everything else.
But the promoters fight the stigma. Funk has
unjustly become a code
word for the poor, black and violent, DJ Marlboro says:
"They talk as if everything bad that happens is
because of funk. The
public perception has connected funk to drug
trafficking and violence.
There are 500 dances every weekend. Maybe 10 of them
have problems.
But those dances get all the attention, instead of
the other 490."
Despite the events' size and the potential for
disaster, the problems
generally do not get worse than fistfights. Funk has
bred a controlled and
ritualized form of combat. At "corridor dances,"
galeras square off across a
neutral zone patrolled by security guards, trading
insults and punches.
Corridor dances have faded, outlawed by many
promoters. Still, the idea
of channeled combat survives. It evokes the Brazilian
tradition of capoeira,
a blend of dance and martial arts invented in the
days of slavery.
"A rich kid can go to an academy and learn
karate to channel his
aggressions," says Jose Carles of Furacao 2000, a
promotion company
that produces a top-rated, "Soul Train"-type show for
television. "A poor kid
can't afford a gym. The dances are a place where they
can blow off steam."
Funk culture has foreign and Brazilian roots. In
the 1970s and 1980s,
African American singers such as James Brown and Sly
and the Family
Stone were popular among Brazilians of African and
mixed-race heritage,
who account for more than half the population.
But the rise of rap and hip-hop took its own
path in Brazil. Instead of the
big-name rappers from New York and the West Coast who
dominate the
airwaves in the United States, Brazilians were drawn
to the more tropical,
festive sound of artists based in Miami. The idols of
Brazilian artists are
relatively obscure singers from Miami such as Stevie B.
"The Miami sound is more melodic, more Latin,"
says DJ Marlboro.
"Miami and Rio are culturally very similar."
Performers in the humble districts of Rio
created a musical stew mixing
U.S. bass and synthesizer sounds with fragments of
samba and other
Brazilian genres. At first they sang in English,
mispronouncing with
cheerful gusto. Refrains such as "Whoops! There it
is!" became parodic
nonsense verses in Portuguese.
The breakthrough came in the early 1990s: DJ
Marlboro, whose real
name is Fernando Luis Mattos da Matta, realized that
listeners wanted
lyrics in Portuguese.
The result was a modern-day example of
antropofagia, a Brazilian
cultural movement of the 1920s that espoused the
melding of foreign and
national art forms, according to Ribeiro, the
architect. "Marlboro perceived
the advantage, the opportunity to sing in
Portuguese," he says. "Funk
became something that everyone was singing."
The words and attitude were quintessentially
Rio. Despite the
desperate conditions in which millions of its
inhabitants live, the city's
festive, sensual spirit shapes its music. Funk
artists sing about their
neighborhoods, parties, romance.
Even songs about police brutality or poverty,
Ribeiro says, "lack the
aggressiveness that characterizes the rappers in Los
Angeles or Sao
Paulo," Brazil's biggest city and industrial capital,
where a fledgling school
of performers imitates hard-core U.S. rappers.
Because funk has a huge market and is cheap and
easy to perform, it
has caused a street-level entrepreneurial revolution.
Everybody wants to be
a disc jockey.
In the favela of Vigario Geral, a teenager named
Andrea brightens when
asked about funk. He pulls a cassette from his
pocket. It contains a
primitive tune produced by his cousin, an aspiring
artist who raps about a
police raid in the neighborhood. Other deejays
compose songs glorifying
drug lords, hoping the flattery will get them spots
in concerts financed by
gangsters.
The dreams are inspired by the home-grown origin
stories of songs
such as "I Am Crazy." It started when a shoe salesman
leaped onstage
during a wild moment at a dance and bellowed into the
microphone "I am
crazy." His voice had a hoarse power that caught the
ear of the disc jockey,
who mixed the words over a beat. A hit was born.
The title has worked its way into everyday
speech in Rio; the song plays
at soccer games to pump up the fans. The shoe
salesman hired a couple
of flashy backup dancers and went into show business.
"Funk has opened new doors for kids in favelas,"
Ribeiro says. "These
are kids who don't have formal education; otherwise,
they would be in the
street selling melons. You have hundreds of musicians
now who live off
this, making records, playing at dances. This is a
new dimension that is
more than musical."
At the top of the cottage industry are promoters
like DJ Marlboro. He
makes records in a house-studio where rooms are piled
with crates of
CDs and T-shirts. He sells as many as 50,000 copies
and discovers stars
who go on to sign with international labels.
His hottest discoveries include Claudinho and
Buchecha. DJ Marlboro
pays the duo a Friday night call as they sit in a big
van outside a nightclub,
waiting to go onstage. Both are in their 20s,
clean-cut kids disarmingly
unfazed by fame.
They grew up in the outlying Salguero
neighborhood. Claudinho worked
as a street vendor and Buchecha as an office boy
while they performed at
singing contests among galeras. After they won at a
festival in 1993, their
style--they croon a cappella openings to
songs--started to catch on.
"We liked all kinds of music: American music,
hip-hop, Brazilian," says
Claudinho. "Since we were kids, we liked to sing."
A few years later, they were given their first
gold album by Xuxa, the
blond TV personality who epitomizes mainstream
success in Brazil. Now
the duo hit the weekend dance circuit, earning $500
apiece per
performance.
"We have big responsibilities we didn't have
before," says Claudinho.
"Over time we have had to become adults. There's a
lot of funk singers, a
lot of competition."
Sitting in the back of the van, Claudinho thumbs
through a
Portuguese-English dictionary. He and Buchecha still
live in the
neighborhood where they grew up, but they dream about
visiting a musical
mecca one day: Los Angeles.
Copyright Los Angeles Times
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Elson Trinidad
Los Angeles, CA, USA
elson@westworld.com * http://www.westworld.com/~elson
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