Archive for the ‘favelas’ Category

« Older Entries

Tech Savvy

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

picture-2

Looks like I may be prodding some funkeiros to the LAN house after all.  I was worried that MCs like Beto da Caixa, who never showed much interest in communicating from afar, would become lost contacts as I hopefully shift to a more digital distribution model.  But then Beto popped up in my inbox — with curiously perfect English to boot (I don’t think he speaks a word of it) — sending over a track by MC Jota from Borel, the favela nearest to where Beto lives (and home to famous funk artists  like Duda do Borel and until recently DJ Sandrinho).  The vocal mix is a little raw and it claims to be “light,” but the gunshots suggest there is a proibidão version lurking out there somewhere.  I like the radio sample at the beginning — something I’ve heard on quite a few recent tracks.  The other samples I’m having trouble placing — a beep, but rich rather than tinny, and then almost a parrot squawk?  They had some color to this otherwise straightforward reppin’ the hood rap.  “No Borel é nós que tá / Por isso eu faço a rima” (In Borel, that’s where we at / That’s why I’m cutting this rhyme).

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in brazil, favelas, mpfree, tech | No Comments »

City of Walls

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Google satellite doesn’t lie:

picture-1

“Throughout this century, social segregation has had at least three different forms of expression in São Paulo’s urban space.  The first lasted from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s and produced a condensed city in which different social groups were packed into a small urban area and segregated by type of housing.  The second urban form, the center-periphery, dominated the city’s development from the 1940s to the 1980s.  It has different social groups separated by great distances: the middle and upper classes concentrated in central and well-equipped neighborhoods and the poor exiled to the hinterland.  Although residents and social scientists still conceive of and discuss the city in terms of the second pattern, a third form has been taking shape since the 1980s, one that has already exerted considerable influence on São Paulo and its metropolitan region.  Superimposed on the center-periphery pattern, the recent transformations are generating spaces in which different social groups are again closer to one another but are separated by walls and technologies of security, and they tend not to circulate or interact in common areas.  The main instrument for this new pattern of spatial segregation is what I call ‘fortified enclaves.’  These are privatized, enclosed, and monitored spaces for residence, consumption, leisure, and work.  Their central justification is the fear of violent crime.  They appeal to those who are abandoning the traditional public sphere of the streets to the poor, the marginalized, and the homeless.”
–Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls, p. 213

The center of São Paulo is the “green zone” of this Brazilian Baghdad, an analogy made by DJ /rupture but relayed to me secondhand.  One can spend months, years, a lifetime circulating this hive of culture & commerce, pleasure sites for eating, drinking, dancing, without venturing into the periphery (except, blinders on, heading to the airport or on the highway out of the city, headed for distant points, beaches, abroad).  Not unlike the Parisians of Roissy Express.

I myself have been caught up in that capitalist feedback loop during the few times I have been to Sampa, but I felt compelled, in light of Caldeira and the informal cities exhibit at the Museu da Casa Brasileira (a rework of a Harvard GSD exhibit, “Dirty Work,” for which I provided the soundtrack), to pick a bus and simply head out.

dsc05130

Over an hour of standing room only later, I disembarked in Grajau.  Here I had crossed beyond the horizon point, where the viewing platform from the highest building downtown yields high-rises in every direction as far as the eye can see.  The glamour of São Paulo yields to the mundane – a favela on the hillside, a park, a school.  This area, at least was near several bus lines and a train station.  The bolder move would have been to strike out for truly hard to reach territory, but with limited time, I still clung to the familiar spine of easy routes back to the center.

dsc05140

dsc05138

dsc05136

dsc05146

The politics of transportation are a powder keg in Sampa.  I commented to a friend how on major avenues downtown, dedicated bus platforms had electronic signs with accurate displays on which bus lines were coming next and in how many minutes.  Not all buses are created equal, he reminded me, and these were comparatively affluent bus routes, not infrequent, suburban-bound, packed-to-the-door routes.

dsc05147

Meanwhile, the metrô is expanding and even greening, with Paulistanos encouraged to get off of four wheels and onto two.

But not far from Grajau, riots erupted over inadequate bus service.

020869619-ex00

São Paulo is still the undisputed home of “consciência,” conscious music, the hip-hop that speaks truth to power.  A friend tipped me off to Frente 3 de Fevereiro, named after the anniversary of a notorious act of racially-motivated police brutality.  They weld hip-hop, spoken word, funk, and Afro-Brazilian music as they fuse contemporary urban/racial concerns with the deep roots of Afro-Brazilian culture.  Check the website to download the full album.  This is but the preamble to their manifesto:

The February 3rd Front is a multidisciplinary research and direct action group concerned with racism in Brazilian society.  Their approach creates new readings and puts into context the fragmented data that comes to the population through traditional communication channels.  The direct action creates new forms of protest on racial issues.

New strategies are necessary to think and act in a reality of constant transformation, permeated by cultural transformations of diverse processes and meanings.  The February 3rd Front affiliates with the artistic legacy of the generations that have thought of ways to interact with urban space and the history of resistance in Afro-Brazilian culture.

___

“In neighborhoods like Morumbi, streets are leftover spaces, and the material quality of public spaces is simply bad.  Because of the inward orientation of the fortified enclaves, many streets have unpaved sidewalks or none at all, and several streets behind the condominiums are unpaved.  The distances between buildings are large.  Walls are high, out of proportion to the human body, and most of them are topped by electric wires.  Streets are for cars, and pedestrian circulation becomes an unpleasant experience.  The spaces are intentionally constructed to produce this effect.  To walk in Morumbi is a stigma: the pedestrian is poor and suspicious.  People on foot may be workers who live in nearby favelas and who are treated by their richer neighbors with distance and disdain—and, evidently, with fear.  Since middle- and upper-class people circulate in private cars while others walk or use public transportation, there is little contact in public among people from different social classes.  No common spaces bring them together.

The paths inside the favelas are for walking, but the favelas too end up being treated as private enclaves: only residents and acquaintances venture in, and all that is seen from the public streets are a few entrances.  The favelas can be seen in their entirety only from the windows of the exclusive apartments above them.  When both rich and poor residents live in enclaves, passing within the walls is obviously a carefully policed activity, in which class signs are interpreted in order to determine levels of suspicion and harassment.  Empty streets of fixed boundaries and scrutinized differences are spaces of suspicion and not of tolerance, inattention to differences, or wandering around.  They are not enjoyable urban spaces.”
–Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls, p. 310

Caldeira’s argument is less about the sprawling poor periphery, and more about the arrival of wealth in the periphery (cf Alphaville, where I couldn’t enter even if I tried) and the arrival of poverty in the urban core.

I walked in Morumbi at dusk settling into nightfall, dodging the streams of anonymous cars, windows tinted by the dark if not already shaded.  It is uncanny to feel so alone in the middle of the fourth largest city in the world, but that’s the peculiar construction of São Paulo’s fortified environments.  Simple urban exploration is an act of defiance to the auto-centric order.

My destination was the Morumbi counterpart, a tiny favela demarcated by an ‘F’ among the winding suburban-style streets on my map.  The most direct route was stymied by walls and gates, the sprawling condo and shopping mall complex of the Cidade Jardim (but this was no garden city) had cut ostensibly public streets (why map them if they are closed? But then there is a branch of the city government that actually facilitates the gating off of previously through streets).

I was tipped off by the trickle of pedestrians and bicycle riders, the only others not ensconced in automotive security.  They followed one of the spurs off the road to arrive at a cluster of favela architecture, wedged between the looming high-rises (walled off) and a sloping hill down to the Marginal Pinheiros, a highway along one of Sampa’s fetid rivers.  I stopped at a bar at the entrance for a Coca-Cola and asked the name of the community.  “Jardim Panoramica,” the same as the upper-class neighborhood surrounding it.  Even favelas in São Paulo seem to have less character than their Rio’s counterparts.

A dog sniffed around lazily.  A man sat on the steps plucking his guitar.  Neighbors chatted.  It was, as usual, a community at work, even as metropolitan machinations seek to continually wall off the built environment, its citizens, and their citizenship.

How is the view from your balcony pool?

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in brazil, favelas, transportation, urbanism, violence | 2 Comments »

Choque de Ordem

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Last week was my first time back to Rio in a year and a half, and the first time since the election of new mayor Eduardo Paes.  Immediately I perceived some serious efforts at bringing more “order” (whether hard or soft) to this notoriously chaotic and disordered city.  That, in fact, is what the campaign is called, a “choque de ordem,” an “order blitz” to shock the city into cleaning up its act.  In the first five days of the campaign, which began in January, 230 tons of trash were removed from the streets, 1,300 cars were ticketed, and 280 towed, from all parts of the (formal) city, generally targeting the more affluent Zona Sul and Barra da Tijuca as well as the working class Zona Norte.  Not much to argue with there.  An illegal building in nouveau riche Recreio was torn down, although the circumstances were unclear in the news article.  Illegal billboards and posters have been targeted as well, which could equally be affecting large commercial ventures as, say, the mural-style ads for music events that proliferate throughout the city.  On the darker front, 257 homeless people have been removed from downtown and Copacabana — to where and with what resources is also left unclear.

Eduardo Paes is something like Giuliani come to Rio, only the “quality of life” situation can easily take that darker turn here.  The choque de ordem entailed a complete police takeover of the Favela Dona Marta in Botafogo.  All of the traficantes were kicked out and the entire hill is under police control.  The extremely steep hill is reportedly going to play host to a cycling downhill in a few months.  The eventual goal is to retake all of the favelas in the Zona Sul, to finally put to rest the disturbances that upset all the upper-class condo dwellers.  Last month Maga Bo posted on the Rocinha invasion of Ladeira dos Tabajaras, a favela on the hill behind Copacabana.  He copped a proibidão montage that intros with a reporters’ voice about the attack, then mixes gun shots, big ups to the “bonde da Tabajaras,” and yells about those “filhos de puta” (sons of bitches) who came up the hill.   The titles translates as “Rocinha fucked itself.”

Just last Friday, the police invaded Pavão/Pavãozinho, neighbor to Cantagalo (famous for its Friday night baile that I have been frequenting since I first came to Rio).  Maga Bo was at home and told me about the helicopter that circled above the hill for hours and hours, while Wulfie, who lives up further on the hill, finally fled his house for some peace and quiet elsewhere.  The link I provided from RJTV has some video that gives a sense, as Bo pointed out in his Tabajaras post, of how such intense shooting can occur in a dense urban area.

The next morning I picked up a copy of O Globo, which in its usual prejudicial fashion emphasized that residents of Copacabana and Ipanema were disrupted by the shootout, only mentioning the obvious effect on the residents of the favela itself much deeper in the story.  The RJTV article is again more charitable, focusing on the schools that were forced to close and the park full of children that cleared out immediately.  In such a dense urban area, it is precisely this matter of proximity that matters, and while I respect the discomfort and potential danger (stray bullets have been known to lodge themselves outside the hill) that such violent activity has on the residents of Copacabana and Ipanema, it unquestionably has a worse effect on residents of Cantagalo and Pavão/Pavãozinho.  However, the implicitly classist (and by extension racist) interpretation of mainstream Brazilian media, especially the Globo empire, will always focus on the affected by virtue of wealth before taking a more objective perspective.

Ultimately it’s a matter of property values, with citizens who own more expensive real estate believing they have the right to better city services (which in the case of Rio, include a heavier police presence in the neighborhood favela).  I read another article that same day about an apartment building near the entrance to the tunnel that leads to Rocinha, which has become an informal gathering spot for the unlicensed vans that supplement the bus system.  Between the motors and the cobradors calling out stops, the noise has apparently led some to sell their places and subsequently devalued the property.  Real estate, again, is the supposed justification to make the city step in.  But favelas are what one economist calls “unreal estate,” although they have a way of exerting their own pressure to get something done about their lack of services, mostly when the pressure of their communities spills over the hillside.  Sadly, the police invasion once again interrupted the ongoing work of the PAC (Accelerated Growth Program), a nationwide initiation that Lula was touting in the favela of Manguinhos today.

The baile was canceled as a result, echoes of 2006 when one Friday I climbed the Cantagalo stairs only to be told “não tem baile a causa da guerra” (no baile on account of the war).  I went to Rocinha the next night instead for a blow out with “todos os novos ritmos” (all the new rhythms).  Wulfie says the baile funk (in the sense of the funk played at the baile) is moving to more “trippy” instrumentals and aquecimentos (warm ups) and less aggressive tamborzão with MCs.  Sandrinho told me something similar, that the music is becoming more dancefloor friendly, better for “a mulherada” (the women), who now make up a majority at the baile.  In the thousands thronging the Curve do S bus garage I had trouble telling, but there was plenty of everybody — age and gender.  The DJing that night more or less bore out those claims, although I still don’t know what to make of the ten minute psy-trance breakdown.

Leaving Rocinha with ears ringing at 5 am it’s hard to think the city is really becoming that much more “ordered,” that the tropical entropy of Rio will surely outlast Eduardo Paes.  How sustainable from a financial perspective is it to completely occupy a favela 24/7 with police?  Can they do it to all of the Zona Sul, even Rocinha?  How many people will have to die in the process?  What will the spillover be?  MC Gringo says a bunch of Dona Marta refugees came over his way to Pereira da Silva, where they were big-upped on the mic at a baile right as the BOPE (SWAT team) arrived — uh-oh.  A few thousand rounds later, the quadra needed a new roof.

It’s hard to escape the Rio 2016 candidate posters across the city, especially since the IOC made its official visit only a month ago.  Can you imagine Eduardo Paes’ embarrassment as they drive past favela after favela?  “You will have the situation ‘under control’ by 2016, yes?” askes Jacques Rogge.  As they toured the Engenho Novo Stadium built for the Pan-American Games in 2007, did they notice the entrance where iron gates were built to cut off the neighboring favela?  I can see it on NBC now: Panoramic shots of favela hillsides on TVs worldwide, mirroring the opening sequence of Ônibus 174.  Surely the IOC wants to give the global south its due and award South America its first Olympics.  I have a feeling I feel be returning in 2016 to report on the Olympic torch’s ability to burn what it doesn’t illuminate.

logo_rio_2016

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in brazil, favelas, mpfree, music, politix, sports, violence | No Comments »

Tropa de Cultura

Friday, November 28th, 2008


Even if it’s old news in Brazil, I’m due to provide a refresher on Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad in English). It was directed by José Padilha as the second film in a trio that began with Bus 174, the documentary of a hostage taking on a Rio bus that was captured by national TV to disastrous results. His cinematic vision is to tackle the city’s central pressing issues — violent crime, the drug trade, police corruption and brutality. In Tropa de Elite, he focuses on the BOPE, Rio’s equivalent of a SWAT team, that conducts intense operations in favelas — usually with callous disregard for human life. Shoot first, ask questions later, as it were. Their ostentatiously violent symbol makes that abundantly clear (“It looks like a biker gang in the third reich.”)

I first watched it in Rocinha with some 2Bros folks, where the scene portraying BOPE invasions of the favela were eerily similar to real life. We had a pirated copy that had leaked in August 2007, just a week or two before my departure. It had already spread like wildfire, and by the time of its official release in October, it was seen by a reported 11.5 million Brazilians. Not much the copyright police can do about that.

Most interestingly, it was equally popular among all strata of society, but for opposite reasons. Favelados were on the side of the victimized favelados as well as cavalier gangsters, and a friend of a friend was proud to have been an extra as a bandido. The middle and upper classes were taken by protagonist Capitão Nascimento, whose strongarm, torture tactics elicited applause in movie houses.

In a country whose moneyed interests frequently feel that the drug trade can only be reined in by extra-legal measures, Nascimento’s take no prisoners attitude made him, as this magazine cover argues, a new national hero.

Padilha cannily rejects any claims that his film endorses either side of the debate. I saw him speak at the Harvard Film Archive last spring, where he maintained the position that the film was a portrayal designed to spark dialogue, not a polemic. In short, he’s let the film be a mirror on its viewers’ own prejudices and opinions about the power relations in Rio.

I don’t think a strong-willed director tackling such challenging subjects should get off so easily. Surely there was some authorial intent. For one, the group that comes off the most negatively in the film are the wealthy college students who patronize the drug trade — they provide the funds that keep the whole operation going, much to the detriment of folks who live just a few miles away up in the hills (on a longer scale, Colombia is taking the anti-cocaine message to middle-class Europeans).

Those folks, meanwhile, get their fair due of fun for a brief moment at the beginning of the film, with a stellar baile funk scene that tragically ends in a police-gang shootout. It’s chopped up by the opening credits, as you can see in this trailer, but the shots come the closest I’ve seen on screen to a baile funk, or at least one c. 1997.

I say 1997 because that’s the setting of the film, not too long after Rocinha brothers Júnior and Leonardo popularized one of the classics of funk carioca, “Rap das Armas,” which they sing live in this opening scene. I documented a recent acapella usage and linktubed to a Yo! MTV Raps-esque version during my Rocinha sojourn. The popularity of “Rap das Armas” as the theme song to the film was a real turn of fortunes for Júnior and Leonardo, who I met around the same time in August 2007 just as they were preparing to tour Europe in advance of the film’s release there. After skyrocketing to fame in the early ’90s, they became increasingly impoverished until they were reduced to driving a taxi cab on 12-hour shifts each, so the car was constantly in rotation. Now they’re back in the driver’s seat, so to speak, as funk MCs.

This version is from the official Tropa de Elite soundtrack, which amazingly is on sale stateside, as is the DVD. It cycled around some film festivals in the U.S. this year, but I never saw it make much of a splash in wide release. I was convinced it would become the next City of God, a lush but violent film about Rio, set to further fix foreigners’ minds that the city is a violent nightmare. I guess I was wrong. But if you don’t want to shell out for the official copy, you can see it for yourself with English subtitles.

With such broad appeal, meanwhile, it was only a matter of time before edits/dubs/remixes trickled out of the Brazilian webosphere. In fact, to permit a cross-linguistic pun — Tropa became a trope, its catch phrases and music trotted out in all manner of remix culture fashion. Below is a sampling of the samples –

  • Capitão Nascimento viciously berates his wife as his battles in the field increasingly rattle him. He created a new slang term, “Quem manda nessa porra sou eu” (I’m the one who controls this shit), that caught on rapidly, enough to become remixed as a funk track.

  • Brazilian humor site Kibe Loco has some video remixes cobbling together scenes from the film with tamborzão, crunchy guitar (and in the first, the riff from “Seven Nation Army”), and popular lines from the movie. The stutter-start chopped scenes actually recreate the funk vocal sampling technique with some accuracy.

Posted in cinematic, favelas, free culture, funk, globalization, remix, rio, sample, viewtube, violence, viral | 3 Comments »

Mnml do Morro

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

Brasil still on my mind — stripped down & sped up.

First, there was some percussive ferocity lingering in my inbox, c/o Daniel D’Errico. He plays in Boston’s BatukAxé, a drum group led by Bahian Marcus Santos. Up above, they’re playing at the “Welcoming New Bostonians” event, holding it down for the constant stream of Brazucas coming to the Bean. (Daniel is the odd one out in the yellow shirt.)

BatukAxé (Marcus Santos’ Bateria) by gregzinho

Then wayne&wax tipped me off to Discobelle’s most recent Mixin’ It Up by DJ Downtown of Helsinki (what is it with the Finns?! tropical living vicariously through funk carioca?) The opening track is a stripped down version of “Rap das Armas“, the ever controversial and ever misinterpreted telling-it-like-it-is funk track. This version sounds like the one re-recorded for Tropa de Elite, which I shamefully never blogged about, although you can read up on all the fuss from last year over at the now defunct BOPE Blog.

Posted in bateria, beantown, blogosphere, favelas, funk, globalization, immigration | No Comments »

Electoral Maps

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

It’s an off-year election season in Brazil, too, where my man Cabide DJ actually ran for vereador (selectman or alderman) of his town, São Gonçalo, just over the Guanabara Bay from Rio proper. Unfortunately, he didn’t make it past the primary, but I don’t think we need to worry about him quitting his day (night?) job: being O No. 1 Sampler do Brasil. See him live at the Milky Way in just a couple hours.

That said, a friend recently sent me an interesting campaign tool released by Fernando Gabeira, PV (Green Party) candidate for mayor of Rio. He’s most famous for having helped kidnap the American ambassador in 1968 to protest the military dictatorship, which resulted in his exile (the event was later made into an Oscar-winning movie, “Four Days in September“). Gabeira has since given up armed revolution for politics, however, although his cultural revolution continued on Rio’s beaches. After a distinguished career as a deputy, hopefully his strident leftist voice will now put him in charge of the city.

Like any mayoral candidate, he wants to address the overwhelming issue of the criminal factions that run the drug trade. How anyone is going to stem that tide is beyond me, but if calling a spade a spade is a start, then he’s on his way:


Exibir mapa ampliado

This is a map of all the favelas in Rio, color coded by the ruling faction (one of the three gangs, or independent vigilantes called milícias. There are symbols for recent flare ups as well. Laying it out like that is a very stark — and very powerful — method of recognizing the scope of the problem. I wish him luck on Sunday.

p.s. On a lighter note, there are several Barack Obamas running in Brazilian local elections this weekend.

Posted in favelas, politix, rio, violence | No Comments »

Favela Keeps Getting Chicer

Friday, May 30th, 2008

Paris and London have long had their own corner favela serving up $10 caipirinhas made from $1 bottles of 51 cachaça. Tomorrow, the NYC crowd will be able to get its own first-world favela fix.

Among Brazilian immigrants in the U.S., at least in the plentiful Brazilian Boston (or more accurately Cambridge/Somerville) community, the universal referents for Brazilianness are fairly typical: futebol, Rio, samba. But it seems the CDD phenomenon definitely had an impact: Among the chic, favelas are the real stand-in for Brazil.

I don’t doubt they deserve visibility, but consumer consumption at expensive nightspots is hardly a helpful way of getting it. When it comes to favela chic, this is more my style.

Posted in beantown, brazil, fashion, favelas, nyc, rio | No Comments »

Unlabeled: The Anonymous as Exotic in Presenting Proibidão

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

[Update: The folks at norient.com liked this paper enough to publish it. It's missing the hyperlinks from the blogaversion, but still nice to see it circulated it further afield.]

[The reason I went on down to New Orleans after all was for the BRASA conference, where I appeared on the panel: "Raps do Parapapá: Representations of Violence in Brazilian Funk Carioca," organized by Paul Sneed, of 2Bros fame. Below is the paper I presented, modified for the blogging public with some links &c]

The existence of this CD, Proibidão CV, the subject of my talk, is due in no small part to the efforts of American DJ Wesley Pentz, aka Diplo, who first brought funk to a certain kind of American audience: young, musically au courant, tapped into wider hip-hop and dance music scenes that include music from across the United States, Jamaica, other parts of the Caribbean, the UK, Latin America, and increasingly Africa. Beginning in 2003, he released two funk mixes, “Favela On Blast” and “Favela Strikes Back”, and included several funk tracks on his mixtape “Piracy Funds Terrorism,” which was a promotional tool for the Sri Lankan by way of London artist M.I.A., who in turn borrowed some aspects of funk to make a bricolage of global urban beats that catapulted her to pop stardom.

However, whether out of a desire to monopolize access to funk or simply out of carelessness or even ignorance, Diplo’s inaugural funk efforts were notoriously devoid of any contextual information. In particular, artist and track names are simply nonexistent. The two exclusively funk mixes do not come with track listings even though some tracks are by extremely well known artists like Bonde do Vinho. The mixtape, meanwhile, is more egregious. It features a mixture of commercial hip-hop, recordings of M.I.A., and funk. The latter, however, is listed only as “Baile Funk 1,” “Baile Funk 2,” “Baile Funk 3.” [I should add that “baile funk” has become the name for funk among non-Brazilians.]

Diplo was criticized somewhat for this disservice, although ultimately let off the hook. Music critic Nick Sylvester, reviewing Favela Strikes Back for Pitchfork Media in June 2005, argues “But 10 wrongs do make five rights, and if Diplo’s shtick is bringing this shanty to the world in a way they might respond to and ultimately might take vested interest in (read: $$$), then let’s drop the charges for now and indulge the music as wide-eyed as he does.” While I don’t share Sylvester’s laissez-faire attitude, I’ll nevertheless point out that Diplo has at least made recent efforts to act less like a “culture vulture,” including plans to open a branch of HeapsDecent, an NGO that offers music production workshops, in the favela of Cantagalo in the Zona Sul of Rio de Janeiro. He is also working on a movie, Favela On Blast, that purports to put names, faces, and stories to what he had previously presented as anonymous.

Anonymity, however, is the order of the day in this recent release by the label Sublime Frequencies, Proibidão C.V.: Forbidden Gang Funk from Rio de Janeiro. Its liner notes, after providing a brief, simplified, and somewhat inaccurate explanation of proibidão, read: “Recorded and assembled by Carlos Casas. Courtesy of some anonymous MCs and DJs in different bailes along the favelas of Zona Sul, Rio de Janeiro during March-April 2003.” On the opposing page, it prominently states: “All artists are Anonymous. All tracks are Untitled.” It then lists the tracks as “Untitled Proibidao CV” numbers 1-17. [Italics are my own.] For the listener who doesn’t know any Portuguese that, unfortunately, is the end of it. However, a closer listen reveals a more complex CD than the providers are willing to admit, or perhaps are even aware of, in their liner notes.

To begin with, there is little indication that all of the tracks take place in the Zona Sul, as track 3 sings of “tranqulidade na Mangueira,” track 10 speaks of a “Festa da Jacaré” in addition to mentioning Vidigal, both 7 and 11 indicate that they are from “Borel”, and #2 perform the well-known trope of poetically listing a series of favelas from across the city. Conversely, Rocinha, the stated source of the photographs in the CD package, is not mentioned once. Instead, the photos, which do not document any act of criminal behavior to my eye, implicitly link favelas with the drug trade. It’s an unfair generalization — a CD of proibidão, therefore it needs photos of favelas no matter what they show.

The liner notes also mention “the explicit lyrics of apology to drug gangs and the violent content.” I will not dispute that this is present, as tracks 4 & 5 – which appear to be a continuation of the same live recording and not separate tracks – declare, “Hoje vai ter churrasco pra geral / só ninguém vai comer” when speaking of burnt bodies in a prison riot at Bangú 1. On the other hand, there is a more thoughtful view in track #15.

It opens with a protest against stereotypes in a clever call and response: “Dizem que nós somos violentos / Mas desse jeito eu não aguento / Dizem que lá falta educação / Não é desse jeito não / Dizem que não temos competência / Mas isso sim que é violência / Que só sabemos fazer refrão.” (They say we’re violent / But this shit I don’t buy / They say we lack education / That’s not it at all / They say we’re not competent / But that right there is violence / That we only know how to cut refrains”) Later, the MC sings affirmatively: “Nós temos escola / nós temos respeito” (We have schools / we have respect) and “cidadão brasileiro e tenho meu valor” (Brazilian citizen and I have my value). Such sentiments are hardly the one-dimensional view that the CD Proibidão CV presents. The prominent spelling of “Cidade de Deus” also makes it clear that this is another track not from the Zona Sul.

Likewise, something beyond apology for the drug trade is taking place in track #12. While the reference to the Comando Vermelho motto “Paz, Justiz, e Liberdade” would affirm its status as proibidão, the earlier lines are of considerable interest. “Eu sei que um dia a gente saí daqui / Não sei o dia e nem sei a hora. / Mas sei que um dia a gente vai embora.” There is an escapist, and I believe even utopian, impulse in these lines. Will “a gente” leave by escaping the cycle of violence, by leaving their community, by dying in a blaze of glory in a gun battle? This open-ended vision credits more toward the insightful analysis of Paul Sneed, who I’m sharing this table with, in his dissertation on proibidão: “Machine Gun Voices: Bandits, Favelas and Utopia in Brazilian Funk.”

Indeed, it is precisely a perspective like Paul’s this is lacking in Sublime Frequencies’ presentation of proibidão. They conclude in the liner notes, “This CD is in no way an apology for these groups, but a document to portray a moment in time in Rio de Janeiro musical and social history.” On their website, meanwhile, they declare the label’s mission: “SUBLIME FREQUENCIES is a collective of explorers dedicated to acquiring and exposing obscure sights and sounds from modern and traditional urban and rural frontiers via film and video, field recordings, radio and short wave transmissions, international folk and pop music, sound anomalies, and other forms of human and natural expression not documented sufficiently through all channels of academic research, the modern recording industry, media, or corporate foundations.”

Such rhetoric is a dodge. If indeed they are “explorers” on the “urban frontier” of Rio de Janeiro seeking to “portray” a particular “moment,” then they are uninformed explorers who make no effort to explain the parameters of that moment – where, when, why. Instead, they let the listener concoct his or her own vision of Rio’s favelas based on abrasive beats, gruff voices, and the sampled sound of gunshots.

Such a proposition – suggesting the violence of Rio’s favelas without fleshing that concept in with details – is reminiscent of the attitude that Alex Bellos takes in an article on proibidão for online music publication Blender. He opens the article, “Coke. Guns. Booty. Beats.” with the declaration that funk is “the most dangerous – and most exciting – underground club scene in the world.” The implicit link, however, is that it is the most exciting because it is the most dangerous. The same principle is at work in Proibidão C.V. – one doesn’t need to actually know what the songs are saying; rather, the music should be exciting simply because of its violent, dangerous context. In both cases, exciting is also a substitute for exotic, for the exotic is exciting as well because it intimates danger. I should add that Sublime Frequencies traffics principally in “exotic” locales like “Java, Bali, Sumatra, Burma, Morocco, Thailand, India, Mali, Syria, Laos, Cambodia, and Nepal.”

Anonymity, then, is indeed the rub. I am certain that a lack of knowledge of Portuguese, both among foreigners like Diplo and among their audience, plays a role. However, I think there is a more sinister impulse at work as well. For anonymity ultimately implies unknowability. Radical urbanist Mike Davis provides a chilling account of the consequences of unknowability in Planet of Slums. He concludes the book by arguing that the Pentagon is the only global institution to take seriously the implications of rapid slum growth in large urban areas. He cites U.S. military tactics, which “assert that the ‘feral, failed cities’ of the Third World – especially their slum outskirts – will be the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century” and continues by quoting an Air Force theorist writing in the Aerospace Power Journal: “Rapid urbanization in developing countries results in a battlespace environment that is decreasingly knowable since it is increasingly unplanned.” But the attitude that slums are going to be the next global battleground, perhaps because of their unknowability, is not limited to the U.S. military. One only need look as far as a recent edition of O Globo to find the polícia civil or, in more extreme cases, the BOPE in blockbuster hit Tropa de elite, engaging in such tactics, trying to bring Rio’s favelas back under the city’s control. Unplanned favelas are unknowable spaces to the uninitiated. They are, moreover, soundtracked by proibidão. But when proibidão is presented as anonymous and unknowable, as in the case here, then it does nothing to increase knowledge – and knowability – about both the music and its environment. Instead, it only encourages the exoticization of both, a process whose consequences may be extremely dire.

Posted in academish, ethics, favelas, funk, proibidão, rio | 10 Comments »

Favela Passport

Thursday, January 31st, 2008


I first heard of the Grupo Cultural AfroReggae, an NGO that uses culture to keep favela youth out of drug trafficking, when I saw the documentary Favela Rising before my first trip to Rio in ‘06. Why I didn’t take the initiative to volunteer with them then is beyond me, but I’ve been an admirer ever since and have slowly managed to visit most of their outposts around Rio — always located in the favelas that they serve, always upbeat, always brightly painted and well-maintained. Culture is our weapon indeed.



Their newest nucleus in the notorious Complexo do Alemão opened in the midst of a vicious police operation that was the talk of Rio. The national guard was still stationed at the entrance when I visited later in August.


AfroReggae was still unpacking when I dropped by, and most of my visit ended up being in the company of Flávia, a 1o-year-old girl whose mother cleans the building. Flávia kept pestering me to take pictures of her, and I was happy to oblige.



She told me that she hadn’t been to the beach in the 3 years, that teenagers sell drugs outside of her school (but she knows drugs are stupid), that she can only play a few feet in front of her house, that school was canceled during the recent police blockade. And here she was turning cartwheels on the roof with Alemão all around her. I was reading a book at the time whose title couldn’t be more appropriate — Favela: Alegria e Dor na Cidade (Favela: Joy and Pain in the City).

I headed off with the goal of visiting AfroReggae Digital, their Internet radio station (tune in!), located in Parada de Lucas, in the Zona Norte (north side) at the border with the suburbs. Lucas was at war with neighboring Vigário Geral, where the founder of AfroReggae is from, for almost two decades. It was a big step, then, for VG-based AfroReggae to open a nucleus on the other side of the tracks (literally, the SuperVia rail line divides the two communities).

I didn’t make it before leaving in August, but I was able to go earlier this week.


More than just a radio station that uses radio as an educational tool, it’s a whole community center, serving a neighborhood of 20,000-25,000 . . . as the only NGO. In contrast, I’ve heard that Rocinha has more than 80 for a population of approximately 200,000. In other words, there are 10x more NGOs per resident in Rocinha than in Lucas. That, unfortunately, is part of the divide between the Zona Sul and Zona Norte, with the Zona Sul consistently getting more investment and attention.

It was here, though, that one of the AfroReggae Digital organizers told me about the new HQ going up in Vigário Geral to be inaugurated in April. It will be open 24/7 and has been described as the favela Guggenheim — a curious comparison in light of other Guggen-de-Janeiro proposals I’ve commented on. I can’t wait to see it the next time I come back.

Finally, yesterday I hit a third AfroReggae nucleus, back down on my end in the Zona Sul at Cantagalo, the favela between Ipanema and Copacabana. I’ve been to Cantagalo many, many times now for their baile funk and finally had the chance to return in the daytime. The prime location commands some great views . . .


That’s the cidade partida (divided city) for you right there.


The Cantagalo operation teaches, of all things, the circus. Júnior, the founder, got connected with Cirque de Soleil and now it’s part of the AfroReggae stew. I caught them rehearsing for a visit by representatives of the Barbican Centre, a London arts behemoth, where AfroReggae has performed before, and will be artists-in-residence or a similar arrangement later this year.



Their director made a very telling comment in my interview with him. He said he sees his AfroReggae t-shirt not a shield — one that will let you pass between rival favelas as a neutral entity — but as a passport — one that enables you to enter them and mediate conflicts, which he saw as AfroReggae’s main goal.

I got a shirt for my trouble (and in truth picked one up last year, so that makes two), so I’ll be wearing my passport on Sunday when the Bloco AfroReggae does its Carnaval parade in Ipanema.

Posted in NGOs, favelas, rio | 1 Comment »

Dirty Work

Monday, January 28th, 2008


For those cooped up in the Beantown cold, the Rio summer heat will be there in sound&spirit tonight at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for the opening of “Dirty Work: Transforming Landscape in the Non-Formal City of the Americas.” The exhibit is up through March 16, and tomorrow (January 30), I encourage everyone to see Robert Neuwirth speak on the “21st century medieval city.” His book Shadow Cities was a huge influence on my own understanding of Rio, and in fact he put me in touch with Two Brothers — I certainly would not be sitting in the room I’m writing from if it weren’t for him.

I can’t be there in person to tonight (7 or 8 pm, I’d guess? No time listed on the site) for obvious reasons, so instead I sent in the following mix&commentary that will be played&displayed during the opening. It’s practically another Blogariddims contribution (& one of the 76-minute specials at that) featuring tracks that diligent readers/listeners will recognize from both my own blogariddims funk mix and postings throughout the last year(s), but hopefully now contextualized in a different way. And of course, there’s stuff I got just a few days ago, so it’s fresh all around.

I’m quite happy about the title’s twist on the name of the class that produced the exhibit (see below) — the catchier Low Income Tomorrowland was unfortunately already taken.
___

Landscaped Beats for Low-Income Strategies
Mixed by Gregzinho in the favela of Rocinha
Rio de Janeiro, January 2008
75:46

The tracks in this mix come from the favelas, suburbia, periferia, villas miserias, or, in more technical parlance, low-income settlements, of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires, three of the seven cities featured in the exhibit “Dirty Work: Transforming Landscape in the Non-Formal City of the Americas,” a product of the Harvard Graduate School of Design class Landscape Strategies for Low-Income Settlements. The other four are certainly also rich in music that has its strongholds in the cities’ barrios, from Colombian cumbia and hip-hop (Bogotá) to reggaetón and other Caribbean sounds (Caracas), to Mexican music both traditional and contemporary (Mexico City and Tijuana). However, I was limited by what I know personally—having been to Rio, Sampa, and BsAs, I’m intimately familiar with samba, funk carioca, cumbia villeira, and Brazilian hip-hop and reggae. Tranquilo? Pronto? Vamos.

1. Dudu Nobre – Batucada 01

Dudu Nobre is a young, popular samba composer out of Rio de Janeiro and the fierce rhythms of batucada, a percussion-heavy samba variation with strong African influence, set a proper tone to start things off.

2. G.R.E.S. Imperatriz Leopoldinense – Liberdade! Liberdade! Abre as Asas Sobre Nós (Liberty! Liberty! Open Your Wings Above Us)

The story of the rise of samba in Rio—and later Brazil writ large—is inextricably tied to the growth of the city’s favelas, where samba—once outlawed for being too African—took refuge in the first decades of the 20th century. Groups of sambistas who performed routines around Carnaval began organizing themselves in escolas (schools) around 1930 and by the post-war era became the premiere attraction at Carnaval time. This 1989 samba enredo (story samba, the elaborate, scripted routines performed in the official parade at the Sambódromo) commemorates the centenary of the proclamation of the Republic of Brazil, which was precipitated by the abolition of slavery a year prior in 1888—itself an important theme in the 1988 sambas, especially given samba’s origins in slave music. Imperatriz Leopoldinense hails from the Ramos neighborhood in Rio’s north side, which includes the Complexo da Maré, a large complex of favelas that greets visitors as they get on the Linha Vermelha expressway at the international airport and head downtown.

3. Cartola – Verde Que Te Quero Rosa (Green That I Want You Pink)

Cartola is quite simply the most famous sambista of the 20th century, and one of the founders of the most famous samba school: G.R.E.S. Estação Primeira da Mangueira. Green and pink are Mangueira’s colors and were chosen by Cartola.

4. Digitaldubs Sound System ft. Ras Bernardo – Morro Não Tem Play (The Hill Doesn’t Have Playgrounds)

Digitaldubs is a contemporary reggae sound system in Rio. In addition to importing the latest 7”s and dubs out of Jamaica, they produce and perform their own Brazilian reggae, with MCs toasting in Portuguese and their DJs mixing in other Brazilian music, including funk carioca (see tracks 6-14). This lament about conditions on the morro (hill, a catch-all term for favelas in Rio, which are often located on hills), especially for children, fits perfectly with the social concerns that reggae has traditionally taken up.

5. Capoeira Mestre Suassuna - Macuele

The dance/martial art of capoeira, like samba, has its roots in Brazilian slave culture but has since become a prominent part of Brazilian culture. While the best capoeiristas don’t necessarily come from favelas, the historical link between enslaved black Brazilians, and favelas is well documented historically. No surprise, then, that the ginga (rhythm) of capoeira is cited as an influence on the development of the tamborzão (big drum) beat, which has been the basis of most funk since about 2000.

6. MCs Leonardo e Júnior – Endereço dos Bailes (Address of the Bailes)

Funk carioca (carioca is the adjective to describe someone or something from Rio) or just plain “funk” to those who live it and love it, is something like the new samba—nurtured in favelas, persecuted by authorities, bane of the middle and upper classes, but slowly gaining respectability. Musically, its most direct antecedent is not American funk (from where the name comes) but rather Miami bass, the syncopated, minimal-beats-maximum-bass hip-hop style of the late ’80s (think 2 Live Crew). Black American dance music (funk, disco, soul, early hip-hop and techno) had been popular in Rio for some time, but when Miami bass arrived, it took the black dance crowds by storm and, coupled with technology that allowed producers to record local vocalists on top of looped Miami bass beats, became an immensely popular Brazilian style. “Endereço dos Bailes” is a 1995 track by this duo of brothers from the favela of Rocinha, Rio’s largest, and shouts out the different bailes funk (funk balls) taking place in favelas across the city, forming a kind of alternate tourist map to the one they describe in the opening lines, featuring the usual gamut of sun, soccer, sand, and samba.

7. MCs Cidinho e Doca – Rap da Felicidade (The Happiness Rap)

Also from 1995, this song became a national hit, its plaintive “Eu só quero é ser feliz, andar traquilamente na favela onde eu nasci (I only want to be happy, to walk peacefully in the favela where I was born)” resonating as Rio was racked by violence in the early ’90s. Cidinho and Doca hail from Cidade de Deus (City of God), whose reputation for violent gang activity was immortalized (and to some extent sensationalized) in the Oscar-winning movie of the same time.

8. MCs Leonardo e Júnior – Rap das Armas (The Arms Rap)

Back to the brothers from Rocinha. “Rap das Armas”, from the same era, is another anti-violence song. The lyrics are basically a run down of the different kinds of guns (Uzi, M-16, AK-47, etc.) that the two saw on a daily basis in Rocinha. It concludes with a call for peace, but was misinterpreted by the media as an apology for the criminal factions. They fell on hard times, ultimately working consecutive 12 hour shifts as a taxi driver (so the car was always on the road), but are now rebounding and recorded a new version of “Rap das Armas” for Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), a film that promises to be the new City of God and will be released in the U.S. this year.

9. MC Binho – Meu Sonho (My Dream)

Sticking with Rocinha, but more recently, is MC Binho, a current funk MC who handed me a CD with this track over the weekend. The more electronic, almost techno sound in the track is a new trend in funk production. While definitely a positive dream—to become a big star in music or on TV—it doesn’t have quite the same conscience as the previous three tracks. But then again, I can’t blame the guy: He squeezes his MCing in between shifts working as a cobrador, the guy who takes your fare in one of the vans that supplement the bus system.

10. Beto da Caixa – Blindão

Beto da Caixa is another current artist who deals more directly with the reality of favela life. “Blindão” is a slang term for the favela code of conduct—it comes from the word for ‘armor’—and Beto swears by it in this track. “Tenho fé não tenho medo / A gente é sempre no blindão (I have faith, I don’t have fear / We’re always in blindão),” goes the refrain.

11. Menor do Chapa – Vida Louca (Crazy Life)

Beto’s lyrics hint at one of the obvious preoccupations of funk tracks: the criminal factions that are, for all intensive purposes, the chief authority in a vast majority of the city’s favelas. Funk has evolved as the soundtrack of the favela—blasting out of nearly every corner bar and car window—and a particular subgenre called proibidão (extremely prohibited) sings exclusively about, and in favor of, the factions. Menor do Chapa has built a career praising the Comando Vermelho (Red Command, abbreviated CV), the city’s first, and most notorious, narco-trafficking gang.

12. Anonymous – Proibidão do Cantagalo

While Menor do Chapa’s proibidão has almost gone mainstream, much of it is recorded live or on rough studio equipment and stays very local—as in, specifically about the faction of the MC’s favela. In the case of Cantagalo, the favela between Ipanema and Copacabana, the CV is in charge—“minha facção, claro que é o CV (my faction, clearly it’s CV)”. It’s this kind of proibidão, however, that isn’t just an apology for drug trafficking, but also a vital form of communication within the favela. The proibidão MC speaks from the faction to the community, certainly, but also from the community back to the faction, and can articulate local concerns in communities that don’t have another medium in which to do so. While this role, at least in my opinion, absolves the proibidão MC from being a simple apologist for the gangs, they still tend to remain anonymous because of the possible trouble it can lead to from police or rival gangs.

13. MC Alex – Seu Presidente (Mr. President)

The lo-fi production values are a hallmark of funk—all it takes is a cheap sampler and some mics—as the bricolage quality of the music is, in many ways, reflective of the architecture and visual environment that supports it. Here, MC Alex from a favela in the Zona Norte (I never did get the name of it), sings as a “pobre cidadão” (poor citizen) against both the corruption of politics and the corruption of the gang, the latter complaint having made it very difficult for him to find bailes to perform at, as the gangs are usually the financiers in favelas, throwing huge bailes da comunidade (community balls) that are free to all.

14. DJ Sandrinho – Medley Yazoo

That said, lo-fi production values are becoming a thing of the past, especially among the best DJs and producers who oftentimes have top-notch computers and recording equipment. Funk has commercialized, commanding huge radio audiences and massive festivals, but that doesn’t mean it has entirely left the favela. DJ Sandrinho still lives and maintains his studio in the favela of Borel, despite having been the DJ to Mr Catra, hands down the most in-demand funk MC in all of Brazil, and also having toured Europe several times and had tracks on foreign releases. Clearly, his place of residence hasn’t diminished his access—and interest—in the wide swath of music he pulls into this feijoada de funk: new wave (Yazoo’s “Don’t Go”), early disco-house (Indeep’s “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life”), and commercial alt-rock (Nirvana’s “Come As You Are”). It’s amazing what an Internet connection can do.

15. MV Bill – É Nós e A Gente

Rio rapper MV Bill helped found the Central Única de Favelas (Central Favela Factory, abbreviated CUFA), a national NGO that focuses on hip-hop culture as an alternative to the drug trade. He riffs on the arbitrary divisions of the narco-trafficking world in Rio by juxtaposing “é nós” and “é gente,” two slang expressions that mean the same thing—it’s us—but come from rival gangs, the CV and the Amigos de Amigos (Friends of Friends, abbreviated ADA), respectively.

16. Xis e Profeta – Us Mano e As Mina (Profmix)

MV Bill is really an exception to the rule: Funk is the music of Rio, and hip-hop is the sound in São Paulo. The two are considered very different, with paulista hip-hop fans looking down on funkeiros as juvenile and vulgar compared to the serious social concerns that SP hip-hop tackles. Xis’s 2002 track with Profeta doesn’t directly deal with the favelas paulistanas, banished to the periphery of the world’s fourth largest city, but the sound sets the right mood for the hip-hop paulista mindset.

17. Criminal Master – Pobreza (Poverty)

Going back to the roots now—“Pobreza” is from the 1988 hip-hop compilation Consciência Black. Lamentation in verse about the constant urban condition, all set to a funky (this time the American sense) beat.

18. Racionais MCs – Pânico na Zona Sul (Panic on the South Side)

Racionais MCs formed in 1988 and also contributed to Consciência Black with this track, launching a career that turned them into Brazil’s best-known rap group, a very serious voice for the millions of favelados in São Paulo. “Justiceiros são chamados por eles mesmos / Matam humilham e dão tiros a esmo / E a polícia não demonstra sequer vontade (Hired killers as they call themselves / Kill, humiliate, and shoot at random / And the police doesn’t show any will to stop them).” Guess who opened for Public Enemy when they came to São Paulo?

19. Sidestepper – Mas Papaya (More Papaya)

Moving south to Buenos Aires, but picking up a sound that comes from further north. Cumbia is a Colombian folk music, but in its various mutations throughout Latin American, it has sprouted as cumbia villeira in the Ciudad Autónoma, popular in the villas miserias with hardcore lyrics about gangs and drugs, in a way akin to funk proibidão. A new breed of DJs and producers in BsAs has recently picked up cumbia and begun blending it into other global urban sounds, including Jamaican dancehall. [Edit: A commenter pointed out that Sidestepper is Anglo-Colombian -- so maybe I hit Bogotá after all -- but I got it off a compilation I bought at ¡Zizek! in BsAs, which evidently isn't a reason to assume every track is porteño.]

20. Colon Colon – El paena loco (The Crazy Crown)

Pure cumbia without other styles mixed in—the telltale shaker (shickishin is the local onomatopoeia) is cumbia’s signature sound.

21. Princesa – Aquí Princesa (Princess Here)

Princesa is a porteña MC who has been tearing up the local scene with a fierce blend of reggaetón and dancehall.

22. G.R.E.S. Acadêmicos da Rocinha – Rocinha é minha vida, Nordeste é minha história (Rocinha is my life, Northeast is my history)

Beginning with a forró flourish, the Acadêmicos da Rocinha chose to honor the heritage of many of the community’s residents in their samba enredo for the 2008 Carnaval parade—it will be performed on Saturday night, February 2, at the Passarela do Samba (known colloquially as the Sambódromo) in the Series A & B competition. The population of favelas in Rio’s largest cities has swelled in recent decades with an influx of nordestinos (northeasterners), fleeing the most impoverished region of Brazil. They in turn have increased the popularity of northeastern music, like forró, in Rio. Mangueira, for example, is commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of frevo, a rhythm from Pernambuco, in their performance on Sunday night in the Grupo Especial. Broadcast live on national television with the winning samba school feted in Brazil as much as Super Bowl champions will be in the U.S. that same night, samba endures as a striking example of what the non-formal city in the Americas can accomplish culturally.

Posted in BsAs, beantown, cumbia, design, exhibitions, favelas, funk, hip-hop paulista, mixes, reggae, rio, samba, sampa, squatters | 4 Comments »

« Older Entries