Alongside the dominance of rappers in São Paulo, in Rio de Janeiro’s suburbs a more relaxed style of hip hop leads the scene: Rio’s funk. Every weekend a new generation of low-income Brazilians, mostly blacks and mulattos, gather in bailes funk (funk balls) to enjoy themselves by reproducing the U.S. sounds they have grown up listening to in American TV programs and films. Bailes funk gather hundreds of thousands of youngsters in the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods where they socialize, dance, and reconstruct their identity through the beat of electronic drum machines and sampled sounds. The word funk serves as an umbrella term to describe a creative mix of U.S. African American styles of the 1970s and 1980s ranging from disco, soul, and funk, to Motown, R & B, and rap. Most influential in the bailes funk is the now passé 1980s Miami freestyle dance-pop sound of Stevie B and others, with a resounding syncopated heavy bass over which catchy pop vocals lead the crowd to non-stop dancing.
Rio de Janeiro’s bailes funk take place in local clubs, warehouses, and often in samba school quadras (halls), where sound system crews stack speakers and amplifiers on top of one another to form a wall of sound that pumps out the heavy bass. Here, in the midst of laser lights and large screens, samba is but one of several beats sampled and repeated in techno-pop drum machines. On top of the main theme, DJs recycle English words, mixing them with Portuguese in improvised commentaries. DJs rap about neighborhoods, parties, and romance, but also compose original narrative lyrics that recount the harsh reality of their neighborhood’s daily scenes of violence, drug trafficking, social exclusion, and lack of prospects. In truth, life in the favelas has never been so outspokenly celebrated in the lyrics of Brazilian songs. In bailes funk, the romantic image of racial democracy that propelled samba songs to become popular hits in the 1940s is replaced with lyrics that call for war among gang factions and depict violence in a well-defined ‘gangsta’ style. In some neighborhoods, bailes became scenes for drug lord confrontations among heavily-armed gang members. There are also the so-calledfunk sensual: here DJs saturate their songs with sexually explicit lyrics, which dancers respond to with choreographies that highlight invitations for sex in intentionally sexually provocative song lyrics.
But to show only this side of bailes funk is to oversimplify the complex social, ethnic, gender, and musical scene that has set the stage for their emergence. As the music’s synthesized sounds and loud heavy bass has grown as an outlet for thousands of youngsters, they turned from a youth fashion to a racially and socially conscious movement. The song lyrics in bailes funk highlight the gap between the white rich and the mostly black poor, and there is no room for national unity or other nationalistic agendas, or for samba music that carries the images of cordial Afro-Brazilians happily celebrating. According a well-known artist in the scene, DJ Marlboro, funk is music by the ghetto for the ghetto. Some would call it “an expression of political resistance” which uses the same physical space once devoted solely to samba to harbor non-traditional musical styles and new identities. As such, bailes funk and the music associated with them were destined to become stigmatized by the mainstream, middle-class, white Cariocas (Rio de Janeiro’s residents). Even so, bailes funk have gained a space in the music industry at the beginning of the 21st century, as recording labels started to invest in “cleaning up” the lyrics of the most popular funk songs so they can market them to a larger audience eager for the novel, danceable music provided by Rio de Janeiro’s innovative DJs. In the end, the music emanating from these bailes has become one of the most vibrant musical environments in contemporary Brazilian popular music in recent years.