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| Funk carioca is counter-cultural, homegrown underground style of music full of provocative, sensual elements that romanticize violence and glorify drug traffickers. / gettyimagesbank |
'Machine Gun Voices' digs into funk carioca
By Kang Hyun-kyung
Back in 1990, Paul Sneed, then an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia in the United States, went all the way down to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for an independent research project about drug trafficking and residents in the shanty district of Rocinha.
Through mingling with the favela locals to move his project forward, Sneed, now a professor of the Department of Hispanic Language and Literature at Seoul National University, found himself at a dance party thrown by a drug gang.
The poor inhabitants of the slum district were invited there to have fun with their neighbors. Oddly, armed gangs were part of the crowd and their brawls with favela inhabitants over trivial issues sometimes led to tragic incidents ― gang fights resulted in injuries and deaths. Some gang members fired their guns in the air to threaten the residents.
Surprisingly, it wasn't the dangerous party guests that caught Sneed's attention.
The American was intrigued by the Afro-Atlantic beat, rhythm and sound of the music the young people there were dancing to. The locals called it funk carioca or bailes funk.
Funk carioca is counter-cultural, homegrown underground style of music full of provocative, sensual elements that romanticize violence and glorify drug traffickers.
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| Paul Sneed, professor of Department of Hispanic Language and Literature at Seoul National University / Courtesy of SNU Public Relations |
It took almost a decade for Sneed to take the local music seriously. His interest in funk carioca grew as he befriended an increasing number of young locals through the non-profit group Two Brothers Foundation that he co-founded with his friend. After living on and off in Rocinha as a community activist in the 1990s, Sneed was determined to go back to the area in the early 2000s to conduct fieldwork to research the Brazilian underground funk.
His decades of passion, research and first-hand experience of funk carioca led him to write a book about the music. "Machine Gun Voices: Favelas and Utopia in Brazilian Gangster Funk" was released by SNU Press earlier this month.
In its essence, Professor Sneed says funk carioca is the expression of young Brazilian residents living in the shanty district of Rocinha.
"My aim was to write it in a relational way, not just as information about styles, histories or techniques but also as something that would in ways embody the call-and-response spirit of favela funk itself as an art form and community practice," Sneed said in a recent email interview with The Korea Times. He is currently on sabbatical at the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawaii and working on the Korean diaspora in the Americas.
"Machine Gun Voices" is a pioneering book that brought the Brazilian underground funk music to light.
Sneed says funk carioca is "a vibrant musical youth expression characterized by irony, complex masking and subversive messages and practices" and continues to be one of the least understood by people outside of the community.
"At once heroic and delinquent, a cry of protest and resistance, an apology of crime, a cheap and sexualized commodity…. Brazil's funk is a weapon in a postmodern war," the book reads.
Sneed says funk carioca is an art and a source of fun for the young Brazilian urban poor.
Don't be judgmental, feel the music, the author suggests.
"My aim as a researcher was to understand favela funk on its own terms, before analyzing it academically," he says. "Eventually, as time went by, the music developed and so did I."
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| "Machine Gun Voices: Favelas and Utopia in Brazilian Gangster Funk" by Paul Sneed / Courtesy of SNU Public Relations |
Originating in the poor neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro in the early 1970s, funk carioca was produced mostly by people of color living in Rocinha. The area became one of the cradles of the underground music.
"Funk carioca underwent a crucial shift as local MCs and DJs began performing in Portuguese to address the daily lives of Rio's poor youth," the author said.
As the music became popular among them, gangster funk songs known as "proibidao" were created as a subgenre.
Unlike other related genres, such as hip hop or mainstream Brazilian funk, he said proibidao is still not played on radio stations or sold in stores.
"Machine Gun Voices" is about much more than class friction between urban favela residents and the middle and upper classes of mainstream Brazilian society. "At a deeper level, (the book) interprets it as a story of a communally-oriented Afro-Atlantic worldview versus the dehumanizing colonialist and imperialist one," the author says.
