Bandits, Favelas and Utopia in Brazilian Funk

Utopian solution

B. Energy (work and play synonymous), city dominated or pastoral return

C. Intensity (excitement, drama, affectivity of living)

D. Transparency (open, spontaneous, honest communications and relationships)

E. Community (all together in one place, communal interests, collective activity) (376)

Despite the great differences in the level of audience participation in the cultures of American musicals and funk, parts of Dyers analysis on the utopianism of musicals is still tremendously useful in understanding funk. In examining his definition of entertainment, it seems to me that his main point is that the purpose of entertainment is to produce pleasure and that the performance/audience dichotomy he suggests is secondary and even dispensable. For me, the main purpose of funk is the production of pleasure, despite the instances of consciousness-raising that occur within funk culture or even the use made of it by drug traffickers to naturalize their power. The high level of co-participation between the audience and the performance in funk only strengthens this tendency and makes funk more pleasurable for its fans. As was the case regarding the definition of entertainment used by Dyer in his study, so too will these categories need to be slightly adapted to match the characteristics of funk. Furthermore, it is important to acknowledge that any separation of the utopian impulse in terms of such categories is somewhat artificial since in reality they cross over into one another.

While some people who are not fans of funk consider it misogynist, I found in interviewing female fans of funk that they did not agree. Despite words like cachorra, which means a female dog (but which does not transmit the same as the American slang, “bitch”, in its connotation as a mean, unpleasant woman), the female fans of funk that I interviewed generally found funk to be fairly egalitarian in regards to gender. Both sexes are somewhat objectified in funk, a fact that leads some women to feel empowered and placed at the same level as the men.¹⁰ Funk transforms women too into hunters and aggressors, so to speak, who have the same right as a man to view a member of the opposite sex as an object of consumption to be obtained. It’s not difficult to understand why people would accuse funk of being misogynist, with MCs like Serginho singing that what he really wants to do is to “morder o seu grelinho” or “bite your little clit.” On the other hand, Tati Quebra-Barraco, whose name roughly translates as “Tati Screw Me”, expresses a similar attitude in dealing with men. She sings that she doesn’t like “little dicks, “Não gosto de piru pequeno,” and graphically describes what she does to the men she catches. She is perhaps the most enduring and widely known female entertainer in funk and almost all of her songs play with the objectification of men and the liberation of the female libido.

While the subject of sexuality in funk is deserving of a separate study, it seems to me that the sexuality in funk is more a question of the rejection of bourgeois values than mere hedonism and misogyny. John Fisk has suggested that excessive elements in popular culture are often vehicles for contradicting and drawing attention to largely unseen features of dominant ideologies:

Popular culture is often excessive, and is frequently criticized by those who do not understand it for being “sensational.” Excessiveness, sensationalism, and exaggeration are stylistic devices of contradiction, and, as I have argued, the contradictory is characteristic of popular culture. Each of these devices takes ideological norms and then exceeds them, magnifies them so that their normality is brought to our attention and is not allowed to continue its ideological work unseen: its powerful position of the “taken for granted” is thus disturbed. They promote a norm and then exceed it, spilling over beyond its ideological containment. This excess then becomes a resource that people can use to interrogate or contradict the norm, the excessive is meaning that has escaped the control of the norm. (328)

In any event, the blatant sexualization of funk is not constructed in the sort of “battle of the sexes” that appears in American hip-hop and its characteristic negative portrayal of women is not typical of funk. In addition, there is a certain androgynous sexuality in funk reminiscent of MPB, or the Brazilian Popular Music of performers like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, and axé music of such groups as É o Tchan do Brasil from Bahia. This is evident in the dance styles used by men and women both, dance moves that are quite often directly influenced by axé music, a much less polemic style that is also highly sexualized. MC Serginho’s enormously popular dancer Lacraia is a good example of the playfulness with which gender roles are treated in funk. Lacraia is a transvestite who dances in a frenetic centipede-like fashion, as her Lacraia name entails, and who became something of a national celebrity in 2003 who became more famous than MC Serginho himself. This serves to illustrate that the non-representational level of cultural practice can often be more powerful than the formal level of such things as lyrics. Not surprisingly, proibidão, however, does not share this androgynous nature and there are no major female MCs that sing about the power of drug gangs and criminal factions.

Beyond the “bathroom humor” of the lewd and childish rhymes often heard in funk music, there is a further ‘infantilization’ of the space of the baile in which the spheres of adult life and and childhood ambiguously mix together. This is another dimension of the transparency and openness in relationship in funk, for the childlike expression of emotions and desires is much less restricted by the bourgeois idea of acting like a grown-up. This attitude may reflect the inadequacies of childhood itself among many poor people in Brazil, people who have to grow up fast relative to their middle-class and elite counterparts, either because they do not have as much time and space for recreation, or because they are exposed to the harshness of reality on a daily basis in the violence and poverty of the favelas. At the same time, this ‘infantilization’ works both ways and the space of the baile and culture of funk offer a more typically adult experience to the children that are in contact with it. The participation of children in funk is striking and is not limited to hearing and writing songs on the block or even the matinê dances. Even kids who live in the most stable and affluent homes of the favela are likely to pass through dances in the street, or hear the music booming through the walls of their houses at all hours of the night. Furthermore, the poorest kids in the neighborhood are often found at the adult community dances that take place in the streets. These kids may be street kids who come into the favela for protection, or they may be the children of the least stable families of the community who often receive very little attention, guidance or material support from their parents. More often than not they are the same ones that work selling things at stoplights or painting their faces and juggling in traffic. In a sense, they are children and grown-ups at the same time who mostly work and barely go to school, if at all. With very little parental supervision, or none at all, these kids sometimes engage in sexual relationships and in criminal activities such as drug delivery and prostitution. In the space of the community dance, the expectations and experience these grown-up kids have are not very different from those of their older counterparts.

The repetitive nature of the dances is another aspect of the imagined community of the baile as a utopian space. As the fans get comfortable with the setting of a particular dance over a period of months or years, it becomes something like the square of a small town in the interior of the country. Indeed, in communities like favelas that rarely have any central square in which people from all over the neighborhood can come and socialize, the space of the bailes has become one of the most important alternatives, especially for the young people who attend them. In the case of Rocinha, for example, it could be argued that the beach in São Conrado has this function and that many courtship and friendship ties are developed and maintained on the beach. In fact, the population of Rocinha has virtually taken over both São Conrado and Pepino beaches and the middle-class people from the neighborhood are much less evident there, other than those involved in the hang gliding circles towards the far end of the beach. At night, the beach is less popular and the people of Rocinha meet in thousands of other smaller places throughout the favela. There are some small plazas and parks, but normally nothing brings together as many people as the baile, be it the somewhat upscale one at Emoções (which can bring together as many as 4,000) or the street dances in the Via Ápia, especially during Carnvival. (in which upwards of 20,000 people can crowd the relatively small street).

In addition to what might be called the formal aspects of community formation, as those which can be inferred from Dyer’s utopian criteria mentioned above (all together in one place, communal interests, collective activity), a significant aspect of the community which is given life in the dance is one of racial dynamics. While it is clear that the baile and indeed funk culture in general are associated with blackness and low-income communities, there is an anti-essentialism in them that embraces the characteristically Brazilian dream of racial harmony and democracy to a striking degree. While I will discuss this situation at greater length in my comments on the implications of Gilroy’s ‘black Atlantic’ for funk, here I want to make the argument that within the space of the dance the feeling is created of what it would be like to live in a society free of racism and class warfare. The baile is one of the few places in Carioca society where middle-class and rich young people, who are almost exclusively white, can have extensive contact with young people from favelas and other low-income neighborhoods on a somewhat equal footing. I would argue that the desire of many of Rio’s wealthier adolescents and young adults to frequent the baile funk, while a complex subject, is in some way representative of their own desire to transcend the class and race differences that are so blatantly omnipresent in their daily lives. While the skin-tone of the crowd in the baile is likely to be varying shades of brown, MCs, DJs and dancers are, like the fans, of a variety of colors ranging from black to white. Even the music played is non-essentialist; in most bailes blocks of other styles of urban music are played in addition to funk, such as hip-hop, pagode and even hard rock, and whatever class and racial connotations these styles might have tend to be ignored. This does not mean that a black racial identity is lost in funk, just that it eschews any facile dichotomy and presents itself, in a sense, as the realization of the Brazilian cosmic race. ¹¹

Another very important dimension of the community that is created in the experience of the dance is its elevation to the status of a fantastic or idealized version of the space of the favela, discussed above in my comments on ‘abundance’. When one stops to consider the notion of community constructed in prohibition so fundamental to the hegemony of the drug traffickers, the sort of ‘we of the favela’ versus the ‘them of the asphalt’ discussed in chapter three, it is clear that the construction of this idealized utopian community in funk is convenient to the social order of organized crime. In the end, such a construction greatly intensifies any sort of messianic intensity implicit in funk in general and proibidão in particular.

Besides the distinctive inadequacies evident in people’s lives in any given socio-historical context, another fundamental aspect of the specificity of utopia is the culture of the group seeking to escape the world as it is. In the case of funk, I have discussed at length the presence of the culture of drug traffickers in many of the principal communities where funk is practiced. What remains is to explore the specific cultural dimensions of funk in terms of local Carioca Carnival, the legacy of cultural cannibalism in national Brazilian civilization and the international tendencies of the double-consciousness of modernity in the African Diaspora. Such is no small task and I will content myself to make some general comments and observations to this effect.