Chasing Bohemia (26 page)

Then I realised that Mr Catra was probably driving like that because he didn't care if he died, or if we did either, for that matter. He simply had one of those devil-may-care philosophies on life that said, ‘Live each day as it comes because you might not be here tomorrow.' It was not at all like Germany. Cars veered on the road in front of us, and Mr Catra accelerated through them, bellowing, ‘Fucking idiots. The police are snipering the favela from a public highway again'. He looked across at me self-righteously, gesturing with one hand, ‘They put public lives at risk.' I nodded, then looked to the back seat for confirmation from my companion Chiara that we were driving with a lunatic, but she was laughing, her dark hair flying around her face, happy as an angel of Charlie Manson, and simply leaned in to grab me by my forearm and say, ‘He's so cool, isn't he?'

There was no really defined purpose behind our research of Carioca funk, except, perhaps, to satisfy dear Papa Rimoldi in Milan — Chiara had recently informed him that she was retraining in investigative journalism, in order to extend her trust fund into her thirties. In truth, I suspected that Carioca funk was just another pretext for Chiara to meet beautiful Afro-Brazilian people. She loved black people: black children, black artists, black dancers, black intellectuals, black axe-murderers. She didn't discriminate, as long as they were black.

‘It's the new voice of the favelas,' she'd told me before we left on the Friday evening to accompany Mr Catra on his rounds of Carioca funk balls in the city.

‘It's a giant fart,' Fabio had countered as we left, ‘derived from the ingestion of too much processed American culture.'

He was opposed to our ‘field mission' on the basis of the level of danger and the quality of the music. He had gone so far the previous day as to give me an ultimatum — to choose between samba and Carioca funk — indicating that these two musical styles were mutually exclusive and that to like both, therefore, was impossible. There was now open warfare between Fabio and Chiara for the stake of my musical tastes.

‘He's just pissed off because samba is dead. It has been stolen by the white middle class of Brazil,' Chiara assured me, throwing a dismissive look in his direction.

Fabio just smiled as he swung idly in the veranda hammock. ‘People have been saying that for years. I can assure you, my little middle-class princesses, it will survive well after this shit they are trying to call music has come and gone.'

The target of Mr Catra's explosion that Friday evening was The Riviera, a garden-lined club on the beachfront complete with swimming pools, Mathuin-inspired fountains, and ridiculous door-entry charges. Our convoy of cars screeched to a halt at the front of the club, and a sea of excited white faces parted as Catra and his crew stormed into the club. It's a posh concert venue, The Riviera. Bow-tied waiters crisscrossed the velvet-curtain-lined hall, serving drinks in steel ice-buckets to a well-heeled white crowd. At the front of the hall the wild-child types were already waiting, swinging their lady lumps as the girls in the favela do, only their Lycra tops were from Gang and worth three hundred reals a piece, and they were rebelling against their parents, not society. I met one of them later that evening, a blonde teenage girl in a ripped white t-shirt that read ‘Can't Touch This', and asked her why she liked funk.

‘Because my father hates it!' she cried, revealing a mouth full of expensively braced teeth as her floppy-haired boyfriend strutted beside her. In the background, the latest funk revelation, MC Frankie, screamed out ‘
Ela, ela, ela, quer'
— loosely translatable as ‘She, she, she wants it,' — among other references to anal sex and polygamy.

Later that night, on the other side of town, we stood in between two facing walls of a hundred speakers where punters had been corralled into a tunnel vibrating with the blast of funk proibidão, or illegal funk. This was the Fazendinha, within the same Complex Alemão where Tim Lopes had been murdered. Voluptuous women, a good percentage of them transvestites, their parts barely covered by strips of diamanté-studded denim, were grinding their way to the ground in moves that left little to the imagination. Men stood behind the girls making the obligatory sexy thrusting moves.
Bondes
, trains of bare-chested youths carrying AK-47s, threaded their way through the crowd, thrusting their weapons in time to the music, although they were not just dancing together because they liked each other's company. The funk dances are charged with symbolism, and the formation of the bonde itself is no less than a metaphor for the invasion of another favela or territory. The atmosphere was loud, raw, and unapologetic, and the kids looked right at home.

They call it funk, but it's not funk as we know it. The heavy bass line imitates the crack of a machine gun, while the MCs shout out rap-style rhymes about their conquests in the bedroom and on the frontline of Rio's most violent favelas. According to Article 6 of Law 3410, which prohibits music and proceedings that apologise for criminal activity, the music is illegal and the balls can be closed down — if the police get through the barricades at the front of the favela, that is. Even if they do, rumour has it that, for a mere 60,000 reals, they'll turn a blind eye.

This is a scene now repeated throughout Rio de Janeiro every weekend in every favela, and in half the playboy clubs of the rich Zona Sul — the latter minus the AK-47s and the mentions of the drug dons, of course. The critics say that it's vulgar, denigrates women, incites violence, and represents the ‘dumbing down' of the rich musical culture of Brazil, but none of that is stopping Carioca funk from consuming the hearts and minds of Rio de Janeiro's party generation. The favelas are blazing, the nightspots are swinging, and the teenagers are hysterical once more over Brazil's latest musical odyssey. Edited versions designed to escape the censors are selling like hotcakes. The walls of DJ Marlboro's Big Mix Studios, the home of commercialised Carioca funk, are adorned with platinum disks signalling sales upwards of 250,000 copies. Even foreigners have moved in for the kill, with the new English sensation, MC MIA, Maya Arulpragasm, releasing an English version of Carioca funk for the bloodthirsty London locals.

Funk has Brazil's samba musicians throwing their hands up in despair. The traditional samba pagode session has been relegated to brief opening spots for the funk MCs at balls, and the kids wouldn't know Tom Jobim if they saw him in the street.

‘Funk is the death of our music culture,' Fabio grumbled moodily one night in Lapa as a group of sambistas playing on the street were drowned out by the sound of an anthem Carioca funk song that gave youthful fans a DIY guide on how to rob a car.

‘Music needs a rhythm, a melody, and a harmony. Where is the melody and harmony in funk?' he shouted in frustration. ‘The MCs of this movement are not musicians.'

He had a point. For a music style that draws its roots from the unlikely source of inspiration that is Miami Bass, one can hardly expect its proponents to be a rich source of musical culture. Mr Catra cited, and with some uncertainty, Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osborne as some of his influences, while his counterpart MC Sapão gave a nod to Stevie Wonder and Mariah Carey in an internet chat-room recently. Many of the artists cite black music such as soul, hip hop, and reggae as their inspiration, but there is surprisingly little reference to other Brazilian genres such as samba or Afro-Brazilian music. Carioca funk can hardly be described as beautiful music, nor are its lyrics particularly inspirational. However, those who think this means funk lacks the punch of other musical styles are missing the point. Unlike samba, which draws hard on the achievements of classical guitar and prides itself on the fusion of European and African styles, Carioca funk has wholly excluded the old world from its equation. It is not delving into its roots, nor looking to Europe for intellectual guidance.

The MCs claim that Carioca funk is simply looking around itself and describing exactly what it sees. ‘Funk is the eyeball of the people living in the favelas,' claimed one of Chiara's friends, the grass-root funk artist Victor Hugo (no relation to Winston Churchill!), a.k.a. MC Funky. That's something that can no longer be said for samba, argue MCs like Mr Catra. ‘Samba does not belong to the favela anymore. Look at Carnaval! Does that look like a favela to you?' he bellowed at us one day from his house in a working-class neighbourhood of north Rio, admittedly not in a favela either. It is no coincidence that the samba schools are holding crisis composer meetings to encourage new compositions of samba, and no surprise to find the meetings devoid of anyone who actually lives in a favela. A walk through any favela in Rio de Janeiro will tell you that the sound of poor Rio is the sound of Carioca funk.

It's not so easy for a middle-class Anglo-Saxon woman to swallow lyrics that encourage virgins to walk the streets without panties, and that support the culture of polygamy in the favelas, or indeed the traffickers who are being held responsible for the violence of Rio de Janeiro. But, as its defenders like Mr Catra will tell you, ‘Carioca funk reflects the way of life, the way of living within the favela, and the sexual practices within the favela.' Polygamy, under-age sex, police violence, drugs, and trafficking may offend the new middle class of Brazil, who like to see themselves as living in a modern country, but its proponents say this is the real Brazil for the people who still live in illegal slums, socially excluded from the wealth of this vast country.

As for fidelity, Mr Catra, infamous for his dozens of girlfriends and his brood of nine children, claims that they are simply singing about the reality of relationships in a city where homicide rates hover at around 50 per 100,000 people, and rise to 228 among young men between fifteen and twenty-five years of age. It is enough to make a single woman cry into her coffee, not to mention the poor girls trying to hang onto their husbands. While it seems dubious that the deaths of 228 guys out of 100,000 really create a perceptible gender imbalance in Rio — this is much more likely to be a result of the general male tendency to date women much younger than themselves — the image of this imbalance has nevertheless given rise to a defined hierarchy of women within the favela: the
Mulher-de-Fe
(Faithful wife), the
Amante
(Lover), the
Safadona
(Slut), and the very unfortunate
Lanchino-da-Madrugada
(Morning munch). The biggest Carioca funk star to date, Brazil's very own Lil' Kim, MC Tati Quebra Baraca — translated as Tati, Home Wrecker — was the first to faction the troops along these lines, singing for the Safadonas famous tunes like ‘I'm Ugly but I'm In.' Mulher-de-fe, MC Katia, says that she has the edge at the end of the day, ‘because they come back to sleep in her bed,' while Amante, MC Nem, brings it all back to basics with ‘I'm the one kissing your husband.'

Mr Catra doesn't need to defend what appears to be a regression into arbitrary tribalism, since it's the women themselves who are dividing the sisterhood, but he backs up his theory anyway with this battery of excuses: ‘Inside the favela, people live in a polygamous system; a man has his wife and his lovers. It is unilateral but, at the same time, there are more men than women in the favela, women can survive longer without sex, and our testosterone levels are about 70 per cent higher … Also, the woman can only have one child per year and will only ever love one man. Anyway, I am not being macho; I'm just telling you how it is.'

It's a cosy little argument for the denigration of women in the favelas, but presumably one not subscribed to by the new, sharper generation of Carioca funk MCs such as the slightly masculine MC Sabrina, of the fierce favela of Providencia, who recently opened an illegal ball in the north of the city with the battle cry, ‘Hands up who is single?' Hands shot up everywhere. ‘And do you know why?' They clearly knew the answer already when they screamed back ‘Why?' and she didn't disappoint. ‘Because of the dogs of men beside you', she yelled, and then to the simultaneous explosion of the bass and the roar of the crowd, she launched into the song, ‘Kill, kill, kill it now.'

It was an adventurous night in the heart of Rio's northern slums, complete with a punch-up in the flooded girls' bathrooms, and Chiara and I were nearly spitting with excitement at this grassroots feminist call-to-arms among the bastions of chauvinism. It was a bitter disappointment, therefore, when Chiara rang Sabrina the following week only to be told by her brother-in-law that he was the one who wrote her lyrics, and what would she want to interview her for! However, we consoled ourselves with the thought that somewhere, somehow in this city of fatherless children, there was at least one woman saying, ‘You mean you get to fuck around, not look after your children, and send
me
out to work on top of all of it. Haaaang on a minute … '

The debate is predictably riddled with some good old-fashioned outrage and hypocrisy. Mr Catra met claims by the Brazilian intellectual class that the music is just pure pornography with a chuckle. ‘The pornography is in their own head,' he said. It certainly can seem that way when you attend the middle-class balls of the rich Zona Sul of Rio and find the playboys and trust fund daughters dancing dirtier than anyone in the favela, but then there's nothing new in that. The sons and daughters of Brazil's ruling class have been sponging off the fun of the poor for centuries. Even Rio's Carnaval parade started from the rowdy street-parties of the slaves. Now there is hardly a black Queen of the Batteria among them. In any case, the MCs claim that the focus on sex in the lyrics is simply a distraction from the real heart of the Carioca funk movement, which is a rage against the social injustices of Brazilian society.