Chasing Bohemia (27 page)

‘There is a mythology around Carioca funk which is created by the rich to keep funk marginalised,' MC Victor Hugo Funky said one night as we sat under the arches while the police cruised up and down, their machine guns provocatively displayed. Rolling out titillating stories of sex and wanton abandon is an old trick of any media; but in a country riddled with corruption and nepotism, it takes more than page-three models to keep the public from rioting. Still, nobody is really complaining about the attention. Carioca funk has used the media as much as it has been used itself. It has the hallmarks of a rebel teenager, with its heedless desire to shock and appall at any cost. After all, if building the biggest slum in Latin America on the doorstep of the most famous beach in the world won't get the attention of the elite class, what will?

While attention tends to fall on the sexually explicit or violent songs, there are funk songs that are profoundly political. Mr Catra's song ‘Vida Na Cadeia' (‘Life in Prison') with lyrics such as ‘Ilha Grande is over, but you still have your history, after many have suffered, you still guard their memory,' openly implies that they consider the prisoners of the Comando Vermelho to be political. Ilha Grande, while more famous today as a backpacker destination than for its past as a political prison under the 1970s' military dictatorship, was the birthplace of the current Comando Vermelho, who consider themselves to be freedom fighters rather than drug dealers. At the heart of the funk movement is the inherent belief that the laws and structures of Brazilian society do not extend to the one-third of Rio de Janeiro that lives in the poverty of a favela. The message of this Carioca funk is that Rio is in a state of urban war and that the local trafficking groups such as Comando Vermelho, Amigos do Amigos, or Terceiro Comando are the only groups who represent the poor.

This is a society divided. Armed guards and barricades mark the entrances to each favela. They have their own army, their own language, and their own laws, however crude and arbitrarily enforced. Steal, and you'll have your hand removed; openly oppose the command and, well, only Tim Lopes could tell that tale. On our excursion to the Fazendinha, Chiara found the battery of her camera fading, and Mr Catra took it to be recharged at a bar filled with gun-toting youths. As he hustled us off around the street party, Chiara expressed some concerns about the safety of her camera, only to be told ‘Nobody steals from anyone in the favela. Only from the outside.'

There are signs of an emerging consciousness in Carioca funk, one that is going deeper into the root of their problems. ‘There are not arms factories, nor cocaine farms, nor pot plantations inside the favelas, and it is not Elias Maleuco or Fernando Beira Mar (another one of Rio's drug lords currently in jail) who puts the drugs and arms there … the problem with Brazil is that the people got used to calling the criminals “Governor”,' Catra says, referring to corrupt politicians who continue to get elected in spite of corruption scandals. ‘It's the politicians who send the police into the favela to sell arms (to the drug factions), pitting one favela against another.'

Of course, none of this is stopping the commercialisation of Carioca funk; even the main MCs themselves have a weekly schedule of appearances at chic clubs in Barra de Tijuca, where they receive up to five thousand reals for tantalising the sons and daughters of the law-makers and journalists who are so outraged by this movement. Their children say they want to know what's happening on the other side of their city, and I want to believe them, even if, as Mr Catra says, he remembers their parents turning up to the early funk balls fifteen years ago. Certainly it seems a little absurd to be sitting in the drawing rooms of Barra de Tijuca listening to stories of North American violence when there is an urban war afoot on the mountain behind.

ON THE TUESDAY
after our weekend with Mr Catra, Fabio invited me to go to a samba composer's evening in Mangueira. ‘You need to listen to some real music,' he told me gruffly, as he pushed me onto the bus. He usually went alone to this type of event — composer-related activities not being occasions for mere women — but he wanted to up the ante in his war on Carioca funk. The evening had been announced the week before with a request for original new compositions within the samba genre. The white sambistas from Rio's wealthy Zona Sul arrived early, some a little nervously because the traffickers outside were taking pot shots over the roof of the Mangueira Escola da Samba quadrangle. What sounded like a hand grenade went off outside, and a well-dressed guitarist in chinos grinned at me.

The president of the Composers of Mangueira and his assistant president arrived shortly afterwards. The former was dressed like Spike Lee, but with wide, plastic-tinted sunglasses, and the latter like a pimp — not that their eccentric appearances detracted from the importance of the two men. Together they had won Mangueira some three Carnavals. Close behind them followed a portly, middle-aged backing vocalist in a sweater that read:
AMERICAN BY BIRTH, REBEL BY CHOICE, HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A REBEL'S SCORN
. The president had the janitor retrieve a small wooden box, which he sat on in order to elevate himself above everyone else at the table. The vice-president accepted a flat chair. As a woman, I was seated outside the circle in this kangaroo hierarchy, presumably because women did not generally compose samba.

‘Due to their lack of opportunity?' I offered hopefully.

‘No, due to their lack of capability,' I was told.

The president cleared his throat and looked to each of the musicians with a grave expression.

‘We are here to develop
samba do terreno
, samba of the roots. The samba of our forefathers. We are not looking for Carnaval sambas or commercial jingles. We are not looking for white middle-class interpretations of what it is like to live in a favela.' He looked over the rim of his tinted aviator glasses to let the last sentence sink in, and a couple of white college boys discreetly slipped their songbooks back into their designer leather satchels. ‘That means if you don't live in the favela, if you have never lived in the favela, and you will never live in the favela, well, then, sorry, sonny, don't write about it.'

In short, they were looking for the new Cartola, a musician of rare and glittering talent whose original compositions could represent the famous favela into the future. Samba was in crisis, the president said. People were not writing samba like they used to, and they were going to turn it around. A murmur of excitement spread across the room. Who knew what this could be the start of? It was shaping up to be the Brazilian samba version of
Australian Idol
. The president shifted on his box, briefly consulted the vice-president, informed the musicians that ‘talking during the performances will be considered a sign of your lack of education', and then waved his drumstick in the direction of the first musician to signal that he should commence.

It made for a strange scene: a row of black men from Mangueira behind a table making notes about a queue of white middle-class kids desperate to prove that they had soul. It was a delicious reversal of racial roles, even if it didn't bring them the music that they were looking for. There were some highlights of the evening, such as that from Pingo, one of the few Mangueira locals present who, in spite of his excellent composition called The Regretful Sinner, was presumably not really in the running for the new Samba Idol because of his seventy years of age. There was an elaborate intellectual piece on the history of samba from a regular at Copacabana's infamous Bip Bip's samba bar; one from Fabio; two guys from Mangueira who didn't know which key to start in; and a few guilty compositions about living in the favela written by some awkward-looking middle-class kids from the Zona Sul.

Needless to say, the search for the new Cartola was abandoned some three weeks later. I guess it is hard for anyone to watch their beloved culture discarded by the new generation, but in Fabio's view it represented the difference between art inspired by hope and art driven by despair. It was a rebellion without promise and not worthy of the great history of Brazilian music. ‘People say things are better in the favela. Well, I say this. Thirty years ago nobody knew how to read in the favela, but they wrote the most beautiful music ever heard on earth. Now everyone knows how to read, and all they do is watch television and listen to shit.'

Although I doubt it was in the interest of art, on 30 September 2005 the MCs were brought in for questioning by the federal police and warned against writing songs that might be disturbing the peace. A website manager promoting illegal Carioca funk was put in jail. Mr Catra's phone was disconnected, and we didn't dare ring Sabrina's brother, so we were left to read the wonderful
O Dia
newspapers for updates. They should have known, since it was the paper itself that called for the DJs to be apprehended in the first place. In a sad reflection of either censorship or, worse, a lack of interest, the higher-brow newspapers published nothing about this violation of freedom of speech. They dedicated the space to reviews of middle-class rebels Slipknot and Avril Lavigne instead, and a short review of that English trash bag MIA, who has blatantly plagiarised the Carioca funk genre to shore up her shoddy Coca Cola image of revolution among the music bores of London. Unsurprisingly, the Cariocas said she was crap. But then, when you live in a war zone, you are probably less impressed by the glamour of AK-47s and Molotov cocktails.

I don't know why I worried about it, since Mr Catra is no more than a chauvinistic ratbag himself, one who needs to be taught a damn good lesson by his wife (or one of those twelve girlfriends, anyway). I know the music is crap and disgusting, and the kids might have stopped learning guitars and cavaquinhos, but there is something that still makes me want to defend him. Of course samba is better. But it is dying, and someone needs to take on the hordes of MIAs, or Avril Lavignes, in their designer khaki and manufactured rebel attitudes, and in the absence of anyone else it is going to be guys like Catra. It was a sentiment I shared with Chiara — although, unsurprisingly, not with Fabio, who called us spoilt little rich girls under a gangster's charm. He yelled that they could all go to hell, MIA, Avril, and Catra, together, because there will only ever be one decent music on earth, and that is samba and only samba, and what did he do to deserve falling in love with a cultureless Australian who doesn't understand this, and so on … until we turned up the radio, and nobody could hear him anymore.

–14–

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (… in Rio)

And some live until one hundred and twenty years (they count their age in moons) for they all drink from the Fountain of Youth and do not in any way drink at those murky pestilential springs from which flow so many streams of distrust, avarice, litigation and squabbles of envy and ambition, which eat away our bones, suck out our marrow, waste our bodies and consume our spirits.

–
JEAN DE LERY
,
History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil
(1556)

S
o there I was, jealous, broke, and tanned, with Carnaval bearing down on me like a mateless malandro at dawn. It was nearly February 2004, and I had just become an illegal alien in Brazil. I could no longer go to the police for assistance of any kind, I was living on less than $10 per day, and I was staying put. I hadn't come this far to miss Carnaval. After the madness of the Cariocas in the subtle months of winter, the devil only knew what sort of tricks they would be up to in the midst of the world's wildest pagan festival. I had struggled to learn the confounded language of Portuguese. I had abandoned my value system. I had run myself into horrifying debt. I was going to have my sequins and drums, even if it killed me.

To all appearances, it may have looked as if my life was in tatters, but the truth was that I was largely content. For, despite my odd emotional breakdowns, or perhaps because of them, I was doing exactly what I wanted to do. Sure, I woke up on the odd occasion in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with my head pounding with anxiety, but a whole lot less than I had when I was working the corporate wheel in London. I guess life has to have some level of anxiety whatever way you live it, and I would rather mine be the question of ‘How will you eat tomorrow?' than ‘Is this all there is to life?' I had put the prospect of gainful employment behind me, resigned myself to a long relationship with VISA card Australia, accepted that the Cariocas were, well, ‘different', and got back to the real essence of life — that secret traveller's business of self-indulgence. The fact is that the banal things often outweigh the supposedly important ones. The incredible joy of not having to wake to an alarm in the morning, the relief of not having to chase obscure and intangible goals such as professional achievement or emotional balance, and the freedom to express my rawest emotions, each generated far more pleasure than I had ever had from a successful career or shopping spree back in the ‘real world'. In Rio, the goal was simply to do what you want.

‘IT IS SO SIMPLE
. Life is so simple,' Gustavo philosophised one morning as he struggled vainly to reclaim our washing line from the swollen summer garden. Bloated on sweet tropical rains and hot humid days, the steeply sloped garden had become a bottomless tangle of foliage and trees, and was fast advancing on the walls of the Casa Amarela. Only God and Torré really knew what lay under the waves of vines, creepers, and parasites at the back of the house. Once, after a half-hearted burn-off in September, I found the remains of a penny-farthing cycle and a lion-claw bathtub. By February, the garden had assumed firm control. The mango and avocado trees were strangled by vines, the smell of rotting fruit stung our nostrils, and the red lobster claws of the heliconia had taken on prehistoric proportions. Some vines were so strong that they even grew trunks.