Sonic politics: technique, work and musical production in funk carioca

Políticas sônicas: técnica, trabalho e produção musical no funk carioca

Abstract

This article results from fieldwork I have been conducting since 2014 with funk artists, especially the funk produced in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. Using both historical and ethnographic material, I reflect on the way DJs and MCs design sonic forms that challenge the hegemonic music industry through musical production techniques. Focusing on funk studios in favelas, I explore the creative processes of the artists, the technological resources they mobilize and how they connect with everyday life in favelas. To trace theses connections, I consider the artists’ activities as both ‘technologies of enchantment’ (Gell 1998) and work, which in a capitalist context implies relations permeated by the dimensions of class and race.

Keywords:
Funk; Favela; Technic; Capitalism; Race

Resumo

Este artigo é fruto de um trabalho de campo que teve início em 2014 junto a artistas de funk, especialmente o funk produzido nas favelas do Rio de Janeiro. A partir de material histórico e etnográfico, reflito sobre o modo como DJs e MCs desenham formas sonoras que desafiam a indústria da música hegemônica por meio de técnicas de produção musical. Focando nos estúdios de funk em favelas, abordo os processos criativos destes artistas, os recursos tecnológicos que mobilizam e sua conexão com a vida cotidiana nas favelas. Para operar estas conexões, considero as atividades destes artistas ao mesmo tempo como “tecnologias do encantamento” (Gell 1998) e como trabalho, o que num contexto capitalista implica relações permeadas pelas dimensões de classe e raça.

Palavras-chave:
funk carioca; favela; técnica; capitalismo; raça

INTRODUCTION

Funk is one of the most popular musical genres in Brazil. Its origins can be traced back to the bailes black held in Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s. These were parties that attracted a mostly black public from the city’s poorer neighbourhoods to dance to the funk and soul being produced in the United States. It was only in the 1990s that Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, the city’s poorest areas, became the principal centres of funk production and consumption. The bailes held in the favelas, as well as the studios where MCs and DJs produce their tracks, today sustain an economy that enables a certain degree of professionalisation among artists and producers. Built on economically precarious foundations, it is the funk economy’s collective dimension, as a form of ‘popular mass culture,’ that enables its persistence and generates its multiplying effects. While the bailes have created possibilities for a degree of professionalisation, this professionalisation is continually threatened by the difficulties inherent to a setting where simple subsistence remains uncertain. Yet faced with the near-certainty of becoming exploited labour in a system that feeds on inequality, art as work offers a glimmer of hope. As the anthropologist Adriana Facina, who has researched artistic production in the favelas for decades, observes: ‘opposed to alienated labour, dreamed-of work is a path to be chiselled out of stone by these youths’ (Facina 2019: 105).

In this article, I reflect on the ways in which funk artists, using musical production techniques, craft sonic forms that challenge the hegemonic music industry. Based on historical and ethnographic research in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, I look at the creative processes of these artists, the technological resources they mobilise and how they connect to everyday life in the favelas. The first section offers a brief historical overview of funk produced in Rio de Janeiro. Despite the difficulties inherent to producing a synthesis that attempts to cover fifty years of history in just a few pages, I consider this a necessary endeavour. The research that generated the questions discussed in this article was based on interviews and participant observation with DJs and MCs from various generations. Many of the phenomena highlighted by these artists during our encounters concerned the technical, stylistic and thematic transformations experienced by this musical genre over time. The aim of the first section, therefore, is to situate - however provisionally - these different periods and points of inflection.

In the second section, I provide a more detailed description of a lived experience from my fieldwork in the company of DJ Bel, an important DJ from Cidade de Deus, the favela where I lived in 2017 and 2018. Working as a music producer with Bel and his friends afforded me a clearer understanding of how questions of style and the formal aspects of sonic organisation are fundamental to the types of circulation that tracks may - or may not - achieve. The third section proposes an analysis of favela studios and the ways in which they give sound to different circuits, each with distinct levels of commodification. The circulation of tracks made for favela bailes often resembles a form of gift exchange: a mode of circulation in which fame does not necessarily correspond to financial return. In my concluding remarks, I reflect on the connections between race and class and the sonic features of the funk produced in Rio’s favelas.

A SHORT HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF FUNK CARIOCA

It is possible to trace the emergence of funk carioca through various distinct points of inflection over time. Although use of the expression baile funk to refer to the parties held in Rio de Janeiro’s suburbs only became consolidated in the 1980s, the origins of funk as a musical genre lie in the bailes black of the 1970s. These parties brought together suburban black youth to dance to African-American music, especially the funk and soul then being produced in the United States (Vianna 1987, Essinger 2005, Peixoto and Sebadelhe 2016). This movement was baptised ‘Black Rio’ (in English) by the journalist Lena Frias in an article published in the Jornal do Brasil in 1976 (Frias 1976). The scene described by Frias was striking in terms of its scale: hundreds of sound systems animated dances in suburban clubs and attracted hundreds of thousands of young, poor black people every weekend.

The interviews conducted by the journalist made clear that those who frequented the bailes were fully aware of the racism they faced in their everyday lives. Among sound-system owners, DJs and dancers, it was common to invoke both a transnational black identity and the myth of ‘racial democracy.’ Accused of ‘bringing racism to Brazil,’ the Black Rio movement was criticised by sectors of the media and by intellectuals from across the political spectrum. Its leading figures were even persecuted by the dictatorship’s censorship bodies, which sought to identify possible connections with the Black Panther Party (Pedretti 2018. The blacks were labelled as submissive to North American culture and accused by critics and opponents of devaluing the ‘roots of Brazil’s black population,’ whose quintessential cultural production, they argued, should be samba (Alberto 2009, Palombini 2009, Oliveira 2019).

The bailes black fostered a vibrant economy sustained by the dance parties themselves, by the importation of vinyl records and by the release of music compilations produced by the sound-system crews. DJs, sound-system owners and intermediaries travelled frequently to the United States - especially Miami and New York - to bring the latest musical releases back to Brazil. This constituted a market of its own since most of these new tracks fell outside the repertoire of the mainstream recording industry in Brazil, despite their enormous success among the bailes public. The bailes black experienced a turbulent transition in the late 1970s for three main reasons. First, Frias’s article attracted unwanted attention from critics and from the dictatorship’s security agencies. Added to this was the controversy surrounding the musical scene’s alleged opposition to samba. Finally, there was what Dom Filó described as the ‘coup de grâce’: the rise of the discothèque (Essinger 2005: 42). As the musicologist Carlos Palombini aptly put it: ‘Black or not, for Brazilian DJs of the seventies and eighties, disco was that bland, white thing that had put an end to the bailes’ (Palombini 2009: 46).

Convinced that the disco wave would end up diluting the ideological content of the Black Rio movement, Dom Filó left Soul Grand Prix and broke with Nirto, his cousin and business partner in the sound system, who was more accommodating towards the changing times and the need to ‘play the commercial game’ (Essinger 2005: 44). Although the transformations of the period frustrated those producers and regulars more firmly committed to funk and soul like Dom Filó, they did not mark the end of the bailes or the sound-system crews. On the contrary, while Frias’s report on Black Rio estimated around three hundred sound-system crews at the time, data gathered by the anthropologist Hermano Vianna a decade later recorded around seven hundred bailes taking place every weekend in Rio de Janeiro and its metropolitan region: ‘making a conservative estimate, it is possible to state that one million young people attend these dances every Saturday and Sunday’ (Vianna 1987: 6).

The sound of the electronic drum machine spread around the world in the 1980s and the bailes of Rio de Janeiro were no exception. During this period, the term ‘funk’ began to be used generically to refer to a variety of musical genres such as Latin freestyle, Miami bass, electro funk and hip-hop. It was also in the 1980s that the first academic study of this musical movement appeared. Hermano Vianna, an anthropologist affiliated with the Museu Nacional, published a master’s dissertation that would later become a book: O mundo funk carioca (Vianna 1987). At the end of his research, Hermano gave a drum machine as a present to a friend who had assisted him considerably during his fieldwork. At the time, this kind of item seldom circulated among funk enthusiasts due to its high cost. The gift served as an incentive for DJ Marlboro to make the first funk record sung in Portuguese, Funk Brasil, released in 1989. Despite his pioneering role, Marlboro was not the only one investing in producing Brazilian funk. A few months later, another DJ, Grandmaster Raphael, independently released his own record in Portuguese, Super Quente (Super Hot).

These albums opened the door for young people who had previously just frequented dance parties but could now have their own tracks recorded. Some of these tracks took inspiration from the melodies of Miami bass classics and other genres mentioned above, while others combined elements taken from samba, capoeira and Afro-Brazilian musical expressions. Many of these tracks became national hits and consolidated funk carioca as one of the most popular musical movements of the 1990s. These recordings frequently used instrumental tracks from US musical genres as their rhythmic base. Among them, the most popular was the ‘volt-mix,’ taken from the B-side of a record by DJ Battery Brain, an artist based in Los Angeles whose work is more closely aligned with electro funk (Palombini 2016).

Since the 1980s, a phenomenon known as bailes de briga (‘fight parties’) had been taking place - a variation of baile widespread in the funk world. At these events, groups of young people gathered to dance and, sometimes, to fight rivals inside the clubs. The groups were organised according to where participants lived. There was no relation between them and the drug factions then vying for control of territory in Rio’s favelas. The fights were institutionalised and the excitement they generated formed part of the entertainment. Like an LP, the party was divided into a Side A and a Side B, a boundary sometimes marked out by a rope, which, at the height of the music-induced euphoria, would be lowered so that the two sides could confront each other. These bailes continued into the 1990s and were cited by the corporate media and state agents as evidence of the allegedly violent and dangerous potential of young people, thereby justifying crackdowns against the events. As several authors have emphasised, news outlets had already begun to associate funk and favela youths with drug trafficking and urban violence in the early 1990s (Lopes 2011, Herschman 1997, Facina 2010, Mattos 2006). These youths came to be seen as a ‘dangerous class’ whose funk music represented an ‘uncivilised battle cry’ against the ‘prevailing civilised values’ (Facina 2010). The stigma that associated favela-dwelling young black people and funk music with criminality was reiterated throughout the 1990s by state policies and the mainstream media, producing not only an enemy but also their accompanying soundtrack.

In response to these attempts at criminalisation, funkeiros, club owners and sound-system crews created the festivais de galera, which sought to channel rivalries through dance and music. During this period, pede a paz (ask for peace) raps became prominent, exalting local communities and calling for an end to violence (Mattos 2006: 34). These appeals for peace, however, did not stop the bailes from being gradually closed down until, by the end of the 1990s, most club-based bailes had disappeared. After the demise of the clubs, bailes in the favelas became the principal setting for enjoying funk. These bailes had existed since the 1980s but they neither had the scale they would later acquire nor occupied a central place in the funk world. Aside from the crackdown against the club bailes, another key factor in the consolidation of favela bailes in the late 1990s was the falling cost of equipment such as mixers, samplers and microphones. Until the 1990s, the high cost of musical devices meant that the production of Brazilian funk remained concentrated in the hands of large sound-system crews like Furacão 2000, Cashbox and Pipo’s, or controlled by major record labels that invested in more pop-oriented styles of funk. The increased availability of recording and sound-production devices enabled favela DJs to produce their own tracks independently. Favela bailes thus came to be fuelled primarily by music created within the favelas themselves by local MCs and DJs.

One favela in particular came to the fore at the turn of the 2000s. Located in Rio de Janeiro’s West Zone, Cidade de Deus launched various artists who would define a second wave of national success for funk. Deize Tigrona, Tati Quebra-Barraco, Bonde do Tigrão and Bonde do Vinho were among the artists and groups from Cidade de Deus who recorded hit tracks now eternalised in the national imagination. These MCs helped consolidate a new subgenre within funk carioca that featured more explicit sexuality and became known as putaria.¹ A distinctive feature of this style was the strong presence of women artists, something previously rare to the genre. The label putaria, however, was not initially adopted by the artists themselves, especially by the female MCs, who referred to their work instead as ‘sensual funk’ or ‘double-entendre funk.’ The work of these women prompted important reflections on gender and sexuality in funk carioca (Lopes 2011, Moreira 2014 Gomes 2015).

Another major legacy of this generation from Cidade de Deus was the tamborzão (‘big drum’) sound. Although not the creator of this electronic drum pattern, DJ Duda was responsible for using the tamborzão on the tracks of all the aforementioned artists, making the rhythmic style so popular that its sound became virtually indistinguishable from the identity of funk itself. This rhythmic base synthesises US electronic genres with elements of Afro-Brazilian music, especially maculelê (Moutinho 2020). The tamborzão was quickly adopted by DJs from other favelas and contributed to the nationwide success of funk in the 2000s. Despite its prominence, the Cidade de Deus baile was only one among hundreds taking place across Rio’s favelas.

The first decade of the 2000s was also marked by the success of another subgenre, the proibidão (‘prohibited’), at the time also known as neurótico (‘neurotic’). These categories refer to musical tracks that narrate the world of criminality, touching on the everyday life and sociabilities linked to the notion of the bandido (‘bandit’: crime gang member). This style of funk had already existed since the 1990s, but the consolidation of the favela bailes allowed these tracks to achieve greater prominence, narrating the hardships of a violent daily life shaped by the war on drugs and by inequality. In contrast to the official and media discourse that treats bandidos as abject beings, the proibidões depict these figures as complex subjects with critical perspectives on what society is and what it could be. A discourse ‘from the favela, about the favela, for the favela’ (Caceres, Ferrari and Palombini 2014: 178), these narratives expose the contradictions of state policies that treat favela bodies as lives of less worth.

Favela bailes drive a million-real economy that sustains hundreds of families, providing them with their primary source of income. Funded largely by the contributions of the barraqueiros who sell drinks and food, the bailes generate employment for sound-system owners, speaker haulers and sound technicians, as well as DJs and MCs. It is this collaborative, community-based economy that financed one of the country’s most powerful cultural movements. The golden era of these bailes, however, was abruptly halted by the arrival of the Pacifying Police Units (Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora: UPPs), a public-security policy that proposed to ‘permanently retake communities controlled by drug gangs.’² In practice, the UPPs resulted in numerous violations of the rights of favela residents and proved to be a policy aimed solely at preparing the city of Rio de Janeiro for mega-events such as the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. The first UPP was installed in 2008 in the Santa Marta favela, followed by another 37 in diverse favelas across the city of Rio de Janeiro and the Baixada Fluminense. As Marcia Leite emphasises, this number was far from covering Rio’s more than one thousand favelas (Leite 2012) but it did affect some of the main producers and disseminators of funk carioca, extinguishing some of the most important bailes. The UPPs were a central factor in the national epicentre of funk production shifting from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo in the early 2010s.

In 2011, a young director named Konrad Dantas, originally from the Baixada Santista region of São Paulo state, created Kondzilla, a YouTube channel that produces music videos for funk artists. This company quickly became the main platform for promoting funk, developing an aesthetic inspired by North American gangsta rap videos. Kondzilla was also responsible for increasing the visibility of São Paulo-based productions in general: these came to dominate the Brazilian scene, gradually displacing Rio de Janeiro’s hegemony over the production of funk. By 2012, the channel already had around 22 million subscribers on YouTube and was considered the most popular channel in Latin America. Today that number has surpassed 66.9 million,³ placing the production company among the largest music channels globally.

Kondzilla’s productions possess a distinctive aesthetic that revolves around luxury cars, bundles of cash and mansions, which led to its early videos acquiring the epithet funk ostentação (‘ostentation funk’). These themes were already present lyrically in Rio’s proibidão, whose artists served as inspiration for MCs from the Baixada Santista. Even so, the company carefully avoids publishing any explicit reference to the world of crime (Facina et al. 2019: 7). ‘Avoiding the explicit’ is, in fact, one of Kondzilla’s defining characteristics, not only in relation to criminality but also sexuality. Unlike funk carioca, the lyrics of these songs generally avoid taboo or ‘vulgar’ terms, even when the content is markedly erotic. In keeping with this ‘moral cleanliness,’ the musical productions released by Kondzilla also tend to feature a higher degree of ‘professionalism’ with arrangements and equalisation more palatable to radio stations and television networks. This trait can be heard in the increasing use of harmonic progressions in these productions, in contrast to funk carioca: ‘the melodies of funk carioca may suggest harmonisations but, before the 2010s, most of them dispensed with chords or interpolated chord sequences and avoided overlapping with the vocal line’ (Palombini et al. 2018: 235).

Although primarily a video-production company, Kondzilla stimulated the emergence of a range of business enterprises in São Paulo that invest in the careers of MCs and manage their public image, compositions and actual musical production. The scale of this market - its levels of ‘professionalisation’ and profitability - was incomparably larger than the Rio de Janeiro market in the 2010s, a period during which the city’s funk economy was smothered by the implementation of the UPPs. The hegemony of São Paulo funk sparked a series of debates among DJs, MCs and entrepreneurs in funk carioca, who attributed Rio’s declining presence in the recording industry to the city’s supposed ‘amateurism.’

Over time, constant reports of rights violations, the financial crisis in Rio de Janeiro state and the completion of mega-events such as the World Cup and the Olympics all contributed to the collapse of this policing initiative. Today, the UPPs are practically extinct, unable to curb the trade in illicit drugs as they had once promised. Based on a conceptual repertoire revolving around the metaphor of war (Leite 2012), this policy succumbed to the consequences of its original sin: namely, treating the favela population as a mass to be controlled rather than as citizens whose rights should be protected (Birman 2008). This failure, still not officially acknowledged by state agents, contributed to the re-emergence of funk carioca, particularly from 2016 onwards.

During this period, a group of young DJs from the Complexo da Maré began to explore a musical technique that, although not new to funk, had never been pushed to these new limits. Tracks that had previously been produced at a tempo of around 130 beats per minute (BPM) began to be played at 150 BPM. By accelerating the tempo, they created a cadence that spurred dancers into a heightened state of agitation - so much so that, progressively, funk played at the tempo that had characterised the genre for the previous twenty years became increasingly rare in Rio’s bailes. This generation of DJs and MCs came to be known as the ‘150 BPM movement.’ As well as the accelerated tempo, some of the defining features of this movement were the central role of DJs rather than MCs, the intensive use of digital platforms like YouTube and SoundCloud for distributing tracks, the mixture of proibidão and putaria in the lyrics, and the use of carimbos (‘tags’): hundreds of different versions of the same track, each personalized with the names of specific people or favelas.

The internet was a crucial refuge for Rio’s DJs and MCs during this period. Their productions were disseminated mainly via small YouTube channels, often run by fans who were not necessarily DJs or MCs themselves. The spread of computers in the favelas, especially through lan houses, enabled a proliferation of DJs who began producing an endless number of tracks and sharing them on digital platforms. Young people - not all of them DJs - created YouTube channels where they posted their favourite funk music. Some of these channels grew relatively large and their owners became known initially as ‘internet DJs.’ They were the ones who most quickly embraced the 150 BPM innovation, circulating the earliest productions of the DJs rising to prominence in the favela bailes. The era of the UPPs and the emergence of the 150 BPM movement in Rio’s bailes coincided with the period in which I began my fieldwork among funk artists - a research project that started in 2014 and, in many respects, continues to this day. In the following sections, I turn to one particular fieldwork experience that prompted the reflections orienting this article.

PRODUCTION STYLES AND MUSICAL CIRCUITS

Between 2014 and 2016, I was able to interview DJs and MCs from different generations, accompany them in their studios and performances, and attend - often intensively - the bailes that still existed and resisted at the time. The Pacifying Police Units, racism, the criminalisation of poverty and the disruptive potential of funk proibidão were the focus of my master’s dissertation, entitled Funk Proibidão: música e poder nas favelas cariocas (Novaes 2016). My exploration of the history and backstage world of funk carioca acquired new contours and tones at the end of 2016, when I moved to Cidade de Deus, a favela located in Rio de Janeiro’s West Zone. Living in Cidade de Deus, I closely observed the conflicts with the local UPP and the violent operations carried out by the Armed Forces during the period of Federal Intervention in 2018 and 2019. As a parallel activity to some extent more distant from the focus of my fieldwork, I contributed to the creation of a community pre-university course as a teacher of philosophy and sociology, and also worked as a volunteer guitar teacher for children and adolescents at the Centro de Referência da Juventude.

My work as a guitar teacher attracted the attention of a well-known DJ from Cidade de Deus, DJ Bel, who was interested in playing guitar and asked whether I could teach him some basic notions of music theory. In exchange, he began giving me lessons in music production in funk carioca. What began as a reciprocal teaching relationship soon became a close friendship and a working partnership. By mid-2017 we had started producing a number of tracks together and for about a year I spent time daily at Malibu Produções, Bel’s studio in Cidade de Deus, working as a music producer and recording keyboard arrangements for several funk tracks. Bel’s trajectory resembles that of many of the artists I interviewed over the years. He began as a DJ in the early 2000s and rapidly became the music producer for a group that subsequently achieved considerable national success, Bonde dos Hawaianos. Their success brought a period of prosperity for all members of the group, as well as Bel, who built a house for his mother and an apartment for himself, both in Cidade de Deus. But the group broke up in 2011 and shortly afterwards Bel also left the Hawaianos, entering a period of financial hardship. When we met, he was still struggling to make a living from his art, trying to avoid the kinds of jobs that most of his friends in Cidade de Deus relied on like construction work, driving or delivery-app jobs.

When I first arrived at Malibu Produções, Bel was committed to developing a technique then still relatively uncommon in favela studios: ‘harmonising’ a funk track. At the time, it was rare to hear productions that used keyboards in funk carioca and he wanted to be among the pioneers of this practice. The vocal and compositional style of the Hawaianos is known in the funk world as montagem.⁴ This involves a type of vocal delivery in which there is no particular concern with melody, nor necessarily any harmonic relationship between the MC’s vocals and the track’s rhythmic base. In other words, over the course of his career as a DJ, Bel’s production techniques had not depended on any specifically ‘harmonic’ knowledge. The basic mode of production used by DJs in the 1990s and 2000s involved three elements: the beat, the rhythmic pattern that underpins the track; the pontos or points/stitches, that is, short sonic fragments drawn from various sources, also known as samples (in English); and the acapellas, the MCs’ vocal lines. One of the most polysemic terms in the funk lexicon, the ponto has elsewhere been defined as ‘a short, recurrent melodic or rhythmic phrase, in the manner of a vocal or instrumental riff, which the DJ-producer adds to the combination of the base’ (Palombini et al. 2018: 9). This type of production can be heard in various tracks by the Hawaianos released between 2005 and 2011.⁵

Bel’s dedication to mastering the keyboard and acquiring some basic notions of harmony was driven in part by his desire to produce work capable of reaching a public beyond the circuit of favela bailes and the limits that this circuit set on earning a living. In other words, Bel wanted to produce tracks that not only became hits but also generated income. Success and money do not necessarily go hand in hand in funk carioca. A track may explode in the favela bailes and become widely known among regular frequenters, but since these events involve no collection of copyright royalties and artists often perform for free, success in the bailes does not necessarily translate into financial return. Bel wanted to make the leap into more lucrative musical circuits, following the example of the most successful production style at the time: São Paulo funk. It was as if there were some kind of magical property in the harmonies and in the melodic delivery of the MCs. Something in the very structure of the tracks that could account for their success, their effectiveness. Together, Bel and I began working intensively in the studio, trying to create arrangements inspired by what the DJs in São Paulo were producing, engaging in a series of sonic experiments that sought to emulate the same magical effect. The studio functioned as a kind of laboratory in which we tried, through trial and error, to develop the most effective feitiço (‘magic spell’) to achieve success.

The funk produced in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas during this same period displayed very different characteristics. The explicitly sexual content of the music, the references to the trade in illicit drugs, the intensive use of samples and mixes, as well as the short formats - with songs often consisting of just one or two phrases - made this style of funk far less marketable to a mass audience, despite being extremely popular in Rio’s favelas. The hundreds of bailes that take place every weekend are the main context in which the city’s favela DJs practise their art. The bailes thus constitute a circuit of musical production and enjoyment that generates its own characteristic codes, values and affects. Through my daily work in the studio, I learned that for DJ Bel and other artists, the form of a track - what I call its sonic design - can be a decisive factor in its circulation or commercialization. Technical issues relating to sound quality, compositional format, lyrics, styles of montagem (‘editing’) and modes of production are fundamental in determining how a track will circulate. Moreover, Bel was not the only artist who recognised the relationship between these elements and the different circuits. Many of his views were widely shared among funk artists, as illustrated by debates surrounding a highly popular type of production in Rio’s favela bailes: the carimbadas - tracks with short lyrics that suit the dynamics of the bailes, where montagens (edits) predominate.

Carimbadas are composed with ‘blank spaces’ that can be filled in as needed. DJs favour the circulation of these tracks as a way of drawing attention to themselves and demonstrating that they are important references in the funk world - important enough to receive this kind of homage from MCs. Bandidos also often frequently ask for these tracks to be played as they connote status. The MCs, for their part, record these versions because they know how much these customised tracks can enhance the visibility of their work: indeed, those who adopt this format in many of their compositions tend to achieve far above-average prominence in funk carioca. Tracks structured in the carimbada format were hegemonic when UPP activities were at their peak. One of the most famous Rio MCs between 2014 and 2017 was TH, an icon of this style. The sheer number of carimbadas recorded by him makes it impossible to speak of any ‘original’ version that would have primacy over the others. One example is the track ‘Rei Delas’ (Their King):

Nós é os porra louca, os tralha cheio de pepeca We’re the crazy lot, the crew with all the pussy Pra mamãe _____, pras malandras rei delas For the mamas _____, for the bad girls, their king Pra mamãe_____, pras malandras rei delas For the mamas _____, for the bad girls, their king Marrento, bem cheiroso, gostosin pra elas Cocky and smelling good, tasty for them (MC TH - ‘Rei Delas’)6.

Nós é os porra louca, os tralha cheio de pepeca	We’re the crazy lot, the crew with all the pussy
Pra mamãe _____, pras malandras rei delas	For the mamas _____, for the bad girls, their king
Pra mamãe_____, pras malandras rei delas	For the mamas _____, for the bad girls, their king
Marrento, bem cheiroso, gostosin pra elas	Cocky and smelling good, tasty for them
(MC TH - ‘Rei Delas’)6.

Nonetheless, the characteristics of the success achieved by TH reveal the limitations of the carimbadas and their consequences for MCs. Although the examples cited above were played endlessly by favela DJs, the tracks that actually propelled the MC to success on radio stations in Rio de Janeiro and other Brazilian states followed a different structure. One example was ‘Vidro Fumê’ (Tinted Glass), released in 2015:

Vidro fumê, rolando vários becks Tinted glass, rolling joints Som no último volume, escutando Felipe Ret Sound turned right up, listening to Felipe Rat Do jeito que elas gosta, hoje eu tô carente demais Just how the women like it, today I’m real needy Os menor é sagaz, é os que te satisfaz The boys are cunning, ready to satisfy you Várias danadinhas no contatinho do pai Some wicked girls on daddy’s contact list Faz ela sentir prazer, dá linguada que ela se contrai Let her feel the pleasure, a lick that makes her squirm O macete é tu deixar com gostinho de quero mais The knack is to leave her with the taste for more Várias danadinha no contatinho do pai Some wicked girls on daddy’s contact list (MC TH - ‘Vidro Fumê’).

Vidro fumê, rolando vários becks	Tinted glass, rolling joints
Som no último volume, escutando Felipe Ret	Sound turned right up, listening to Felipe Rat
Do jeito que elas gosta, hoje eu tô carente demais	Just how the women like it, today I’m real needy
Os menor é sagaz, é os que te satisfaz	The boys are cunning, ready to satisfy you
Várias danadinhas no contatinho do pai	Some wicked girls on daddy’s contact list
Faz ela sentir prazer, dá linguada que ela se contrai	Let her feel the pleasure, a lick that makes her squirm
O macete é tu deixar com gostinho de quero mais	The knack is to leave her with the taste for more
Várias danadinha no contatinho do pai	Some wicked girls on daddy’s contact list
(MC TH - ‘Vidro Fumê’).

In this second example, in addition to the longer sets of lyrics, there is no room for references to DJs or their communities of origin. Unlike the carimbadas (tags) created to be incorporated into DJs’ montagens (edits), compositions such as ‘Vidro Fumê’ foreground the MCs and are more marketable products for radio stations or for music-distribution platforms in general. Carimbadas and their relationship to DJ montagens have since become a recurrent topic of debate among DJs and MCs. In their montagens at favela bailes, DJs combine a series of tracks, or track excerpts, like the ones mentioned above. When these montagens are made available on digital platforms, authorship is not attributed to the MCs who contributed the vocal lines but to the DJ who produced the mix. This dynamic has plunged the vast majority of MCs into anonymity while propelling DJs into an unprecedented prominence. Not infrequently, the imbalance between these two categories of artists generates indignant reactions, as in a Facebook post made by MC Rian in August 2018 and shared by many of his colleagues:

The MC records, records, records and puts out vocals, records the carimbos and in the end? Nobody releases them, nobody plays them, and on YouTube the MC’s name doesn’t appear, only the DJ-producer’s! DJs on a roll grab the vocals and only release the carimbos!

No one has the guts to record and then watch their work go nowhere! To all the DJs out there, the DJs who ask me for carimbos in the chat [saying] ‘with all due respect’ and to DJs in general [who say] ‘sadly I only play carimbo, only editing acapellas!’ (...) This business of free vocals in Rio is over. MCs and DJs together we’re stronger and together with friends I’m backing this idea as well! All for a better funk! #RJ150BPM (MC Rian)

Rian’s tone of revolt in the post is comprehensible. That same year, one of the most played tracks in Rio de Janeiro would receive music video treatment on Kondzilla. ‘DJ do Baile Toca Aquela,’ performed by MC Novinho from Cidade de Deus, was a smash hit throughout Rio’s favelas. Despite its success, the track consisted of an astonishing two verses: ‘DJ ___, play that one! / DJ from ___, play-play that one!’ The track’s phenomenal popularity owed much to the MC’s smartness, which in a sense captured an era marked by the intense demand for carimbos among DJs, and, of course, to Novinho’s willingness to record several hundred versions. To justify filming a music video, he had to create two additional verses and then repeat the entire composition several times over the three-minute track. The five hundred thousand views achieved by ‘DJ do Baile Toca Aquela’ can be considered a failure compared to other videos on the channel. Also in 2018, another post went viral among funk carioca MCs:

I don’t much like exposing my personal life on social media, but we need to open this up for debate. Carimbos, do you really think they’re still effective? Working as a street vendor, I saved up the money needed to buy a brand-new motorbike in cash, but I chose to invest in my dream and build my studio from scratch. And I did it in six months. Then I spent another six months recording every day for everyone who asked, famous or not, for a packed baile or playing in a bar. Out of every ten montagens in 2015 and 2016, five had my vocals. (...) And now today we’re fighting for a right that should be ours, recognition for the work we create, and there are still people out there who go against us and say we’re talking too much. #McNãoéMontagem (MC DK)

On one hand, carimbadas continue the references to places and people typical to funk carioca over the years. Yet the spread of music production technologies - especially personal computers - has restructured the tendency that predominated in previous decades in which live productions leaned towards specificity and studio productions towards generality. Contrary to what the earlier tendency might have suggested, the end of live recordings led to an intensification of specificity in the references: artists now record multiple versions for particular DJs and favelas. To a large extent, this is the result of an increasing ‘de-industrialisation’ of the funk carioca world, driven by the decline of the favela bailes and by the hegemony of São Paulo funk spearheaded by Kondzilla. By de-industrialisation I mean the inability to generate profit from music-qua-product - that is, to enable the circulation of these tracks through channels that pay copyright royalties.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the mediation between favela bailes and the wider recording industry promoted by sound-system crews like Furacão 2000 helped drive a tendency towards generality - towards tracks of a more or less standardised length and, simultaneously, towards the MC as a marketable product. The montagens created by DJs, by contrast, are conceived to be performed for the here-and-now moment of the party. They do not fit the three-minute song time that has prevailed in popular music ever since the advent of sound recording. With the shrinking of spaces in which they could present their compositions, MCs found themselves reduced to mere raw material for the montagens. And in the absence of a market in which they could generate income from music - whether through radio, television or performances where copyright royalties were collected - what remained was the pursuit of ‘fame’:

As iconic and reflexive code, fame is the virtual form of influence. Without fame, a man’s influence would, as it were, go nowhere; successful acts would in effect remain locked within themselves in given times and places of their occurrence or be limited to immediate transactors. The circulation of names frees them, detaching them from these particularities and making them the topic of discourse through which they become available in other times and places. Since fame is the circulation of persons via their names (...) it typifies the capacity for subjective relocation and positive reconstitution of the self that is fundamental to the transaction process. (...) fame reflects the influential acts of the actor back to himself from an external source (...) the actor knows himself as someone known by others. (Munn 1986: 117, cited in Gell 2001: 285)

This passage from Nancy Munn’s work resonates in a surprising way with the question of the carimbadas. The context in which the author developed this reflection, however, was quite different, the Kula ring in Papua New Guinea, a system of ritual exchanges that enables participants to accumulate prestige by carrying out successful transactions. The point of intersection between two such distinct contexts - the Kula and the carimbadas - lies in the fact that in both cases the objective of actors ‘is not the acquisition of wealth as such, or the power which wealth confers, but the transformation of the self into a spatio-temporally expanded form’ (Gell 2001: 284) - in other words, fame.⁷

In highlighting this aspect of the carimbadas, I do not mean to suggest that they are not commodities - or, rather, not commodities at some moment in their careers as things. As Timothy Taylor observes: ‘Without capitalism, after all, most of what we think about music wouldn’t be possible. (...) Capitalism has power fully shaped not only the production, consumption, and distribution of music but also the roles that music plays in people’s lives’ (Taylor 2016: 2). Yet although it may often appear inescapable, capitalism is not monolithic. Once produced, things are subject to rearrangements that make their status as commodities, to some extent, contextual: ‘Out of the total range of things available in a society, only some of them are considered appropriate for marking as commodities. Moreover, the same thing may be treated as a commodity at one time and not at another’ (Kopytoff 1986: 64).

Marx held that the value of a commodity derives from the social relations involved in its production and that the system of exchange is responsible for ‘masking’ this value. The commodity’s capacity to detach itself from its real value leads to its fetishisation. But, as Kopytoff observed, ‘some of that power is attributed to commodities after they are produced’ (1986: 83). The author argues that commoditisation is a process rather than an absolute state of things. The intensity of this process depends on two factors: ‘(a) with respect to each thing, by making it exchangeable for more and more other things, and (b) with respect to the system as a whole, by making more and more different things more widely exchangeable’ (1986: 73). The opposite process would be that of singularisation in which things are either too important or too insignificant to be commoditised. Absolute commoditisation and absolute singularisation, as the author himself recognises, are non-actualised poles in real life, where things exist along a continuum. My argument here is that the carimbadas are both products and agents of a cycle of de-commoditisation. On one hand, they are a response to the difficulties faced by the funk carioca economy in generating profit through the commoditisation of its music; on the other, they become singularised and, by their very constitution, harder to commoditise. This cycle produces effects that have been particularly detrimental for the MCs associated with the circuit of favela bailes.

In this scenario, the MCs are able to disseminate the tracks through the carimbos, but not their own names. By accumulating carimbos in a substantial number of tracks, the DJs see their names expand, nurturing the ambition of becoming ‘Big Men’ one day. A post from February 2020, published by DJ Lucian da Silva, raised in the Antares favela in Rio de Janeiro’s West Zone, describes the conflicts that this dynamic generates between the interests of MCs and those of DJs:

Cool, I think it’s great when an MC’s track goes big. But the only chance a guy (a DJ) who’s just starting out today has of getting a hit is by making a montagem. And another thing: a high-level MC isn’t going to send exclusive vocals or hand over some ‘hit’ to an unknown DJ - we’ve all lived that moment. The MC who sometimes records with you often doesn’t believe in your potential, he sends vocals to everyone, and that’s why the only way the menor [kid] can see his work getting played - even if only on the street corner or at the bailes where he appears - is through montagem.

The difficulty of projecting carimbadas beyond the circuit of favela bailes has led some MCs and DJs to cease composing tracks in this style or producing carimbada versions altogether. This is one example of how production and compositional techniques connect to the accumulation of economic capital or prestige -- an example linked chiefly to the form of the lyrics. There is, however, an eminently sonic dimension in which these kinds of disputes unfold beyond words. This will be the theme of the next section.

AUDIBLE MARKETS: STUDIOS AND DIFFERENT REGIMES OF EXCHANGE

One way of thinking about the connection between these musicalities and the circuits for which they are produced is to focus on the practice of the remix. The contemporary notion of the remix originated in the music industry and gained popularity through the radical experiments of hip-hop DJs in the 1970s. By cutting and layering fragments of particular tracks to create ‘new’ sonic objects, these DJs sparked debates around issues such as creativity, authorship and intellectual property (Rose 1994, Katz 2010). These techniques of (re)mixing anticipated to some extent a range of practices that spread throughout the twenty-first century, while simultaneously renewing discussions about older concepts such as ‘bricolage.’ In a broad sense, as Eduardo Navas (2018) has argued, the remix can be understood as the continual recycling and re-signification of material and immaterial things.

Today there exists a vast field of academic work known as remix studies, concerned both with understanding these artistic and creative phenomena and with the epistemological implications of the notion of remix itself. First, we need to clarify what is meant here by remix and how authors working on the theme have approached this notion. I draw inspiration here primarily from the collection Keywords in Remix Studies, edited by Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher and xtine burrough (2018). In this brilliant and provocative volume, the authors select one specific concept to open the collection: ‘appropriation.’ Appropriation can be considered the basic act that connects all practices understood as ‘remixes.’ At the same time, inherent in the notion of ‘appropriation’ is an assumption grounded in the idea of ownership. In the words of Owen Gallagher:

Remix artists, due to their ongoing reevaluation of authorship in relation to creativity, are usually explicit about their borrowing, whereas the majority of ‘original’ authors borrow heavily from others without acknowledging their contribution in the new work. (...) The individual artist is always dependent upon external sources. The artist and author are merely secondary facilitators of cultural texts, weaving together tapestries of citations, intertextual artworks built upon explicit and implicit references to previous works, codified and connected to all other artworks that came before. Culture may be conceptualized as consisting of bricolage, remediation, and implicit participation. (Gallagher 2018: 16)

Gallagher’s reflections simultaneously encompass the politics that permeates the act of appropriation, the relationship of this act to the creative process more generally and the ways in which this notion becomes entangled with the idea of ‘culture.’ In addition, he introduces another concept often treated as synonymous with remix: ‘bricolage.’

Exploring the similarities and differences between remix and bricolage, Annette N. Markham (2018) recognises that the two notions resemble each other to a considerable extent. Although she maintains that using one or the other as synonyms is not necessarily problematic, Markham undertakes a reflective effort to distinguish them. First, she argues, there is a difference of status: the notion of bricolage, ever since it was systematised by Claude Lévi-Strauss, has become commonplace in academic usage, whereas remix is a relatively recent term. Second, there is a difference concerning the ‘product.’ Bricolage presupposes a more or less finished product, the outcome of a process of assemblage, whereas the notion of ‘remix,’ according to the author, focuses on the continuous and inherently open-ended process of remixing, fixing our attention ‘on the way temporally situated arguments are assembled and reassembled as they traverse various audiences’ (Markham 2018: 51).

Despite these qualifications, Markham agrees with other authors that there are more similarities than differences between the notions of remix and bricolage, proposing that the recognition of these practices as constitutive of knowledge production entails a new epistemology. Bricolage, or remix, would be ways of constructing a relational understanding of the world - not an explanation of nature, but an explanation of our relationship with nature. Citing Derrida, she observes ‘if we accept how culture and knowledge is enacted, understood, or made sense of, everything could be considered bricolage’ (Markham 2018: 47).

The remix practices associated with the emergence of hip-hop in the Bronx and Jamaican reggae, as well as Brazilian hip-hop and funk, are profoundly linked to the African diaspora. In her classic article ‘A categoria político-cultural de amefricanidade,’ the anthropologist Lélia Gonzalez argues that the concept of amefricanidade is capable of encompassing ‘the entire historical process of intense cultural dynamism (adaptation, resistance, reinterpretation and the creation of new forms) that is Afro-centred’ (Gonzalez 2020: 135). For Lélia Gonzalez, the African diaspora - as a historical experience shared by amefricanos - involved processes of cultural reinterpretation and re-creation even within a racially hierarchical system produced by colonial violence (2020: 133). The author also highlights the fact that these re-creations produced by the colonised had an impact on the coloniser, as exemplified by the Portuguese spoken in Brazil, which she calls pretuguês because of the contributions of the Africans brought to the country by force. Something similar was observed by Stuart Hall (2003) and by Kobena Mercer (2010), the latter through the idea of ‘cosmopolitan contact zones.’ The formal aspects of musical production in funk carioca are therefore connected to a musical economy that involves remix practices, market dynamics and a racial politics.

For the purposes of the present article, I propose two ‘ideal types’ as a way to differentiate ‘Rio de Janeiro’ and ‘São Paulo’ styles of musical production: the Sampler-DJ (DJ-Sampleador) and the Arranger-DJ (DJ-Arranjador), respectively. I refer to these as ‘ideal types’ because we can identify numerous São Paulo productions that follow a sample-based montagem style similar to the kind predominant in Rio de Janeiro’s favela bailes. The reverse also occurs: productions featuring the harmonic arrangements popularised by Kondzilla are now quite common among Rio DJs, although they remain extremely rare within the bailes themselves. The distinction between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, though, formed part of the lexicon of my interlocutors during the period when I conducted the fieldwork informing this article and so I have retained it here. Among the many possible examples of each production type, I select two that are chronologically close. The set by DJ Zóin from Cidade de Deus, released in 2018, fits what I refer to here as the Sampler-DJ.

In DJ Zóin’s set, the act of sampling comes to the fore. He clearly appropriates sonic fragments from diverse sources to create a very specific sonic object, designed to be effective in a baile funk. The voices of the MCs are sliced into short segments - small phrases - meaning that the result diverges from the pattern of commercialised ‘songs’ broadcast on radio or television. There is also no concern about copyright with the music aimed squarely at its narrower audience: the favela bailes of Rio de Janeiro. The appropriations made by DJ Zóin are not just copies, however: funk carioca DJs have developed a high degree of skill not only in identifying an interesting sound but in sensing what that sound might become. In other words, the fragments they appropriate are clipped and transformed through a range of techniques until they become ‘new.’

In São Paulo, by contrast, a full-blown industry has developed and a new kind of funk has achieved success, characterised above all by the use of harmonies. One example is the track ‘Fazer Falta’ produced by DJ Perera and performed by Livinho, one of Brazil’s most famous MCs, both of them from São Paulo.⁸ Although this is not immediately evident in the work of the São Paulo producer Perera - an ideal-type of Arranger-DJ’ - he also appropriates compositional, arrangement and production techniques from other artists. This has been demonstrated with aplomb by the musicologist Carlos Palombini (Palombini et al. 2018) who undertook a kind of ‘archaeology’ of the harmonic experiments undertaken by various DJs, culminating in the type of harmonic production exemplified by Perera. Returning to Gallagher’s observations, the ‘original author’ is simply more effective at ‘concealing’ the borrowed sources (Gallagher 2018). Perera’s production also contains other important formal features: it provides the base for a single MC, following the more marketable song format, and is more like ‘pop’ music, reaching audiences far beyond the favela bailes and neatly fitting the YouTube channel for which it was produced.

In calling attention to the formal differences between these two types of production, I evoke the notion of style presented by Alfred Gell in both Art and Agency(1998) and The Art of Anthropology(1999). For Gell, style is constituted as ‘relations between relations’ in which artworks must be understood through the formal characteristics they share with other artworks. Different artistic practices are not merely repositories of symbolic propositions about the world but forms of action that seek to transform it (Gell 1998: 6). Rather than looking for some kind of ‘representation’ in artworks, we must understand them as the products of a technical system.

How can we think about artistic agency through production techniques in relation to time? In The Anthropology of Time, Alfred Gell proposes an approach to the cognition of time based on the philosopher Edmund Husserl’s protentional-retentional model. Rather than treating the ‘now’ as a boundary between absolute past and absolute future, Husserl’s model considers the ‘present’ as a kind of temporal horizon. This horizon is formed by retentions and protensions: the former are the projections we make from the past from our viewpoint in the ‘now,’ while the latter are the ‘perspectival visions we have of the immediate future’ (2001: 224). Husserl’s theory challenges models based on the opposition between a dynamic present and a supposedly fixed and immutable past, proposing instead a system in which past, present and future are equally dynamic and where any alteration in one of these dimensions affects the others (Gell 1999: 240).

Owing to their formal properties, both of the tracks presented here can be viewed as later developments of funk styles recorded in earlier decades - retentions and protensions of their formal characteristics. The styles developed by Zóin and Perera radicalise earlier experiments with the possibilities offered by previous works, but their formal experimentations are guided by their implications for different audiences, techniques and modes of musical distribution. In the explicit or implicit use of samples, in the prevalence or absence of the commercial song format sung by an MC, there is a style - and with it, a politics - linked to creative practice and to the collectivities with which these works engage. Not styles as symbolic representations of those collectivities, but as technical systems that act upon them. The trajectories and interviews of producers, DJs, entrepreneurs and MCs reveal the different positions within this continuum as the outcome of fabrication processes, grounded in specific modes of production, techniques and apparatuses. These processes are generally linked to particular regimes of exchange. Studios are privileged spaces for observing this sequence as a whole because it is in the studios that production occurs and, for precisely this reason, they materialise the different levels of capital accumulation that the musical tracks enable, depending on the regimes of exchange into which they are integrated.

In his research on the French recording industry in the late 1970s, Antoine Hennion defined the process of producing pop music as the ‘art of pleasing’ ( Hennion 1983: 188). The differences between his research context and the one informing the present work do not obscure several relevant issues raised by the author. By choosing as the focus of his analysis the work of musicians, producers, sound technicians and songwriters employed by major record labels, he saw in the activity of these professionals a ‘permanent and organised quest for what holds meaning for the public’ (1983: 160). More than a product of manipulation or a top-down imposition, the success of pop music is, in Hennion’s view, the outcome of a constant mediation in which studio professionals seek to capture - or anticipate - the ‘public imaginary.’ The resulting song is not produced first to be consumed later; rather, it is ‘rather a simultaneous production-consumption process takes place first inside the studio, and the impact on those present must be repeated later on outside the studio’ (Hennion 1983: 190). To ‘introduce the public into the studio,’ these professionals mobilise at least three basic resources: ‘(a) through techniques of cutting and mixing which introduce elements of everyday reality into the song; (b) through the presence of witnesses (...) and representatives of the public; and (c) through the working relationships, constituted by mutual criticism (...) by subjective listening (...) and by collective anticipation’ (1983: 189).

Far from being exclusive to major record labels, I believe that the phenomena analysed by Hennion are constitutive if not of recording studios in general then at least of those dedicated to popular music. This is partly due to the fact that, in the context of his research, ‘pop’ refers to popularity in the sense of massification and dissemination among a broad public, rather than a specific production style, as in the case analysed here. Hennion’s effort to counter authors who focused on the particularities of the culture industry as a product of a capitalist system - including Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer among others - ultimately limits his analysis. Undeniably, the ways in which studio professionals mediate between the public and the record labels are fundamental to the success of the ‘music-object’ - to use Hennion’s terminology. Yet his approach fails to explain why, within the universe of songs resulting from the mediation between producers and audiences, only some attain mass success.

The type of mediation described by Hennion resembles what Mylene Mizrahi observed in her research on the collective of MCs and DJs with whom Mr Catra - one of the best-known artists in funk carioca - performed. Drawing on her field experiences, Mizrahi argues that ‘funk artists also find pleasure in pure creation but also they never cease to openly express their desire for their output to circulate. For them, art is that which circulates, not something that remains confined to the sphere of the extraordinary’ (Mizrahi 2016: 255). Taking circulation as an objective requires an exercise in anticipating what the public wants, as well as anticipating which public this involves: ‘creation (...) places production and consumption into relation, since “everything has a circuit” and it is this “circuit” that provides the “standard,” the touchstone for the production and variation of tracks. It is the public and the reception that must be prioritized’ (2016: 262). As an example of adaptation to this circuit, Mizrahi cites the fact that in the first decade of the 2000s artists previously associated with proibidões migrated towards putaria in search of increased circulation of their output.

The desire for musical production to circulate, the mediations that enable this desire to be realised and the existence of different circuits were all features I also observed in my own fieldwork experiences, as will be developed in the following sections. However, the author’s focus on Mr Catra and his immediate network of relations led her to a somewhat distorted view of how these circuits were articulated during the period. In the first half of the 2000s, Catra made a successful transition to putaria and became one of the main exponents of this subgenre. According to Mizrahi, this transition was the result of proibidão being ‘suffocated,’ largely as a result of police repression targeting the leading exponents of the style (Mizrahi 2016: 265). In Rio’s favelas, however, the second half of the 2000s - the period in which most of Mizrahi’s ethnography is concentrated - can be considered the most productive moment for proibidão performers, a success propelled by the rise of the Chatuba baile as one of the epicentres of funk carioca production and enjoyment (Facina and Palombini 2017). Pointing out that proibidão was not necessarily experiencing a period of decline in the latter half of the 2000s does not contradict the author’s observations regarding the greater ‘permeability and acceptance’ of putaria (Mizrahi 2016: 266). My intention is simply to emphasise that Catra and his associates were producing their work with an eye to a wider circuit of listeners, not limited to the favela bailes. Through its permeability, putaria was able to mediate access to more expansive and consequently more lucrative circuits. Compared to the proibidões, whose thematic content was closely linked to everyday life of Rio’s favelas, the sexuality expressed in putaria had wider appeal.

The putaria style enabled a wave of media visibility for funk carioca at the turn of the millennium, with performances on television programmes and strong commercial success - always, of course, in its light versions. Popularity did not make it a ‘pop’ genre, though.⁹ In their production techniques, vocal styles and compositional forms, the tracks made by Tati Quebra-Barraco, Bonde do Tigrão and others condensed the inventive agency of the contexts in which they were created: the bailes of Rio’s favelas. It was in dialogue with the expectations of this listening public that the putaria DJs and MCs created the songs that became nationwide hits. In Alfred Gell’s terms, these tracks can be considered indices of the agency of their producers and, consequently, of the contexts in which they were created. Once detached from their ‘neighbourhood of relations,’ they come to inhabit a range of different contexts and are re-signified in diverse ways. Yet the transformations they undergo over the course of their careers, on the paths along which they circulate, inevitably engage with their own characteristics - with the types of abduction of agency they afford. Detached from their original contexts yet simultaneously a condensation of those contexts, the tracks act as ‘ambassadors’ of their creators and as indices of their social agency.¹⁰

What I am proposing is that this notion of social agency materialised in the ‘sound object’ must necessarily consider the ‘mode of production’ - the kinds of labour relations through which the music was produced. For example, the idea that time spent in the studio should be paid for by the artist did not apply at ‘Malibu Produções,’ the name of DJ Bel’s studio in Cidade de Deus. In favela studios there is a level of informality uncommon in other contexts. I frequently compared the dynamics at Malibu with those of other studios where I had recorded or rehearsed as a musician. In the latter rehearsals, a specific time slot had to be booked and the period of use paid for - a policy strictly observed by the staff member in charge. Recording sessions were even more complex since they required lengthy periods of work and generally cost more per hour of studio time. To minimise expenses, musicians with lower budgets typically rehearse obsessively to avoid mistakes in the recording studio. Concerns of this kind are rare in funk studios in Rio’s favelas.

Studios more intensely oriented by a capitalist rationality impose a series of demands on the professionals who work in them. In the edited volume Palavra Cantada, the vocal coach Felipe Abreu describes his contribution to a singer’s performance as follows: ‘When it comes to rehearsals and recording studios, the saying time is money holds true. This foments the expectation among others that the singer’s performance should be more productive and efficient, using the shortest possible time (studios, musicians and sound technicians all charge by the hour)’ (Abreu 2008: 125). According to Abreu, the vocal coach helps singers without formal training to optimise their time in the studio through warm-up and vocal placement techniques, thereby avoiding the need to repeat the songs excessively to obtain the best takes. Written by someone who has closely observed the day-to-day life of professional recording studios, Abreu’s observations are highly representative of the logic that governs such spaces. Moreover, they reveal how the mode of production influences artistic practice and contributes to the shaping of particular sonorities.

Favela studios, by contrast, tend to be little concerned - if at all - with this rationing of time. A simple acapella recording, which could take less than five minutes, can easily stretch into an entire afternoon of conversation, joking around and, not infrequently, gossip. In these studios, what prevails is what Milton Santos called ‘the time of slow men.’ It may seem contradictory to describe as ‘slow’ the everyday life of artists who are constantly online, who manipulate foreign audio-editing software while assembling sonic fragments from global sources. Yet, as Santos notes, the logic of capital demands a rationalisation of space, modes of production and communication systems to optimise the flow of commodities. The profound inequality that shapes cities is, simultaneously, an inequality in the rationalisation of space: ‘in this sense, urban ghettos, when compared with other areas of the city, tend to attribute relations of proximity with an even greater communicational content, due to a clearer perception of personal or group situations and to an affinity in terms of fate - an economic or cultural affinity’ (Santos 2002: 324).

In this case, slowness contrasts with the universalising tendency of standardising rationality, creating space instead for proximity where the order of affective relations prevails and, as a result, place acquires prominence: ‘popular culture has roots in the land where one lives: it symbolises the person and their surroundings and embodies the desire to confront the future without severing ties with place and to obtain continuity through change. Its frame and its limit are the deep relations established between people and their milieu, but its reach is the world’ (Santos 2002: 327). The focus on the circuit of the bailes is linked to the low level of concern with certain aspects of production such as mastering or vocal finishing, which are marginalised in favour of others - vocal delivery and the rhythmic base, for example. The scenario changes when other circuits come into view.

Studios are privileged environments for observing the different kinds of mediation undertaken by artists and, consequently, the type of circuit they aim to reach. At the same time, through their working relations and the technical apparatuses that enable (or fail to enable) this work, they materialise the different levels of capital accumulation permitted by these circuits. Finally, in the networks of people they mobilise, studios unite specific kinds of techniques incorporated by the artists who engage in them. These techniques, accumulated in accordance with each artist’s context and trajectory, are linked to characteristic sonorities. These three elements interpenetrate: (1) the circuits with which artists align themselves, (2) the accumulation of capital materialised in the equipment, and (3) the technical repertoire of the artists. The techniques deployed by an artist can approximate or distance their music vis-à-vis a given circuit and thus influence the level of capital accumulation. Capital, in turn, enables or precludes the hiring of certain professionals, for example, and their respective technical repertoires.

At least three production/distribution circuits have shaped funk carioca since favela bailes became the primary centres for the genre’s production and enjoyment. The first is, of course, the bailes themselves: an economy large enough to sustain a certain level of professionalisation among artists, yet highly dispersed, which results in a relatively low ceiling for individual capital accumulation. At the opposite pole stand the major record labels, concentrated around just a few artists, entrepreneurs and producers with significant capital at their disposal. Between these poles, different circuits have played a mediating role, occupied once by Furacão 2000, for example, and today by Kondzilla. The varying degrees of commercialisation of recorded music promoted by these circuits compose what I call ‘regimes of exchange.’ How, then, do these elements mesh with the question raised at the beginning of this section? In other words, what imaginary is mobilised when certain tracks are labelled as pop or not?

In an interview with the anthropologist Mylene Mizrahi, DJ Sandro, one of the artists who worked with Mr Catra, listed ‘grittiness’ (sujeira)¹¹ and ‘low sound quality’ as stylistic traits of funk carioca, while global electronic music, by contrast, would be more ‘centred,’ ‘clean’ and ‘equalised’ (Mizrahi 2016: 271). Discourses of this kind describe the continuum spanning from the funk produced in Rio’s favelas to ‘pop funk’ as a process of ‘cleaning up’ or ‘domesticating’ the music. Such cleaning involves a distancing from the favela. A wide range of techniques and devices are used to achieve this sanitisation. One of the most evident strategies is found in the construction of the lyrics themselves. As well as ‘light’ versions, in which some of the lyrics are altered, the thematic as a whole becomes a distinctive element. In this sense, proibidões tend to be intrinsically associated with the circuit of the favela bailes, while putaria is frequently seen as more permeable to other contexts. Another factor, again linked to the MCs, is the vocal style. In this case, mastery of melodic singing is crucial for making the leap between circuits. Slang, accent, colloquial pronunciation or syntax likewise operate as markers of where the musician is positioned within this spectrum. Humour is another salient feature. In the favela bailes, parodies - or versions - of well-known songs are commonplace, although for legal reasons they rarely circulate in contexts where copyright may apply.

Musical production as a whole is no less important. Audio fidelity and distortion levels in beats, pontos (samples) and vocals are just as significant as the lyrics of the songs themselves. For instance, certain types of backing tracks, such as heavier and more distorted drums, are routinely associated with proibidão by the DJs in the favelas. As we saw in the debates around 150 BPM, this does not mean that favela DJs lack aesthetic judgements about the quality of the audio and the material presented. Rather, a ‘calculated grittiness’ is involved, seeking to anticipate listeners’ expectations by producing a track or set in the pique do baile,¹² while simultaneously maintaining particular concerns with quality, originality and so on. The type of equalisation applied to a track intended for playback on a huge sound system with the aim of making bodies of dancers shake at a favela baile is not the same as the type used for a track designed to be heard on domestic loudspeakers, for example. It is precisely in these mediations, focused on the circuit for which the music is intended and the technical skill of producers in adapting their work to the circuit in question, that particular sonorities take shape and simultaneously come to define how they sound. Audio fidelity - another factor that affects a track’s capacity to signal ‘cleanness’ - also depends on the technical apparatus available to the artists. As we saw earlier in relation to DJs, personal computers significantly reduced the distance between musicians with lower and higher purchasing power. Even so, the effects of investing in equipment can still be heard, especially by trained ears.

Finally, we need to consider another major factor distinguishing the favela baile circuit from the ‘pop’ circuit: the use of harmonies. Since the consolidation of montagens (edits) as the principal production technique in funk carioca, most tracks have structurally depended on the triad of beats, pontos (samples) and acapellas. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, pontos rarely performed as a harmonic component capable of supporting the vocal line. In other words, acapellas and pontos were kept separate rather than superimposed. This feature would have been an almost universal rule within the genre were it not for a style known as ‘funk melody’ - a more ‘palatable’ or ‘pop’ strand of funk, produced through a mixture of production techniques. Major record labels and intermediaries like Furacão 2000 were able to hire professionals adept in using a technical repertoire foreign to the kind prevalent in the bailes - in other words, musicians, instrumentalists and producers trained on instruments such as guitar, bass, electric guitar and drums. Nevertheless, the fact that the use of harmony as a technique plays such an important role in distinguishing styles - and thus the different circuits in which they circulate - does not make this distinction any less arbitrary.

The home-grown production style, the use of low-quality equipment, the minimalism of the constituent elements, the off-key singing - in short, the sonic ‘grittiness’ - were defining features of another musical movement, lo-fi. An abbreviation of ‘low fidelity,’ this movement emerged in the 1990s as a kind of update of punk and its ‘do-it-yourself’ ethos. It is not a musical genre but a production style. As soon as the first recordings considered representative of lo-fi appeared, US newspapers and magazines began to describe it as a return to the era of garage bands, whose intimate ambience and certain amateurism were perceived as an antidote to the mainstream of the 1990s, ‘too clean’ thanks to advanced audio-editing technologies (Grajeda 2002: 357-358). As Tony Grajeda has shown, critics and journalists contributed to producing lo-fi as a discursive phenomenon through their writing, attributing an aura of authenticity to the style in contrast to the ‘fakeness’ of mainstream music and its technological manipulation. The irony, as the author notes, is that lo-fi was also invariably achieved through the use of high-end studio equipment and its ‘rawness’ - celebrated by some as ‘authenticity’ - was simply another technologically mediated mode of musical production (2002: 359).

Celebrated as indices of romantic authenticity in lo-fi productions, similar characteristics are frequently identified in funk carioca as signs of amateurism or a lack of technical mastery on the part of its artists. In both cases, we are faced with discursive practices concerning production techniques that have real effects on how the music is produced, received and, in a capitalist context, commercialised. The configuration of the different circuits of production-consumption in funk carioca also takes shape through discursive practices that help delineate symbolic boundaries. While these circuits take solid form - materialised in equipment, spaces of musical enjoyment and so on - they are not hermetically sealed, nor the positions that artists and songs occupy within them. As indices of the agency of their creators, yet detached from them, these musical tracks are capable of mobilising audiences in diverse contexts and can thereby mediate shifts within circuits or even profoundly reconfigure them.

FINAL REMARKS: CLASS, RACE AND SURVIVAL IN FUNK AS WORK

Funk is work. That is how many of the artists I interviewed and worked with over the years put it. The use of the term work signals that even in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro - where music circulates in a space that inhabits the threshold between commodity and gift - funk is a source of income for artists and for the entire network of workers who revolve around its central institution: the baile. As we have seen, the bailes did not originate in the favelas, but they were the prime mover of funk as we know it today. Even now, it is largely through them that funkeiros dance, enjoy themselves and create. Musical production in the circuit of the favela bailes often runs counter to commodification processes.

The dilemmas faced by DJs and MCs from Rio’s favelas - encapsulated at the time in the dualities of ‘funk paulista’ versus ‘funk carioca,’ ‘professionalism’ versus ‘amateurism,’ ‘pop’ versus ‘favela baile’ - speak simultaneously to sonic and market concerns. From either pole, however, producing music is work: a creative exercise aimed at being effective within a given circuit. From a commercial perspective, the favela baile may appear ‘irrational.’ Músicas carimbadas, ‘calculated grittiness,’ references to criminal factions and explicit sexuality are features that frequently hinder their commodification. In sonic terms, something akin to what Milton Santos observed about the poorer zones of cities occurs: opaque areas that resist hegemonic standardisation and are, for that very reason, producers of ‘counter-rationalities’ with a disruptive potential that challenges the dominant order by showing other possible orders and rationalities, vital for survival (Santos 2002).

As an ideal, ‘pop’ is frequently the locus of cleanness, purification and technicism where the ‘ideal song,’ the maximum sonic fidelity, the perfect construction of arrangements and technical mastery of instruments are treated as virtues ‘in themselves.’ This is the kind of technicism that Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) associate with the neoliberal ideal of ‘governance’ - an ideal that is also racialised, a spectre that accompanies whiteness, as the authors note: ‘governance is the extension of whiteness on a global scale’ (Harney and Moten 2013: 56). Seeking to challenge and escape this standardising pretension, artists oriented towards the favela bailes produce ‘objects that resist’ (Moten 2023): sonic objects produced from, and for, the opaque zones that, owing to the inequality intrinsic to the reproduction of capital, elude the homogenising standardisation designed to facilitate the circulation of commodities.

This does not necessarily mean that we are speaking only of a resistance to capitalism, although, since it is produced in territories where its contradictions are the starkest, funk exposes its horrors and gestures towards dreams of other possible futures. In their discussion of the concept of survival, Facina, Silva and Lopes observe that ‘the notion of survival - the agentive interval between living and dying, this suspension, the moment of the now - is also a set of tactics and strategies that correspond only partially to the notion of resistance’ (2019: 20). The desire expressed by Bel and other artists to produce music for more lucrative circuits is bound up with the need to obtain just remuneration for artistic labour, something fundamental to their own subsistence. Even so, these artists continue to take the favela bailes as their principal circuit and point of interlocution. Negotiation and conflict are not perceived as opposites in this politics of survival.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to the anonymous reviewers for the important provocations that contributed to the final version of this article.

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• 1
  Putaria is a Brazilian Portuguese term referring to something overtly sexual or lewd, originally derived from the term puta (masculine puto) meaning prostitute. Used in funk to refer to explicitly sexual lyrics or themes, the term can be translated colloquially as ‘raunchy’ or ‘explicit,’ though within funk carioca it possesses aesthetic, political and gendered connotations not captured by any direct English equivalent.
• 2
  This description featured on the website of the UPPs themselves, no longer available online.
• 3
  These figures correspond to February 2024.
• 4
  A polysemic term that translates variously as editing (a film or music), assemblage (of elements), sampling (music) or mounting (an exhibition), for example, depending on context.
• 5
  One example is the song ‘Sequência do Pente,’ released by Furacão 2000 in 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IauTSswbQE
• 6
  Light version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQLDOONE0dE. Favela version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6hxdCjMtu8
• 7
  It is worth noting that the exploitation and erasure of MCs has a long history in funk carioca, as already highlighted by Adriana Lopes (2011) and Micael Herschmann (2005).
• 8
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9jo4mk0VQU This particular track was released on the ‘GR6 Explode’ channel, the second largest in the genre and also based in São Paulo.
• 9
  This is not a characteristic exclusive to putaria or to funk but is also found in various musical genres that, despite their popularity, are not considered ‘pop.’ The argument advanced here applies to all such cases and focuses on the relation between particularity and generality, constructed simultaneously as an audible and a discursive phenomenon.
• 10
  In the words of Gell: ‘The ideas of “representing” (like a picture) and “representing” (like an ambassador) are distinct, but none the less linked. An ambassador is a spatio-temporally detached fragment of his nation, who travels abroad and with whom foreigners can speak, “as if” they were speaking to his national government’ (Gell 1998: 98).
• 11
  TN: The term sujeira translates more directly as ‘dirt’ or ‘filth’: in this context it approximates to ‘noise’ and suggests a similar aesthetic (albeit not the same musical style) to ‘grunge.’
• 12
  TN: The expression no pique do baile, roughly ‘in the dance party vibe,’ widely used by favela DJs and MCs, refers to a style of production designed to appeal to the favela baile audience.

• This article was translated with support from ‘The Vibrant Project: Publishing Indigenous and Black Brazilian Anthropologists in foreign languages,’ funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research as part of its Global Initiative Grant programme.
• Funding
  Research funded by the Carlos Chagas Filho Foundation for Research Support of the State of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ).
• Data Availability Statement:
  The entire dataset supporting the results of this study was published in the article itself.

Edited by

• Dossier Editors
  Vinícius Venancio ([e-mail] | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3245-1204)
  Federal University of Goiás, Faculty of Social Sciences, Goiânia, GO, Brazil Universidade Federal de Goiás, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais, Goiânia, GO, Brasil
  Andréa Lobo ([e-mail] | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7525-1953)
  University of Brasília, Departament of Anthropology, Brasília, DF, Brazil Universidade de Brasília, Departamento de Antropologia, Brasília, DF, Brasil

Data availability

The entire dataset supporting the results of this study was published in the article itself.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  12 Jan 2026
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  29 June 2024
• Accepted
  21 July 2025