In a project called pacification, security forces rolled in with tanks to establish police outposts. They cracked down on the “baile funk,” parties that came to be viewed as subversive. The outcome: Practitioners of proibidão, the prohibited funk style that champions drug gangs, were forced to move to unpacified favelas or change their style to “light,” with the watered-down lyrics the term implies.
The volume rattles the bones. The gyrations evoke scenes of lustful abandon. In some of funk’s most explicit forms, tracks sprinkled with the prerecorded sounds of machine-gun fire exalt the drug gangs still in control of some of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. On certain nights, the bass from the amps resonates from the hillside slums into the bastions of the privileged classes, as if to remind them: Rio doesn’t belong just to you.
Funk’s varied repertory provides an apt soundtrack for the changes sweeping across the city after the recent boom that lifted incomes and ushered in the era of megaevents like this month’s World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, while also accentuating longstanding inequality. Samba, forbidden by the authorities about a century ago in much the same way that varieties of funk are prohibited today, has developed into such an establishment fixture that big corporations now underwrite carnival compositions. Bossa nova, the breezy fusion of samba and jazz, seems just too genteel for these times. But funk — often aggressive, sensual, vulgar, narcissistic, anti-establishment and eminently adaptable to Brazil’s shifting political mood — is thriving.
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