Border Crossings: Bogotá

29 stencils and pieces of graffiti from the gritty streets of Bogotá, Colombia, are now available here for your eyes. Read more about the Border Crossings-project in the earlier post.

Cumbia Invaders

The finest of the experimental cumbia scene of Buenos Aires, Zizek, toured the North America and have clearly left their mark. A lots of blogs are writing about cumbia and there's this article on subject in URB and another one in The Fader. And XLR8R put out a mix-tape by Villa Diamante, the master-mind behind a lot of what´s happening in the cumbia movement down in Buenos Aires. Up in north Bersa Discos have released their second vinyl EP of experimental digital cumbia already a while ago - and while at the store, you probably should get this collection from Zizek's ZZK Records too. Equally curious are the rumours of some strange mergings of reggaeton and cumbia going on in between the Americas - read more here.

So cumbia just might be slowly invading the northern hemisphere too. It´s been a long trip from the beaches of the Caribbean Colombia via the suburbs and villa miserias of Buenos Aires, but apparently it´s far from over.

A Few Old Mixtapes

To end my vacations for good and to put some action into this blog, a couple of old mixtapes. The first is a mix of tango songs, from old classics to electronic fusion things. It's a very basic introduction, and thus includes loads of basic classics like La Cumparsita. The mix also features number of songs by Astor Piazolla, but none of them played by the maestro himself, just to show the importance of his work.

El Corazón Mixtape vol. 1 (zShare)

Second one was made over a year ago. It was a quick promo-mix for a club called We Try Too Hard, that never became reality, in a bar called Siltanen, that, I guess, never opened it's doors either. It contains hot songs of that time. Some of them are almost nostalgic already, some are just plain over-played. But I post it as the range of the styles on the mix - from baile funk to baltimore and R'n'B, from electro pop and blog house to kuduro - in a way serves to illustrate the focus, or lack of thereof, of this blog.

We Try Too Hard presents: Ruffmixxx 1 (zShare)

And here are covers for the mixes (click on images to enlarge):

The Color Trilogy

The Color Trilogy is a short photo essay on the Bolivarian revolution-movement in Venezuela. It's a small trip into Hugo Chavez´s bizarre mixture of furious nationalism, militant populism, erosion of democracy, dreams of La Gran Colombia, fancy for old-fashioned communism - and perhaps, on the bottom of it, a bit of genuine social progress.

Simon Bolivar was a legendary figure in South America's independence struggle, highly admired in every Spanish-speaking part of the continent and made into something of a figurehead by Chavez for his government. Bolivar can be seen revered in Venezuela along with the characters such as Ernesto Guevara and Fidel Castro. Worth noting is also the resurrection of Bolivar's plans of La Gran Columbia, a union of Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. Illustrating the shared history of the three countries, the same three colors are shared by the almost identical flags of the three.

View The Color Trilogy as a slideshow.

Can a Playboy do the Funk?

The last saturday, May 24th, Eu Amo Baile Funk - a monthly funk carioca-event in Circo Voador - celebrated it´s second birthday. The bigger stars like Tati Quebra Barraco, Menor do Chapa, Galo and Duda do Borel shared the stage with loads of up-and-coming artists: DJs, MCs, dancers and even VJs. In other words, something for everyone and something happening on the stage all the time.

The crowd of the event was curiously different from the one dancing to the funk in the community bailes. Girls from better neighbourhoods were drifting around on their high heels, clinging to Luis Vuitton-handbags, and playboys were playing it cool, carrying caipirinhas to their ladies, white Air Force Ones shining in the night. The scene was more reminiscent of the Sao Paulo Fashion Week than a saturday night in Rocinha. This is hardly surprising as the tickets to the event at the gate would set you back 40 reais, over 15 euros, something that a few favelados can afford.

But then again, who am I to complain - which would be completely besides the point of the whole event anyway. Funk for everyone: Forget the class borders and take consolation in the hope that certainly some of those 40 reais (20 for those who have a student card) we paid to get in would trickle down to the actual artists. Everyone did certainly enjoy the show and as the evening wore on, the patricinhas and marcelinhos were shaking their butts on the sweaty dancefloor like any favelado. Happy birthday, Eu Amo Baile Funk. Todo mundo ama baile funk.

Here are a few rather random tunes from the evening's artists. Tati Quebra Barraco, the big bad girl of funk carioca, was already featured in this blog. Menor do Chapa is, ironically enough, a prohibidão-artist singing the praise to the Commando Vermelho. Duda do Borel is the second half of the legendary duo William & Duda from the favela of Borel, more on whom later. Their tune Rap do Morena, below, is a somewhat classic song. Duda is one of the biggest and most charismatic stars on the scene, a proper old schooler, and has performed even in Finland - see for yourself.

Menor do Chapa: Eu tô Boladão (zShare)
Tati Quebra Barraco: Sequência do Entra e Sai (zShare)
William & Duda: Rap do Morena (zShare)

You can read more about Eu Amo Baile Funk from DJ Rideon´s fine report, and Finnish-speakers also enjoy this little clip they made. Or take a look at the event's page in Last.fm.

Super Classics of Funk Carioca: Rap das Armas

All the guns of favela

Guns I encounter when I walk up the hill, through a maze of buildings hastily constructed of red brick, while dodging the moto-taxis wheeling past: pistols and revolvers are carried on belt even when not on guard duty. Uzis go past every now and then. The definitive weapon of choice is an assault rifle, typically an AK-47. Hand grenades don´t seem to be carried around on a regular basis but are used in combat situations. Sniper rifles are not visible either, they are positioned on the top of the favela, from where they can be used without being seen, in case of a police invasion or an attack by an enemy faction. I carry my groceries past the guns with down turned eyes, without daring to look at the traficantes guarding the close-by boca-de-fumo, leisurely leaning over their huge weapons. I wonder how long it will take to get used to the sight, and if I ever get used to it, is that a good or a bad thing?

Rap das Armas starts with Junior and Leonardo singing "My Brazil is a tropical country / The land of funk, the land of carnaval / My Rio de Janeiro is a postal card / But I´ll be talking about a national problem". In the background we can hear blasts of firearms. Then the duo goes on, "pa ra-pa pa-pa-paa-pa-paa", imitating the sound of a machine gun. The song continues:

"Metralhadora AR-15 e muito oitão / A Entratek com disposição / Vem super 12 de repetição / 45 que ´um pistolão / FMK, m-16 / A pisto UZI eu vou dizer para vocês / Que tem 765, 762 e o fuzil da de 2 em 2 ... vem pistola Glok, a HK / vema intratek Granada pra detonar / vem a caça-andróide e a famosa escopeta / vem a pistola magnum, a Uru e a Bereta / colt 45, um tiro so arrebenta e um fuzil automático com um pente de 90"

Selective misunderstandings

You don´t need to understand Portuguese to realize that it is a list of guns. The song also mentions the Commando Vermelho slogan "paz, justiça e liberdade". Back in the beginning of 90´s, all this made the media do the math: "a glorification of crime", the favourite slogan of all the witch-hunts against the certain genres of popular music in Brazil. "Written by Leonardo and Júnior, well-known brothers from the Valão area of Rocinha, the hit underwent a major process of vilification by the media in the mid-nineties connecting them to the drug underworld. As a result, the Rio police constantly harassed the brothers as they came in and out of the favela, despite the fact that their song was never intended to promote the drug gangs and that their own older brother is a police officer in the Polícia Militar", sums up Paul Sneed the controversy around the song in his often quoted Machine Gun Voices.

This is what the media chose to ignore: the brothers also sing "In this country everyone knows / The favela is dangerous, bad place to live in / and is much criticized for the whole society / But there is violence in every corner of the city / because of the lack of education, the lack of information" and the song ends in the sentence "Say no to violence and let the peace reign."

Ironically enough, the conscious content of the songs was also the duo's weakness, according to Silvio Essinger's book Batidão - Uma Historia do Funk (Record, 2005): "...after four years of struggle, Junior and Leonardo decided it wasn't possible anymore to live of music. Both bought a taxi... funk would stay as sporadic activity, in the circuit of few bailes in the city who were interested in conscious funk, based on lyrics, which, in the end, they knew how to write." And I suppose a little has changed today - still remeber Dança de Creu?

Laws of silence

Residents of favelas are not happy to talk about violence. There is one extreme of presenting violence in media, that of films like City of God. Here the media portrays just the flip-side of the coin, favelas packaged in an exiting, violent form and sold to the western markets. "Most people in the community did not see the film because they can't afford the cinema, and the ones that did see it didn't like the fact that it showed only the negative side of life. It suggested that everyone in the favelas is black, violent and ready to be judged", commented MV Bill on the film to The Guardian in the article already quoted in this blog. "After the film came out, people from City of God would go into town for their jobs as maids and cleaners as usual... Their bosses would sack them when they discovered that they were from somewhere so horrible." Despite City of God being one of the most important films in the history of Brazilian cinema both artistically and financially, MV Bill has a point.

But equally disturbing is the silence of favelas. In book Notícias da Favela (written by Christiane Ramalho, Aeroplano Editora, 2007), the story of Viva Favela-portal, Regina Novaes, the anthropologist behind the Favela Tem Memória, asks how can there be any social memory in a space ruled over by 'the law of silence'. She reminds how, according to the anthropologist Michel Pollack, the society only started constructing the history of nazism when the Jewish themselves were able to discuss their suffering. This is what makes it important that Junior and Leonardo are talking about the national problem.

Viva Favela, by the way, is a very interesting project well worth checking out if you can read Portuguese. Aim is to build an Internet-based media for favelas and so far Viva Favela has been very succesful, every now and then making waves also in the Brazilian mainstream media. While the stories are written under the guidance of professional journalists, all the stories in the portal are by "correspondents" living in favelas.

Pages of a history book

But back to our tune of the day. The extremely famous song was a great hit back in the day and is heard everywhere again after being included on the soundtrack of Tropa de Elite. Despite the controversy, along with the duo´s other hit Endreço de Bailes, Rap de Armas brought them chance to grab a full-lenght record with Sony Music, De Baile em Baile. Together with Cidinho & Doca (of whom we've talked earlier) and William & Duda, they were pioneers building the road of funk into the record industry.

Much has been written on it, but I still decided to post the song, as it is made here in Rocinha, catches a part of reality of favela so well, has a huge historical importance and finally, the guys who made it just happened to live right next to Fundação Dois Irmãos.

Junior e Leonardo: Rap das Armas (zShare)

And as a bonus, a track that is in many ways an opposite of Rap das Armas. The song is a prohibidão funk describing the change of power in Rocinha, when Amigos dos Amigos took over and Commando Vermelho lost the control of the favela. But in addition to being a forbidden gangster song, it is - as a friend who copied me the tune described it - a document of an important page in the history of Rocinha.

Unknown: Track 3 (zShare)

(Unfortunately, I cannot provide any information on the artist and sadly end up doing exactly the same thing as the guys behind the Sublime Frequencies´ much critized prohibidão-collection.)

50 Years of Bossa: Nara

This year Rio de Janeiro is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bossa Nova. I am far from a specialist in the genre, but I do feel obliged to join the party by posting some of my favourite bossas. I already wrote a post on Onde Brilham os Olhos Seus by Fernanda Takai, a recent album of modern versions of the songs that made Nara Leão famous. Now let's take a very brief look on Nara herself - my favourite bossa artist.

Following songs from the debut album Nara take us on an emotional rollercoaster ride. "When launched in March 1964, the fabulous first disc of Nara seemed distant from Bossa Nova. But the time erased this distance", writes Ruy Castro in the linear notes of the album´s remasterized edition. Perhaps it is this originality and unpredictability - the album not sticking to proven formats of bossa, but bravely including songs by sambistas like Zé Kéti and Cartola and back-then up-and-coming composers like Edu Lobo and Baden Powell - that makes Nara so enduring and interesting.

The first song - "March of Ash Wednesday" - is about the Brazilians' favourite subject of mourning: the end of the carnaval. Diz que moves to a more playful mood and finally Maria Moita is a melancholic classic about two generation of repressed females. The first and the last are also notable for the beautiful lyrics of the Bossa Nova's greatest poet Vinicius de Moraes. Moraes is nothing short of a national hero in Rio, right up there in the pantheon with the likes of Antonio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto.

Nara Leão: Marcha da quarta-feira de cinzas (zShare)
Nara Leão: Diz que vou por ai (zShare)
Nara Leão: Maria Moita (zShare)

And because right now I am feeling very, very sad, the following song catches the moment perfectly. "Always alone / I live searching for someone / who too suffers like me / but I cannot find no-one / Always alone / and life will go on like this / I have nobody to pity on me / I am arriving to the end" - well, maybe I´m not quite that sad.

Nara Leão: Luz Negra (zShare)