“Now you see the funk”: the rise of DJs and the technical turn in studies of Rio de Janeiro funk

“O funk agora você vê”: ascensão dos DJs e virada técnica nos estudos do funk carioca

Abstract:

The present article is a synthesis of the diffuse field of funk studies, beginning with its emergence in 1988 and moving on to 2020. Here, we offer up an analytical key to identify important shifts in the way the musical genre of funk carioca and its circuits have been academically understood over this 32 year period. Employing a review of the relevant bibliography and ethnography of the Rio funk scene that began in 2018, I demonstrate how from the 2010s onwards, an analytical inflection that I call the “technical turn” occurred in the context of the intensified repression of funk and the simultaneous expansion of computer and internet in the favelas. This contributed to increased visibility for “baile funk” DJs, who had been historically overshadowed in the market by MCs. In the digital context in which the circulation and visibility of “baile funk” expands, analyses emerge focusing on the DJ, the rhythms, techniques, technologies and the aesthetic possibilities of funk as electronic music.

Key-words:
Funk Carioca; Baile Funk; Technique; Funk Studies; Electronic Music

Resumo:

Este artigo propõe uma síntese do difuso campo dos estudos do funk desde seu surgimento em 1988 até 2020. Nele, ofereço uma chave analítica que permite identificar deslocamentos importantes na forma como o gênero musical funk carioca e seu circuito foram abordados academicamente no período de 32 anos. Através da revisão de bibliografia relevante e etnografia no circuito dos bailes funk cariocas realizada desde 2018, demonstro como, a partir dos anos 2010, ocorre a inflexão analítica que chamo de “virada técnica”, em um contexto de intensificada repressão ao funk e simultânea ampliação do acesso a computadores e internet nas favelas. Esses fatores contribuem para a maior visibilidade dos DJs de baile funk, que foram historicamente ofuscados no mercado pelos MCs. Na conjuntura digital e online, em que são alargadas a circulação e visibilidade do circuito dos bailes, emergem análises interessadas no DJ, no ritmo, nas técnicas, tecnologias e possibilidades estéticas do funk enquanto música eletrônica.

Palavras-chave:
funk carioca; baile funk; técnica; estudos do funk; música eletrônica

INTRODUCTION

It’s because funk today has changed a lot, man. You used to listen to it: now you see it. Today, let’s say a contractor wants to hire DJ Markinho do Jaca - to hire me. What happens? He doesn’t just want to listen to DJ Markinho do Jaca: he wants to see him. I don’t know how to explain this, whether it’s because of Youtube or not. Funk has changed. Today, the contractor wants to see if you have a good clip, if you have a good video on the internet. That’s it.

(DJ Markinho do Jaca 2019)¹

Carioca funk is the premiere Brazilian genre of electronic dance music (Palombini 2009: 52). It is produced by DJs at funk parties called bailes funk, which are sound system parties where music is created by a live DJ and amplified by walls of stacked speakers. These parties have been organized in Rio de Janeiro peripheries since 1970. Up until the 1980s, DJs played soul music records. From the 1980s onwards, they incorporated the latest American electronic music into their playlists: electro, Miami Bass, Los Angeles Bass, and Freestyle, among other hip-hop genres produced mostly by Black and Latino musicians. Produced on electronic drums, computers and even cell phones, funk is constructed as montages, with DJs manipulating samples² from the funk repertoire drawing upon different origins. The carioca³ aesthetic highlights an exacerbated use of samples, scratches⁴ and loops⁵ to create “cut-out” and pulsating sounds. These effects are only possible due to the electronic nature of carioca funk.

In the field of funk studies⁶ - the origins of which date back to the late 1980s with Hermano Vianna’s ground-breaking ethnography O mundo funk carioca (1988) - the specificity of the techniques used by funk DJs has only become a main concern from the 2010s on. This despite the centrality of these artists to funk parties and their prominence in the work of Vianna himself. This period coincided with a significant change in funk’s relationships to the media and the record market, made possible by new digital technologies and online contexts. At the same time, funk 150 bpm emerged. This is a new aesthetic produced by DJs, whose visibility has been boosted by funk 150 bpm’s popularity, at the favelas parties and on digital media. At this point, research on the rhythmic bases, montages, techniques, and technologies of funk began to gain popularity in the academic field - a moment in the historiography of the field that we call the “technical turn.”

Based on the Foucauldian premise that the practices and ways of thinking about an era are historical constructions that respond to the demands of the times, a historical and ethnographic analysis of funk (and the academic knowledge produced about it) can highlight the power relations that run through both music and scientific production over time. As Foucault puts it, human knowledge is the result of “historical, social and economic conditions within the relationships woven between men” (Foucault 2000, p. 307). Looking at the historiography of funk, we can see that technological, marketing and aesthetic inflections have reconfigured both the musical and academic fields. In each period of funk’s history - understood in this work as the different decades of its trajectory as a musical form⁷ - the production of academic discourses highlighted certain aspects of funk that surfaced in ways made possible by historical conditions.

In the present article, I propose a bibliographical review of academic studies of funk carioca produced between 1988 and 2020. My aim is to synthesize and chronologically organize this material while demonstrating the analytical shift that I call the “technical turn”. This work is part of my doctoral thesis, in which I addressed montagens: songs produced by funk DJs through a bricolage of numerous samples. It’s signature characteristic is the intensification of artifices and effects that emphasize the technical and electronic character of funk carioca. In all, I analyzed 42 texts including articles, book chapters, dissertations and theses by researchers from different disciplines. My reflections are also based on the ethnographic research I have been carrying out since 2018 in the baile funk circuit in Rio de Janeiro, composed of dance parties and music studios in Rio’s favelas.

FROM REPRODUCTION TO CREATION (1988-1990)

When funk studies began, funk carioca didn’t even exist as a musical genre in its own right. O mundo funk carioca (1988), a pioneering work by anthropologist Hermano Vianna, describes a circuit of parties in the suburbs of Greater Rio that had been taking place weekly since the 1970s. “An obligatory reference” (Herschmann 1997a: 9), the work derives from Vianna’s master’s dissertation in Social Anthropology, O Baile Funk Carioca: Festas e Estilos de Vida Metropolitanos (1987). The young anthropologist carried out his field research in the mid-1980s. At the time, the suburban parties didn’t attract the interest of the media or record companies, although they already mobilized around a million young people every week at more than 700 events throughout Greater Rio (Vianna 1997: 13).

At that time, the funk circuit was led by sound crews that had emerged in the 1970s. These were small companies that owned the sound equipment (Vianna 1997: 14) and took care of all the logistics surrounding the events: renting venues, hiring staff (DJs, lighting crews, security guards), purchasing records, etc. (Vianna 1997: 35-36). Having identified a demand for leisure among poor young cariocas, these businessmen started promoting parties in clubs, sports courts and samba schools, creating spaces for sociability that were, above all, accessible to young people from the favelas.

It was the musicality of funk, “entirely unknown” to those who didn’t go to the parties (Vianna 1997: 13-14), that made Vianna, a young resident of the South Zone (Rio’s upper-class district) move to the suburbs in search of parties. The music that appealed to this audience - mainly Electro, Freestyle, Miami Bass and Los Angeles Bass - was not released by major North American record labels, nor was it distributed by the Brazilian phonographic market. Vianna described the mechanisms used to organize these events, especially the importations of American records. In order to please the public, the owners of sound crews, DJs and record sellers created “an alternative and almost clandestine channel” between Rio and New York, aimed exclusively at circulating funk novelties (Vianna 1997: 101).

The operation of the funk DJs was although endowed with “artistic sensibility” (Vianna 1997: 44), but it consisted of reproducing foreign music. Vianna, however, interpreted the absence of musical production at the bailes funk as an escape from the logic of the global market: “Musically, the dances produce nothing. They are pure consumption; a pure waste of information” (Vianna 1997: 102). In a later interview (Sussekind, Neto and Lana 2014), Vianna points out to an idea of “pure expenditure”, as inspired by Georges Bataille, pointing to a refusal to accept the logic of productivity and mercantile rescue and not an inability to produce music.

Even though the carioca DJs played imported records, they adulterated perceptions of the original compositions by live set⁸ mixing, using scratch techniques. With the arrival of electronic drums, they also began to insert samples. The foreign songs themselves were also hybrid creations, mixing “original” and “reproduced” sounds composed through sampling. Songs in English were nicknamed “melôs” at the “bailes funk”, gaining titles or even parodic choruses in Portuguese created by sound similarity. The “Melô do Cachorro”, for example (based on M.C. A.D.E’s - “Bass Machine”), used barking samples in its composition. The “Melô da Princesinha” (Bardeux - “Bleeding Heart”), was so named for the female and melodic voice of the singing duo. The “Melô do Computador” (Planet Patrol - “Play at your own risk”) got it’s local monicker for its beeps and “technological” sounds.

In 1989, a year after the publication of O mundo funk carioca, DJ Marloboro, Hermano Vianna’s main interlocutor, released Funk Brasil (1989) on the Polydor label. This contained raps and “Brazilian melôs” in Portuguese, produced with electronic drums that Malboro had gotten from Vianna himself. In the same year, the Fama label released the Super Quente album by the sound crew of the same name, with funk tracks in Portuguese produced by DJ Grandmaster Raphael and DJ Tony. Although both albums were released in 1989, funk researchers tended to focus on the career of DJ Marlboro, considering Funk Brasil to be the inaugural milestone of the funk genre in Rio.

A year after the releases of Funk Brasil and Super Quente, Hermano Vianna published “Funk e Cultura Popular Carioca” (1990), an article in which he discusses the ambiguity in funk’s relationship with the cultural industry. As a mass phenomenon, funk was linked to global market trends and was therefore an artificial manifestation. As popular culture, however, funk came from the people and was therefore authentic. But the context in which Vianna wrote “Funk e Cultura Popular” was radically different from that of the 1980s, after all, Rio de Janeiro had given the world a new way of making hip-hop.⁹ In this way, the advent of Brazilian funk changed its status as foreign music. Going beyond mere reproduction, funk came to be perceived as a hybrid product: something stretched between the “authentic” and the “artificial”; the “foreign” and the “carioca”; the “global” and the “local” (Vianna 1990: 255).

The notion of hybridization, central to cultural debates in the 1990s (Haraway, 2016; Hall 2019; Canclini 2013; Latour 2013; Castells 2013), was employed to think of funk as a product of a fragmented context, marked by plural identities, decentralized powers and globalized consumption. Without a “center” that radiates “national” customs, values and practices, contemporary identities were seen as being forged in dialogue with an increasingly heterogeneous and segmented market (Vianna 1990: 250-251).

Hybridity is an immanent characteristic of electronic music. Vianna’s analysis, however, considers the hybridization displayed by funk not in the musical objects themselves, but in the funkeiro’s look. Unlike São Paulo, where the city’s b-boys had more directly assimilated the look of New York hip-hop, the funkeiros of Rio mixed North American references with elements of surf-wear worn by young surfers of the carioca South Zone. Vianna called the “stylistic bricolage” (Vianna 1990: 247) and claimed that the funkeiros created “their own style with what ‘comes from outside’” (Vianna 1990: 248).

At the beginning of the 20th century, in the context of the First World War, European Dadaist artists used bricolage as an artistic technique that reorganized images in a way that provoked the dominant aesthetic standards. Between the wars, Walter Benjamin saw cinema as the apex of this logic of montage (Benjamin 1985: 175). Benjamin saw this as corresponding to a change in perception related to the emergence of the masses and the decline of the industrial bourgeoisie. In the field of anthropology, Lévi-Strauss described the “bricoleur” as opposed to the “artist”. The former is someone who works without a fixed plan, with what is at hand, in an indirect and fragmentary way (Lévi-Strauss 1990: 32). In all of these cases, bricolage reveals hybrid forms of creation that strain traditional values of originality and representation.

Written in the transition from the 1980s to the ‘90s, when funk carioca emerged as a Brazilian musical genre, O mundo funk carioca (1988) and “Funk e Cultura Popular Carioca” (1990) demonstrate a fundamental shift in the historiography of funk: from being seen as a “reproduction of foreign music” funk became a Brazilian product, albeit a hybrid one. Both works established a decisive foundation for the field of funk studies, acting as a starting point for later research to deepen, expand, or even challenge these original interpretations. From the 1990s onwards, notions of fragmentation and hybridization (through bricolage) were developed by researchers to analyze both funk music and the subjectivity of its producers.

THE 1990S SCENE

Brazil in the 1990s saw the consolidation of democracy after 21 years of military dictatorship. Paradoxically, the decade also exposed the institutional fragility of public administration and the authoritarianism that remained embedded in its ranks. In marginalized territories abandoned by public health, education, culture, and leisure policies, the neoliberal agenda was revealed in its harshest aspects (Souza Lima and Facina 2020). The militarization of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas began in the 1990s with Operations Rio I (1994) and II (1995), which brought tanks and soldiers to the streets of the city’s poor communities. The country witnessed episodes of extreme violence, such as the Carandiru massacre (1992), in which 111 prisoners were killed by police officers during a rebellion; the Candelária massacre (1993), in which eight homeless youths were murdered by police officers; and, a month later, the Vigário Geral massacre, in which a death squad composed of former police officers killed 21 residents of the community. These crimes revealed that, despite re-democratization, the logic of a state of exception was still alive for the poorest citizens of Rio de Janeiro.

Affected by the hardening of repressive policies, funk simultaneously experienced processes of expansion and criminalization. Musically, the 1990s was an effervescent period in which experimentation for the “bailes funk”, as well in terms of the configuration of funk as an industry. Fundamental characteristics of the genre were forged during this period. Alongside the “melôs” and raps sung in Portuguese, this period saw a proliferation of “montagens”. These came to be known as such on sound crew albums from 1993 onwards, but they had already been present in funk since 1989, appearing on the albums Funk Brasil and Super Quente. The popularization of electronic drums and mixers facilitated the sampling processes that produce this type of music (Novaes 2020: 76). DJs used samples from electro and other genres played at bailes funk - the “international melôs”¹⁰ - as the basis of their productions. They increasingly inserted elements from the national repertoire into the cyclical seam of their compositions as well, sampling berimbaus,¹¹ Brazilian music, atabaques¹² and the voices of the funk parties’ audiences, for example.

Funk also broke into wider markets in the 1990s. Funk expanded beyond the dance circuit, asserting its presence among a broader segment of the Brazilian population and becoming molded as a cultural industry (Souto 1997: 62). Funk carioca was a constant presence in different media. It was played on several radio stations and on television. It was written about in specialized magazines on sale in newsstands. It appeared on the charts and accumulated gold records (Souto 1997: 63).

Two books were published in this vibrant context that summarize the main issues in the field of funk studies in the 1990s: subaltern urban youth. Abalando os anos 90: funk e hip-hop - globalização, violência e estilo cultural (Herschmann 1997a) brings together articles by Brazilian and foreign researchers on the relationship between youth, urban violence and the cultural industry. Galeras Cariocas: territórios de conflitos e encontros culturais (Vianna 1997), based on anthropological studies of urban youth groups, highlights the diversity of adolescent cultural practices in Rio de Janeiro in dialogue with such themes as violence, identity and globalization.

The issue of violence that runs through Abalando os anos 90 and Galeras Cariocas is related to the way in which funk carioca came to be covered by the media in the 1990s. The genre had been seen as an artistic universe far removed from middle class life. Dances were held in low-income neighborhoods, and the media and cultural market largely neglected the genre. This scenario changed radically in the 1990s. Along with the expansion of the market and accompanied by intense musical production, the “criminalization of funk” began to take place (Cunha 1997: 92). Dance parties and funkeiros began to be associated in newspapers with disorder, urban violence and, increasingly, drug trafficking. One of the consequences of this campaign was the opening of a municipal CPI¹³ in Rio de Janeiro in 1995 to investigate alleged links between funk and drug trafficking.

The initial milestone in the media’s criminalization of funk was the coverage of the so-called “arrastões of 1992”. These were a disturbances on Ipanema beach in the city’s South Zone, which involved police and young people identified as funkeiros. The media treated the episode as a collective robbery, although this version is contested (Arce 1997: 152). The “hysterical” coverage (Yúdice 1997: 33) created negative visibility for funk outside its original circuit. According to Olivia M. Gomes Cunha, in her article in Abalando os anos 90, the 1992 and 1993 arrastões and their media repercussions redirected the gaze of public opinion, the State, and the security forces towards funk (Cunha 1997: 90). George Yúdice’s article in Abalando os anos 90 and Fátima Cecchetto’s work on “Galeras Cariocas” agree that the arrastões and their media repercussions motivated researchers to investigate funk in the 1990s.

Interested in reflecting on the representations of funk and violence in the media, the authors of both books continued investigating the ideas raised by Hermano Vianna in Funk e Cultura Popular (1990). They addressed from different angles issues related to fragmented contemporaneity¹⁴, globalized communication, the pluralization of “styles”, and hybrid identities related to market trends (Herschmann 1997a: 8; Herschmann 1997b: 58; Yúdice 1997; Zaluar 1997, Souto 1997). In addition to these common themes, the articles in the two collections share a similar perspective. They understand funk (and hip-hop) as something of a total social fact through which to interpret the conflicts then shaking Rio, in which tensions between favelas and the rest of the city had risen to a fever pitch.

George Yúdice (1997) identifies a “decadence of Brazilian national identity” during this period (1997: 24), marked by a social and cultural fragmentation that opened space for the pluralization of styles and the proliferation of “urban tribes” (such as the funkeiros) defined by musical tastes, clothing, and forms of sociability. For Alba Zaluar, funk expressed a rupture: “The family no longer goes together to samba and funk doesn’t bring different generations together in the same space (...)” (Zaluar 1997: 40). Today it is possible to challenge these claims, since there are several generations within funk that, despite certain disputes, exchange experiences and even sonic materials with one another. Still, the idea that funk represented a context of rupture was essential for researchers in the 1990s. Micael Herschmann attests that although funk was not a national symbol, the music - like hip-hop - expressed the “fragmentary and irruptive” character of contemporaneity (Herschmann 1997b: 83). With Brazil on the verge of a “social implosion” (Itamar Franco, quoted in Yúdice 1997: 27), the study of subaltern youth and their subjectivities became a privileged means for understanding social dynamics: “The main relevance of youth cultural expressions seems to be that they offer themselves as ‘mirrors of their time’” (Herschmann 1997a: 8).

In this context, funk was not analyzed as a musical genre, nor as a party circuit, but as an “aesthetic/musical style” linked to the sociability of poor urban youth (Cunha 1997: 99). The notion of style, related to the transnational identities produced in the globalized market, allowed researchers to articulate youth, identity and consumption - central themes at a time when “urban tribes” were gaining increased media visibility.

As the “space-time expression and consecration of funk” (Souto 1997: 59), the baile funk is central to the analyses presented in Abalando os anos 90 and Galeras Cariocas. It became the privileged event for observing young people from the favelas’ ways of being (Herschmann 1997b: 71). In the 1990s, these events expanded and diversified. In addition to the traditional “bailes de clube” in the suburbs analyzed by Vianna, the “bailes de comunidade”, held in the favelas, grew in size and and frequency. “Bailes de corredor” (or “Side A, Side B” or “fight bailes”) also emerged. These latter were responsible for the proliferation of “galeras”: groups of young people from the same locality who went to parties together and competitively represented their “area”.

In the bailes de corredor¹⁵, the party dynamic revolved around symbolic and physical disputes between rival galeras for the “domination of the party”, setting up a logic of “territorial dispute” (Cecchetto 1997: 98) that still persists in funk to this day. Alongside the bailes de corredor, Galera Festivals emerged, organized by the same sound crews that organized corredor, clube and comunidade parties. These events were intended to lower the tensions produced by the bailes de corredor through non-violent competitions between the galeras, limiting violence to “5 minutes of joy”, in which fighting was allowed. Because the Festivals acted to regulate violence, they were analyzed by Jane Souto (1997) and Alba Zaluar (1997), in their articles in Galeras Cariocas through Norbert Elias’ concept of the “civilizing process”.

While the bailes de corredor gave rise to the so-called “montages de galera”, the Festivals boosted the creation of raps. The “explosive montages”, as Cecchetto calls them, were produced by DJs based on the war cries of each group - “one of the most important marks displayed during confrontations” (Cecchetto 1997: 109). These cries were sung (or shouted) by a member of the group, who named their territory, exalted their own feats and ridiculed their rivals. The montages became a “necessary ingredient of the party” and dominated the dance floors, also gaining airplay and consolidating the fundamental features of the genre (Cecchetto 1997: 101). On the other hand, the Galera Festivals boosted the creation of raps about the favela communities themselves, which were sung competitively. Thanks to the financial rewards and visibility provided by the Festivals, these were responsible for the emergence of countless MCs among the young partygoers and residents of Rio’s favela communities.

Although relying on electronic elements, raps were less technical in terms of their sound than montagens: using a more linear base (such as the “Volt Mix”¹⁶ in the 1990s), voice and lyrics were central to rap. Known as “pioneering funks”, the importance of these raps has often been highlighted in funk studies, overshadowing the equally founding relevance of the montagens de galera. In any case, it is through both types of music that the names of favelas, streets and neighborhoods (called “areas” at the time) became a part of funk songs.

Using different approaches, the articles by Ceccheto (1997), Jane Souto (1997) and Alba Zaluar (1997) in Galeras cariocas ask questions about the behavior of the young funkeiros who attend corridor parties. Why do they fight? What is their relationship with gangs? And with the gangs that sell drugs (the drug trafficking “commandos”)?¹⁷ And, above all, what do these youth dynamics tell us about society in a context where class conflicts are intensifying, social groups are being pulverized, and violence in the cities is becoming evident and normalized?

Despite the musical innovations taking place in funk in the 1990s, the authors of Abalando os anos 90 and Galeras Cariocas mainly focused on analyzing the “scene”. This was understood as a space for sociability, conflict, and the production of youth identities. Additionally, funk in the 1990s was still going through its “nationalization” process and was generally perceived as a hybrid music form placed somewhere between the foreign and the local.

This hybrid character of funk was seen more as a trait of funk subjectivity than as an immanent musical characteristic, although Herschmann (1997b) and Yúdice (1997) pointed in this direction in their articles in Abalando os anos 90. Both authors highlighted the appropriation of “other peoples’ cultural heritage” - a term that Herschmann associates with the idea of “plundering” - as a central element in the renewal of funk. This practice was expressed in funk fashion, which mixed the styles of surfers and girls from the South Zone of Rio with the look of North American b-boys. It also appeared in the occupation of spaces for parties. These were often sports courts, town squares and samba schools courts, which were originally intended for other uses. And, of course, the music itself was marked by sampling from diverse genres such as hip-hop and nursery rhymes. Yúdice (1997: 44) adds that even the record importation networks, which were founded in tourism, were appropriations.

Here we see the notion of “stylistic bricolage” (Vianna 1990: 247) being expanded. Herschmann understands that repetition and plural identities - and not originality and impartiality (Herschmann 1997b: 82) - organize the aesthetics of funk, which he defines as a “version aesthetic”, marked by a “grab-and-mix” logic (Herschmann 1997b: 74).

At a time when montages proliferated and the subjectivity of youths groups involved in funk became a public debate (marked by the stigmatization and criminalization of youth practices) the academic works of the 1990s gathered in Abalando os anos 90 and Galeras Cariocas approached montage or bricolage more as a concept for understanding social dynamics than as a musical object per se. For funk carioca to be recognized in funk studies as a legitimate national genre which should be investigated from a musical perspective, it would be necessary, among other things, to “Brazilianize” its sonority. This change in perspective began to be consolidated in the 2000s.

THE 2000S: LEGITIMIZING A GENRE

The 2000s were characterized by the national “explosion”¹⁸ of funk carioca. The “Furacão 2000: Tornado Muito Nervoso” compilation, released in three volumes by the Furacão 2000 sound crew - at this point, also a recording label - was a sales success across Brazil, with Volume 2 being the best-selling album in São Paulo in 2001¹⁹. At that time, Rômulo Costa’s Furacão 2000 and DJ Marlboro, through Afegan and (later) Link Records dominated the funk market, acting as producers, record labels, and studio owners with access to radio and television channels. As true monopolies, they controlled production, distribution, and wider dissemination of the genre, propelling MCs to national - albeit often ephemeral - fame (Lopes 2011: 111). In this phase of the development of funk, MCs gained pride of place, assuming the position of “spokespeople” for the genre outside the bailes funk and favelas.

The mass production of carioca funk went hand in hand with its segmentation into sub-genres, defined mainly by the content of the lyrics. Proibidão (or “context rap”) was the style of rap in which the MC takes on the perspective of a “bandit” member of the drug cartels, making references to crime, drugs and weapons. Putaria (or “sensual raps”, in their less explicit versions) have the MCs (and especially female MCs, a novelty that arose with the subgenre) singing about sexual themes. Comedy or “double entendre raps” had humorous verses, often with sexual puns. “Conscious” (latter called “Funk Raiz”) raps emerged with the Festivals, in which people sang about their communities. Melody encompassed romantic raps and Gospel took on religious themes. The montagens, in turn, began to be perceived as a separate subgenre due to the style of the lyrics, which was characterized by repetition, the use of vocal fragments, and an aesthetic close to house music (Palombini 2009: 52). They could even be understood as a “non-linear bricolage of lines taken from dances, films and other sources” (Laignier 2010: 54).

By the end of the 1990s, the “Tamborzão” rhythmic base had become popular. This was created from a loop of an “electronic atabaque” (Facina and Lopes 2010), which then became predominant in funk productions throughout the 2000s. Developed by DJs using atabaque samples with the “Volt Mix” base, the Tamborzão appears on the album DJ Grandmaster Raphael Beats Funks e Raps Vo. 4 (1994) in the introduction to the song “Macumba Lelê”, by DJs Alessandro and Cabide. The version that became popular, however, is the one that DJ Luciano (later MC Sabãozinho) used in a rap celebrating the Campo Grande neighborhood in 1998, included on the CD Lugarino apresenta os melhores da Zona Oeste (Caceres et al. 2014: 189; Palombini 2016: 37). Although atabaque samples were already present in electro songs played at bailes funk in the 1980s and 1990s (such as “Bleeding Heart” (1988), by the duo Bardeux, known as “Melô da Princesinha”), Brazilian DJs extended and adapted the sound, bringing it closer to national black rhythms. This movement would ultimately come to symbolize the Brazilianization of the carioca funk rhythm.

In the midst of these new developments, funk carioca began to be taken seriously as a musical genre in funk studies. If research in the 1990s had focused on dances as spaces of sociability, as systematized in the Abalando os anos 90 and Galeras Cariocas collections, the 2000s became characterized by a more diffuse academic production, with works in different disciplines (Media Studies, Anthropology, Education, Music, Linguistics, etc.).

Rennan Ribeiro Moutinho (2021) proposes a way of organizing funk studies between the 1980s and 2000s, identifying an epistemological shift from a focus on funk as a scene and space of sociability to funk as a musical genre. Laignier (2010) had already suggested a division between a first moment in funk studies centered on parties, and a second marked by the mediatization of the genre, with the Funk Brasil LP (1989) as a sort of milestone. From that point on, scene and genre became interdependent of each other. But, as Moutinho points out, it was only in the mid-2000s that this change was consolidated in academic studies, that funk began to be studied in dialogue with music and ethnomusicology. This transition from “funk as scene” to “funk as a music genre” marks an analytical shift that crosses, connects, and characterizes the production of the period.

Works from the first half of the decade (Herschmann 2000; Silva Filho 2002; Yúdice 2004, quoted in Salles 2007; Salles 2009; Pinho 2007) resonate with the concerns of the 1990s around youth sociability. From the second half onwards, however, much of the research focused on analyzing song lyrics (Silva Filho 2002: 43; Reis e Santos 2006; Russano 2006; Mattos 2006; Facina 2008; Lopes 2009), their typification into subgenres (Palombini 2009; Laignier 2010), their historical and musical origins (Sá 2007; Lopes 2009; Facina 2009; Palombini 2009; Facina and Lopes 2010) and their legitimization in the phonographic market and legal system (Lopes 2009; Facina 2009; Facina and Lopes 2010). In all these studies, MCs were the funk professionals who stood out. Approaches to the technical aspects of funk and the work of DJs only appeared in the last years of the decade (Sá 2007; Mizrahi 2007 2009 2010, Palombini 2009).

In terms of musical analysis, the Proibidão, Putaria and Funk Raiz subgenres gained visibility. The first two studies to look at funk through the lens of music and ethnomusicology are Rodrigo Russano’s thesis (2006) and Carla Mattos’ dissertation (2006), both on Proibidão. For Russano, Proibidão expresses the “neurotic²⁰“ daily life of the favelas, marked by the constant presence of violence (Russano 2006: 22). Its “illegal content”, according to the author, was an effect of the segregation that confined funk to dominated favelas. By naming drug gang factions, the MCs were re-signifying stigmatized symbols into signs of strength and danger (Russano 2006, p. 27).

Carla Mattos (2006) analyzes the transition from the galeras phenomenon to the Proibidão context, highlighting that the repression of funk and how the interference of drug gangs such as the Commando Vermelho and the Terceiro Comando Puro on youth groups weakened the funk movement and transformed territorial dynamics. In the Proibidões, the logic of “territorial warfare”, previously expressed by montagens de galera, became manifests in raps that “speak from ‘their community’ and how the area should be ‘protected’” (Mattos 2006: 66).

In a later work, Adriana Facina (2009a) also highlighted the “neurotic daily life” of the territories where drug gangs were present. This became a quotidian part of the music by the end of the 1990s. According to this author, Proibidão exists on the threshold between supporting crime and giving a raw account of an indigestible social reality (Facina 2009: 6). Sodré Ferreira, Aragão and Arruda (2010) add that, in addition to the lyrics and the singing voices, non-verbal elements such as the sounds of weapons, vocal distortions, and rhythmic variations inserted listeners into the sensory environment of universe portrayed in the songs. In these analyses, approaches centered on the discursive dimensions of Proibidão - verbal or non-verbal - with an emphasis on the role of the MC and what his singing represented.

While Proibidão (“forbidden funk”) was given this name because it was banned by the traditional media and record companies, Putaria (“slutty funk”) was assimilated by mainstream markets, becoming mass produced and distributed. In the transition from the 1990s to the 2000s, Herschmann (2000) observed that the integration of funk into the “spectacle” of Rio de Janeiro, especially on television programs, privileged Putaria, presenting an ironic, humorous and eroticized side of funk to the general public (Herschmann 2000: 114). This process generated a split in funk music production, with songs aimed at parties in the favelas and others for the mainstream media (Rosa 2020: 72).

In the studies of Putaria published in the 2000s, analyses of discourse and performance also stand out. Here, however, we have a focus on songs sung by female MCs (Cecchetto and Farias 2001, quoted in Mattos 2006; Lopes 2008; Facina 2010; Ferreira et al 2010). Adriana Lopes (2008) identified Putaria as a shift in the female representivity, marking the subversion of traditional gender hierarchies and symbolically repositioning the field of eroticism and desire. In the same vein, Adriana Facina (2010) interprets Putaria as female re-appropriation of discourses on sex, causing an inversion of the subject of sexual domination (Facina 2010: 8).

Both authors indirectly relate Putaria to montagens. Noting that in the 2000s, montagens overlapped with rap in Rio de Janeiro clubs, Lopes describes the first musical form as songs with a Tamborzão base with lyrics composed of “no more than three verses of highly sensual content” (Lopes 2009: 375). Adriana Facina (2010) presented the montagens as “songs that incessantly repeat refrains such as ‘ah, ah, ah, my cock’ over an electronic base” (Facina 2010: 8). Even today, most of the montagens are Putaria and, at funk parties, they are the most played songs. However, the relationship between sex and rhythm in funk carioca was not much explored.

The massification and emptying out of funk in the mainstream media, favoring songs in which territorial marks are less visible, such as Putaria and Melody. As a reaction, funk researchers in the 2000s turned to the raps of the 1990s, which gave projection to the first funk MCs in the Galeras Festivals. In defense of the artists and compositions of this generation, Adriana Lopes, Adriana Facina and other researchers and left-wing activists joined forces with funk producers (mainly MCs) to create the APAFunk (Association of Funk Professionals and Friends). As part of this movement, Lopes (2009) defines funk by its “favela roots” - a structuring territorial identity. This notion would become central to later studies. This idea is opposed to “commercial funk” and so-called “apartment funk” (Viana 2009), produced by middle-class artists far removed from the peripheral experience.

APAfunk recovered these raps (which came to be identified as “Funk Raiz” (“favela-rooted funk”)) and aimed to put the first MCs back on the market. This generated around 10 million reais a month between 2007 and 2008 (Lopes 2009: 374). Furthermore, the idea of funk raiz was central to the legal legitimization of funk carioca. In the 2000s, repression of the genre intensified and gained legal backing. After the municipal CPI in 1995, which investigated links between funk and drug trafficking, another was set up in 1999 to investigate violence, drugs, and alleged deviance in youth behavior at funk parties (Cymrot 2012: 176). In 2000, State Law 3.410 made funk parties conditional on police authorization and presence (Facina 2009: 6). This was repealed in 2008 by Law 5.265, which extended restrictions to raves (Salles 2009; Palombini 2009; Facina 2009; Cymrot 2012). Thanks to the work of APAFunk, all legislation was repealed in 2009 and subsequently superseded by Law 5.544/09, known as the “Funk is Culture” law. This guaranteed funk equal treatment with other cultural expressions, prohibited it from being discriminated against, and recognized its artists as agents of popular culture.

Adriana Lopes and Adriana Facina’s investigation into the “roots” of funk carioca led to a review of the genre’s historiography. The authors problematized the idea that funk’s emergence was the result of a process of reproducing foreign music, as suggested by Hermano Vianna (1997, 1990) and reinforced by successive academic analyses (Reis and Santos 2006). Both authors argued that the assimilation of American electro music at bailes funk was due to its affinity with Black rhythms that already existed in Brazil. According to Facina (2009a: 2-3), funk is a reinterpretation of sounds rooted in the African diaspora, recognized from the outset as Black music, not as “foreign”. Lopes (2009: 374) reinforces this view by situating funk as part of a continuous process of local re-signification of elements of hip-hop and diasporic Black culture.

In previous work, Sá (2007) claimed that the process of the invention of funk carioca as a Brazilian genre did not involve importation, but rather the creation, in Rio de Janeiro, of a “cross-fertilization” between styles such as electro, Miami Bass and the proto-electronica of the German band Kraftwerk. According to Sá, this could only have occurred in the local context. Unlike Facina and Lopes, Sá analyzes the hybridity of funk in the context of electronic music. For this author, funk is an electronic genre with its own rules (economic, semiotic, technical and formal) which is justified - as DJ Marlboro says - in its claims to be “popular Brazilian electronic music” (Sá 2007: 14). Sá believes that funk does not hide “the marks of its hybridity”. Instead, it links the local and the global (Sá 2007: 16). Here, the author takes up the notion of hybridity as proposed by Vianna in the 1980s (reaffirmed by authors of the 1990s), but situating funk in the lineage of global electronic music.

Carlos Palombini (2009) also places funk in the global electronic music mainstream, considering it to be the first Brazilian genre of electronic dance music - “our house music” (Palombini 2009: 50). According to Palombini, funk arose from the creative appropriation of accessible technologies by non-musicians, aimed at producing music for marginalized sectors. In this way, it is similar to Chicago House, created by young black gays in Chicago in the 1980s. In an analogous fashion, young Black people from impoverished urban areas in Rio de Janeiro created funk at the end of the same decade (Palombini 2009: 50-51).

Mylenne Mizrahi (2009) also discussed the creative possibilities of funk as electronic music, analyzing the mechanisms used by the DJs employed by MC Mr. Catra, a big funk star, in his shows and studio. Mizrahi observes that DJs appropriate any sound - including the MC’s voice - to create new effects. For example, the “Beat Box” base, widely used at the end of the 2000s, was constructed from the loop of a live recording in which Catra beatboxes to the rhythm of Tamborzão (Mizrahi 2009: 205).

Going against the grain of the predominant approach in funk studies in the 1990s, Mizrahi proposes that we go beyond analyses that “objectify” the genre by treating it merely as an expression of the favela or its social context. Instead, it is necessary to listen to “what funk has to say about itself” (Mizrahi 2010: 77). Updating Lévi-Strauss’ figure of the bricoleur (Mizrahi 2009: 225; 2010: 104, 225), Mizrahi understands that the specific mechanism that not only makes funk viable, but also characterizes it as a musical genre is its “appropriative logic” (Mizrahi 2009: 206): “(...) previously referred to as ‘a style of sound bricolage’ (Vianna 2007) or ‘grab and mix’ (Herschmann 2000a: 222) and which, in my opinion, has not yet been properly explored” (Mizrahi 2010: 77).

Laignier (2010) also uses the idea of bricolage when analyzing funk montagens as fragmented “textual” constructions, formed by “appropriate lyrics” (Laignier 2010: 54) that do not produce linear meanings, but rather an aesthetic experience that takes place at the moment of the party (Laignier 2010: 56). He relates this aesthetic to the “postmodern sensibility” described by Jean Baudrillard, characterized by an excess of signs and a fusion between medium and message (Baudrillard 1991 quoted in Laignier 2010: 55-56). In this vein, “nonsense” montagens reveal a “crisis in the modern notion of the song… [becoming] something extremely paradoxical, like many of the bricolage elements of postmodern culture” (Laignier 2010: 56). However, one may contest Laignier’s assumption that the lack of narrative linearity entails a lack of meaning, given that funk’s very sonic texture carries meanings grounded in the lived experience of its producers.

Although studies such as those by Sá (2007), Mizrahi (2009, 2010) and Palombini (2009) have highlighted the electronic nature of funk, most research in the 2000s focused on discursive analysis. Even Laignier (2010), when dealing with montages and the DJ’s work, does so from a linguistic perspective. In this period, when the genre’s legitimization became urgent (as popular culture, music from the African diaspora or as part of global electronic music), focus mostly fell on MCs, with an emphasis on voice and lyrics and on raps, whether in Funk Raiz or Proibidões. Putaria, which also employed montagens, tend to be analyzed through the discursive and performative bias of the MCs. The centrality of the MC also had a bearing on the market: while most DJs remained restricted to funk parties in favelas, MCs had a greater chance of ascension and media visibility.

At the end of the decade, however, the situation changed both in the funk circuit and in academic approaches, as research emerged that highlighted the DJ and the technical aspects of funk composition. This trend that would intensify with the growing predominance of machinery, whether in music production technologies and online circulation, or in the form of war machines occupying Rio’s favelas.

2010: THE TECHNICAL TURN

The 2010s in Brazil were marked by contrasts between international mega-events - Rio+20 (2012), the World Cup (2014) and the Olympic and Paralympic Games (2016) in Rio de Janeiro - and simultaneous institutional collapse. Alongside the major infrastructure works that transformed the urban landscape for the events, political demonstrations erupted. These criticized authoritarian public administration schemes that promoted forced evictions and lethal military operations of poor communities, corruption, the high cost of mass transit fares, reduced investments in health and education, etc. These popular mobilizations paved the way for an escalation of tension that would erupt in the following years. In 2016, President Dilma Rousseff was impeached via a process that was widely criticized as an institutional coup. Following the impeachment, the federal government aligned itself with the political right, adopting an even stronger neoliberal agenda and cutting social policies. In 2018, the imprisonment of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (of the Workers’ Party, the same party as impeached President Dilma Rousseff) in a legal process that lacked robust material evidence prevented him from contesting the elections. This, in turn, favored victory of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right candidate whose mandate was characterized by setbacks in human rights and public and environmental policies, as well as the intensification of militarization and violence against minorities.

The militarization of everyday life in the peripheries is a process that has been developing in Brazil since the 1990s, but which increased in the transition to the 2010s. With the aim of transforming Rio in the name of hosting the above-mentioned mega-events, the state Military Police created the Pacifying Police Units project. Inspired by community policing models, the UPPs provided a first phase for the armed occupation of the Rio’s favelas by militarized security forces. This was followed by the installation of fixed bases with police officers trained to work more closely with the population and retake territorial control of favelas dominated by drug gangs. In practice, however, the UPP program maintained the logic of militarized occupation without consolidating any of promised social investments. The UPPs also generated numerous rights violations and police violence.

Academic works on funk in the 2010s show how the UPPs became a new apparatus for repressing bailes funk, the epicenter of funk production (Facina 2014). Of the 38 units installed in favelas between 2008 and 2014 in Rio de Janeiro, only one or two allowed funk parties to continue (such as the Tabajaras community in Copacabana). Carlos Palombini (2012) recounts emblematic episodes in this process. One was the siege of the Chatuba funk party in 2009, when police who had not received a bribe opened fire on the party-going public. Another incident was the destruction of the sound equipment at the Arará funk party in 2012. Palombini also highlights the episode that occurred during the occupation of Complexo do Alemão and Vila Cruzeiro favelas (November 25-28 2010) during the installations of their respective UPPs, in which local drug lords were arrested, but also MCs Frank, Max, Tikão, Dido and Smith, known for singing Proibidões. For Palombini, “armed pacification” was a public security project characterized by the suspension of constitutional guarantees under police tutelage (Palombini 2013: 226).

Adriana Facina (2014) sees the UPPs as going beyond the fight against crime by regulating forms of sociability and the use of space in favela communities. The “Funk is Culture” law passed in 2009 did not guarantee the rights of funkeiros in this scenario, (Facina 2014: 17). Even with the repeal of the “Álvaro Lins law” (5.265/2008) - which required prior police authorization for events - the repression of parties had the legal backing of Resolution 013. This legal device was inherited from the military dictatorship. It established guidelines for police action at “social, cultural or sporting” events, allowing them to be banned without any objective criteria based on the subjective judgments of security agents (Facina 2014: 10). Through this legal instrument, created during the dictatorship, the UPPs suppressed parties in the favelas, funk’s last place of refuge (Facina 2014: 10).

In this context, musical analyses that sought to address territoriality in funk focused on Proibidões (Palombini 2012, 2013, 2016; Caceres et al. 2014; Cymrot 2012; Vieira 2012, Facina 2014; Novaes 2016; Palombini and Novaes 2019). Most of these studies maintained the perspective of previous works, with an emphasis on the centrality of the MC - either in terms of the content of the lyrics (as Vieira (2012: 109) does), or in terms of the voice (as Palombini proposes): “The law of the voice, in Proibidão, is laid down by the MC (...)” (2013: 224).

In his master’s dissertation, Dennis Novaes (2016) interprets Proibidão songs as insurgent narratives that confront local and state power relations, rather than describe daily life of the favelas. A similar reading is proposed by Victor Vasconcellos (2017), for whom Proibidão is a discursive and performative practice that intervenes in urban imaginary, refusing to reduce these songs as support for crime. In their chapter “The labyrinth and the chaos” (2019), Palombini and Novaes discuss Proibidão, whose major musical form is rap, bringing it closer to a literary genre by describing it as a “chronicle of chaos” (Palombini and Novaes 2019: 296). The authors defend Proibidõe’s legitimacy as a counter-hegemonic cultural practice, even when it is disruptive (Palombini and Novaes 2019: 303).

Up until the mid-2010s, the academic debate around Putaria was also more focused on the discursive and performative dimensions of MCs, producing analyses that highlighted the subgenre’s modes of circulation. Haline Santiago (2013) showed how funk - especially the songs of Valesca Popozuda (an icon of Putaria in the 2010s) - was appropriated by the gay scene in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro as a form of sexual subversion. Coppi (2014) discussed the conflicts generated by the presence of funk in schools, where traditional values clashed with youthful expressions. Larangeira (2014) explored representations of the “piriguete”²¹ in funk and telenovelas, reflecting on gender and sexuality. Mariana Gomes Caetano (2014, 2015) pointed out the erasure of funk by cultural critics, who ignored the huge repercussions of songs like “Beijinho no ombro” by Valesca Popozuda. Caetano also argued that the performances of funk singers like Valesca, although ambiguous, can constitute resistance in a market dominated by men.

In these analyses centered on the MC, montagens appear in two almost opposite ways. For Palombini (2013), the context of the UPPs and the repression favela artists, Proibidão montagens (understood as a technique and as a musical product) made it possible for the subgenre to continue circulating. Prevented from performing in their own territories, the voices of the Proibidão MCs circulated through “hundreds of recordings that, chopped up and remixed”, kept their messages alive (Palombini 2013: 229). Mariana Gomes Caetano (2015), on the other hand, offers a critical view, suggesting that the proliferation of Putaria montagens made the genre predictable: “people have already gotten used to these songs, so they can become predictable, worn out” (p. 9). Thus, in these analyses, the montagem was simultaneously evoked as a vehicle for memory and resistance when related to Proibidão and as empty repetition when associated with Putaria.

With the entry of funk into the national media spectacle, MCs became privileged by contractors while the role of the DJ - central to the party - was overshadowed. In order to circulate in the mainstream media, funk not only had to alter the content of its lyrics, but also needed to homogenize its sound, reducing the rhythmic diversity of the genre in circulation outside the bailes. From the mid-2010s on, this scenario began to change. The popularization of home studios in favelas, made possible by cheaper technology (computers, microphones, cell phones) and increased access to the internet allowed DJs to start producing and distributing their music independently. This gave funk some breathing space after the suffocation imposed by the UPPs.

In this scenario of greater visibility for funk produced on the bailes funk circuit, the leading role shifted from the MC to the DJ both in the market and in academic studies. I propose to call this the technical turn: it is an analytical inflection that focuses on technology and not discourses, on rhythm and not voice, and on mechanical composition and not lyrics. Despite the existence of some earlier works addressing this topic, these studies gained prominence from the mid-2010s onward, adopting new research methodologies.

In three articles published during the 2010s, Carlos Palombini (2012, 2016) proposes a re-reading of the historiography of carioca funk based on the rhythmic bases that characterized different periods: Volt Mix in the 1990s, Tamborzão in the 2000s and Beatbox in the 2010s. The last technique is understood as a return to American electro practices, infiltrating the voice “coerced” by police repression into the base and mechanizing it (Palombini 2012: 8). Palombini further developed this hypothesis in an article written with Cáceres and Ferrari (Cáceres, Ferrari and Palombini 2014). The authors describe the sonic transformations of funk to changes in the field of public security, observing that, as parties were repressed and criminalized, the rhythmic bases suffered a “sonic shrinkage” (Cáceres, Ferrari and Palombini 2014: 157).

To represent these transformations, the article introduces the use of spectrograms - a methodological innovation in the field - and reaffirms the notion of bricolage as a compositional principle based on the reuse and reconfiguration of sound residues (Cáceres, Ferrari and Palombini 2014: 178). Funk thus not only expresses the daily life of the favela, but technically and sonically reorganizes it (Cáceres, Ferrari and Palombini 2014: 177).

In another article (2016), Palombini highlights the centrality of montagens in the “transnational game of exchanges between Afro-diasporic musical cultures” (p. 36), while denouncing the lack of studies on the technical procedures of funk DJs of the 1990s (p. 32). In an unprecedented move in funk literature, Palombini details the equipment used by these DJs in the production of montagens that culminated in the Tamborzão base line in the 1990s:

The first montagens were successively made on the Tonos Audio Center Control IC-3, from the Brazilian Electronic Equipment Company, Embrasom, in Rio de Janeiro, and on the Gemini PDM-7008 and PDM-7024 mixer-equalizers, the latter with two 2-second memory compartments, two 4-second and one 12-second, for a total of 24 seconds. They also used the Gemini DS-1224 sampler, also with 24 seconds of memory. (Palombini 2016: 36)

José Carlos Teixeira Júnior (2013), a music teacher and education researcher, also showed interest in funk’s technical aspects, describing these in a discussion about the presence of cell phones in the context of a municipal public school in Rio de Janeiro. In opposition to Municipal Law 4.734/2008, which prohibited the use of electronic devices in the classroom, the Teixeira Junior developed the “Gonzagão Digital”²² project, in which students, acting as DJs, used their own cell phones as funk storage and sound manipulation devices, collectively organizing musical sequences to be played during recess. Based on this experience, Teixeira Júnior understands montagem as a musical practice of the black diaspora, marked by fragmentation, hybridization and disjunctions that cross sounds, bodies, technologies, and histories. He sees funk montagens as imbued with a political character and refuse to conform to colonial and Eurocentric standards (Teixeira Junior 2013: 75). From this perspective, montagem embodies - both technically and aesthetically - the same characteristics that have been attributed to funk and its “scene” since its origin: fragmentation, hybridization, and disjunctions that clash with classic categories of musical analysis.

Turning to São Paulo context, the article “Por uma etnografia dos sistemas de som do funk” (2018), by Paulo Menotti Del Picchia, is also an example of the epistemological shift that took place in the 2010s. Through an ethnography of funk “flows”²³ in the Heliópolis community (SP), Picchia presents sound systems as central agents in the production of parties and in the configuration of peripheral urban spaces. For this author, sound systems - big walls, car stereos, and portable equipment - not only amplify music, but also act on space and bodies, structuring forms of sociability and collective sensory experiences. They are “responsible for sonically demarcating the favela as a locality” (Del Picchia 2018: 81).

Another novelty of the 2010s was the expansion of funk produced in São Paulo, which became a hegemonic presence on the national scene from around 2013 on. Concomitant with the repression of the “bailes funk” in Rio de Janeiro by the UPPs, the São Paulo circuit (led by KondZilla, which began producing music videos on YouTube and became the largest funk label in the state) spread São Paulo funk throughout the country. The forms of funk coming out of Brazil’s largest city had their own marketing and aesthetic characteristics.

In a 2018 article, Facina, Moutinho, Novaes, and Palombini analyzed the trajectory of the song “Deu onda” - a hit from the summer of 2016/2017 in the voice of MC G15, produced by DJ Jorgin, and released by the KondZilla label. The article highlights the resources used by DJ Jorgin, including the track’s controversial bitonality - a melody in a major key over a base in a minor key. It argues that the focus of funk production is not harmony, but the creation of a rhythmic base: “(...) with little or no harmonic content whose function is to make people dance” (p. 235). Although Kondizilla and all those responsible for producing “Deu onda” are from São Paulo, the authors characterize the song as “funk carioca”, arguing that the genre is not an attribute of place of origin, but rather a set of practical, aesthetic, and historical characteristics (Facina et al. 2018: 227). From this point of view, “funk carioca” designates a specific composition technique, leading one to wonder whether the “aesthetic”²⁴ of the montagem is a distinctive characteristic of funk carioca.

In the midst of debates about funk techniques, Carlos Palombini and Dennis Novaes (2019) reformulated the criteria for classifying subgenres. According to the authors, “themes, techniques, dispositions, and points of view are linked together in complex ways throughout the history of funk carioca to define categories such as Proibidão, “Conscious”, Putaria, Montagem, Melody, Ostentation, Gospel, Comedy, “Neurotic” or Pop-funk” (Palombini and Novaes 2019: 287). Within this framework, production techniques guide both the definitions of the subgenre and the theme of the lyrics. The authors point out that montagem is an emblematic example: at once technical and aesthetic (Palombini and Novaes 2019: 288).

The greater visibility of funk DJs to a wider public is related to digital and online contexts in which the market logic of funk is being reconfigured. It is also due to the creation of a new aesthetic, the central feature of which is the acceleration of funk’s rhythmic speed from 130 bpm to 150 bpm.

Around 2015, when funk parties boomed again following the decline of the UPPs, DJs in the favela Nova Holanda started experimenting with the tempo of the songs, playing tracks originally produced at 130 bpm and speeding them up to 150 bpm. As DJ Iasmin Turbininha puts it,²⁵ the “crazy rhythm” montagens pleased the audience at the Nova Holanda’s baile funk - known as “the fastest one there was”. Although funk has accelerated its tempo since its emergence (from the 125 to 128 bpm of the Volt Mix, Hassan and other Miami and Los Angeles Bass bases, to the 130bpm of Tamborzão), the acceleration to 150 bpm was controversial (Rosa 2020: 28). Older producers criticized the vocal distortions caused by the speed and many MCs felt that their voices couldn’t adapt to the new rhythm. Had the DJ’s technique overtaken the MC’s voice?

Despite these criticisms, 150 bpm became the established norm at parties. DJ Polyvox, from Nova Holanda, created the first original beat at this speed - the “coca-cola beat”²⁶ - paving the way for others such as Modinha, Atacabada, Macumbinha, Beat do Jaca, Beat do Borel, Beat Bolha, Megatron, Vapo Vapo, Vuk Vuk, Vem Vem, and many more. Inspired by DJ Rennan da Penha, from the Baile da Gaiola in Penha, a legion of young DJs between the ages of 15 and 20 emerged. These young people were integrated with the digital universe and social networks such as Facebook, “Twitter” (now “X”), Youtube, Soundcloud, and Instagram. They spread the new 150 bpm standard through songs, videos, and montagens on the internet. Between 2017 and 2020, 150 bpm became de reiguer at bailes funk. More adept DJs could even play up to 170 bpm (a radically accelerated sound for funk, unthinkable outside the baile funk circuit). From 2019 onwards, the rhythm was assimilated by the greater cultural industry and became the new fever in Brazilian pop music. This movement was built in relation to the effervescence of the funk parties in favelas, the rise of DJs in the broader scene, and the new visibility in the digital environment - all interconnected phenomena (Novaes 2020; Rosa 2020). The new trend only lost momentum with the parties’ hiatus during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

Towards the end of the decade, in the context of the 150 bpm revolution, Dennis Novaes (2017) addressed the relationship between technical objects, aesthetics, and subjectivities by proposing a historiography of funk carioca centered on its musical production techniques and technologies. Novaes argues that the aesthetics and practices of the genre are inseparable from the technological advances that mark each phase of its trajectory - a perspective I share in this article. This hypothesis is further developed in his doctoral thesis, in which he proposes an understanding of music not just as a symbolic language, but as part of a technical system that condenses both the agency of the artists and the contexts in which they operate (Novaes 2020: 10). The text analyzes how digital equipment, media and platforms (tapes, CDs, computers, MP3s and YouTube) have directly interfered in the way funk is produced, played and listened to.

In this sense, montagem became highlighted as the DJ’s central operation: a key technique in the development of funk. Novaes realizes that the more fragmented aesthetic of montagem, accentuated by the 150 bpm, responded both to the centrality of the DJ in production and to the intensification of digital culture, shaping itself to collective and embodied listening on the dance floor.

In my master’s dissertation in Media Studies (Rosa 2020), I also dealt with the 150 bpm phenomenon, highlighting the characteristics of the montagens that emerged in its context. These were more fragmented, with a greater number of juxtaposed and overlapping samples in multiple layers which, at the accelerated speed, produced a dense and intensely dynamic sound (Rosa 2020: 147). Amplified by social networks and streaming platforms, these montagens were possible thanks to digital production, which offered DJs a wider range of sound manipulation tools. They also employed online sharing, which allowed almost unrestricted appropriation of sounds available on the internet. As a “sound ensemble of its time-space” (Rosa 2020: 149), the new funk’s sonority expressed DJ’s techniques and the sensibilities shared by the bailes funk audience, conveying different territorialities and temporalities in funk.

The 2010s were yet another turbulent period in Brazilian politics and social life, especially in Rio de Janeiro, the scene of international mega-events that led to the implementation of an even more ostentatious repressive apparatuses in the form of the UPPs. For funk, always infused with ambiguities and paradoxes, the 2010s were both a moment of repression - the most critical to date - and of pulverization via the new online media. Technological advances made computers cheaper and allowed them to become popular among the black youth of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro. They also restructured market logics and the paradigm of funk’s visibility in the wider national scenario, beyond funk’s own circuit. By the end of the 2010s, as DJ Markinho do Jaca puts it, the DJs were being “seen”. Although the current circulation of funk cannot be understood as absolute freedom, since it is still limited by market logics through an economy of algorithms that segment online consumption, today’s horizons of possibility present massive opportunities compared to previous periods, when the possibility of becoming visible through funk was restricted by monopolies in the music industry and traditional media. It is in this context of openness and new visibility that new aesthetic and market developments have emerged that focus attention on DJs, their music and techniques. In the academic sphere, there has been a notable “technical turn”, in which studies on funk have begun to highlight aspects of the genre’s technicality, paving the way for new perspectives and objects in the field.

CONCLUSION

In summary, transformations in funk studies have corresponded to changes in the visibility, aesthetics, technique, and technology of funk carioca. The different studies responded to the demands of their times. In his founding texts, Hermano Vianna (1997, 1990) laid the foundations for the field by systematizing the production technologies of baile funk at the moment when funk carioca ceased to be a “reproduction of imported music” and became a Brazilian genre, albeit a hybrid one. The notions of fragmentation and hybridization of the 1990s resonated in the studies in Abalando os anos 90 (1997) and Galeras Cariocas (1997). Aimed more at understanding funk carioca’s “scene” than its musical objects, the idea of montagem emerged to describe funkeiro subjectivity, which was undergoing media scrutiny at the time. In the 2000s, the movement to legitimize funk as a musical genre involved valuing MCs and rap, above all. Although some studies emphasized the electronic character of funk, which was more evident in the montagens, research in the 2000s focused on the discursive dimensions of the genre: the MC’s voice, lyrics, and performance. by the end of the decade, however, the scenario had changed. The popularization of computers and the internet in the favelas was the escape hatch for funk carioca following the almost total siege imposed by the UPPs. The new online and digital contexts made it possible for funk DJs’ productions to circulate more freely, making their technical and aesthetic particularities more evident. In this context, funk’s “technical turn” marks a turning point in the historiography of funk studies as well as some important shifts in terms of visibility and the market. In this new context, focus is increasingly turning to the specificities and possibilities of the musical genre as electronic music which fearlessly displays the marks of its technicality.

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• 1
  Interview given to me and Maria Bogado in 2019, audio recorded by cell phone.
• 2
  A “sample” is a previously recorded piece of audio — such as a sound, beat, speech or melody — that is reused in a new musical composition, often through cutting and digital editing. It is a common practice in genres such as hip-hop, funk and electronic music.
• 3
  TN: “Carioca” is the adjective form of Rio de Janeiro.
• 4
  “Scratch” is a disco technique in which the DJ manually moves the vinyl (or simulates this gesture on digital controllers) back and forth over the needle, creating rhythmic and scratchy-sounding effects.
• 5
  “Loop” is the continuous repetition of a usually short piece of audio, which can be melodic, rhythmic or vocal.
• 6
  Which, in itself, is quite diffuse and not a structured field.
• 7
  These can also be subdivided, given the rapid pace of transformations in the funk world.
• 8
  A “set” is a musical sequence prepared and played by a DJ during a performance. It can be made up of complete tracks, snippets, samples, loops and sound effects, organized in a continuous way to create a sound narrative, keep the dance floor moving, or express a musical aesthetic. The set can be planned in advance or built live, based on interaction with the audience.
• 9
  And in O mundo funk carioca (1988), Vianna states that “Rio is not giving back to the world another way of making hip-hop” (Vianna 1997: p. 102).
• 10
  My term.
• 11
  TN: An Afro-Brazilian musical bow made of a wire, a stick and a gourd.
• 12
  TN: A large Afro-Brazilian hand drum.
• 13
  A Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry is a temporary commission set up by the Legislative Branch (the Chamber of Deputies or Federal Senate) to investigate a certain fact of public interest.
• 14
  When the irradiating center of customs and values shifts from the State and the nation to the flow of the globalized market, producing transnational identities shaped by the neoliberal context.
• 15
  In bailes de corredor, a hall would be divided into two sides — A and B — in which the galeras organized themselves in alliances, confronting their rivals in the central space of the dance floor, called the “corridor”.
• 16
  Base sampled from the song “808 Volt Mix”, by DJ Battery Brain, which uses the electronic noise of the sound equipment as an integral part of the composition’s musicality.
• 17
  Although they are labeled as “gangs”, it is important to recognize that drug trafficking exceeds the retail-level activity occurring within poor and favela communities. In this regard, the use of the term “drug trafficking” to refer to retail drug sales operates as a superlative that conceals the magnitude and reach of the networks underpinning this criminal economy.
• 18
  A term native to funk that represents wide repercussion, recognition and consumption. Similar to “going viral”.
• 19
  Newspaper article on the sales figures for the Furacão 2000 compilation. Available at: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/ilustrad/fq0902200106.htm accessed on 31/07/2025.
• 20
  An emic term that represents the state of tension and fear that surround favelas inhabitants, caused by the presence of drug cartels in their territory.
• 21
  “Piriguete” is a slang term used in a popular and often pejorative way to refer to a woman — usually young — who dresses in a way considered provocative, who openly shows sexual or affective interest in men, and who frequently circulates in environments such as parties and bars.
• 22
  The name is a reference to sonic crews’ names.
• 23
  The name given to funk parties in favelas of São Paulo.
• 24
  As electronic music, any type of funk is constructed using assembly techniques (or bricolage, to use a term that is common in the field of funk studies). But funk carioca has the marked characteristic of exacerbating these techniques with an excess of samples and effects that highlight the technical nature of its production.
• 25
  Interview given to me, Eduarda Cícero, and Maria Bogado in 2018, with audio recorded by cell phone.
• 26
  The beat was given this name because it was produced by recording the sound of a plastic coca-cola bottle hitting a wooden worktop.
• Data Availability Statement
  The datasets generated by the survey research during and/or analyzed during the current study are publicly available under a Creative Commons license in the Minerva Repository, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s institutional repository.

Edited by

• Dossier Editors
  Adriana Facina
  Programa de Pós-graduação em Antropologia Social, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
  http://[e-mail] | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9381-5134
  Silvia Capanema
  Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, pesquisadora de Pléaide/Campus Condorcet, pesquisadora bolsista CNRS CREDA-IHEAL (2024-2025)
  [e-mail] | https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1607-2055

Data availability

The datasets generated by the survey research during and/or analyzed during the current study are publicly available under a Creative Commons license in the Minerva Repository, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s institutional repository.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  20 July 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  31 July 2025
• Accepted
  16 Feb 2026