Muito obrigado to Alexandra for reaching the brink of near deafness with me and surviving to tell the tale.  Yes I saw windows shake.  Who says favela architecture is precarious if it can withstand the sonic onslaught every weekend while IPHAN declares a meticulous building that took four years to construct too fragile for subfrequencies?  Maybe the real precarity is in the formal city.

Building sound systems is its own architectural gesture too, especially with the elbow room of a big downtown square, a far cry from the tight squeeze of a favela’s improvised public spaces.  Turned on its side, Furacão 2000′s speakerboxes look like they would tower above downtown Rio’s citadel to petroleum, the Petrobrás tower lurking behind in all its sinister, cut rectangular prism glory.

In fact, the vertical architecture of downtown actually served as a sonic prism, trapping in the sound waves that just about made themselves visible — from the shaking window to my vibrating Coke can to the blurry vision when I was trapped in the ricochet effect of speakers against building.  Sonic Warfare indeed.

In another medium and on another scale, the Projeto Morrinho also “descended the hill” (as the metaphor goes for favela culture entering the formal city) and set up shop on the Largo da Carioca.  Far from exhibits that recreate shanties as a fetishized art object, Morrinho is like DIY Legos, as the universal building block impulse was picked up by favela kids and turned into a way to ease some of the stress of daily life in Pereira da Silva by recreating their community — large made of bricks — out of bricks.  The vibrant colors of Morrinho gave a taste of morphology that funk was born into, against the drab backdrop of some more downtown office buildings.

If the urban periphery achieved a hard-fought moment of recognition in the center of the city, though, the periphery of the event saw the most prominent trend in Rio lashing back: order.  As the “Urban Control Regulators” of the city’s department of “Public Order” prowled like sharks, waiting to snap up minnows in the form of street vendors who strayed too far from the swarms of funkeiros, an unlucky victim literally had his applecart upset as agents confiscated a cooler full of drinks — probably to go swill beer at the station — and his pushcart.  The vendor looks on despondently as the city crushes an honest, hard day’s work and municipal guards stand tall over the telltale remains of ice melting on a hot Rio street to do what they do best: keep a vague and arbitrary notion of order that is sucking the life out of one of the world’s most vibrant cities.

“UPP filho da puta!” (Pacification Police you sons of bitches!) So went the refrain to nearly every funk proibidão blasting out of the walls of speakers lining the main street of the favela Mangueira on a Friday night last month in Rio de Janeiro.  Around the corner, the G.R.E.S. Primeira Estação de Mangueira, the most famous samba school in Brazil with its trademark green and pink trim (verde que te quero rosa sang Cartola, their legendary sambista), had already wrapped up its rehearsal for the evening.  The action had shifted to the jam-packed baile, a series of sound systems lining the narrow street, like a gauntlet of tamborzão.

The baile rolls on, but only because hotheads in Complexo do Alemão, one of the city’s most notorious large favelas, jumped the gun and triggered (pun intended) a police invasion that captured Brazil’s attention toward the end of November.  Akin to the invasion of Iraq and its embedded reporters, Brazilians – not just cariocas (Rio residents) – watched breathless 24-hour TV coverage from their gated condos as life imitated art imitated life.  Comparisons to the current smash hit Tropa de Elite 2 (Elite Squad 2) – whose anti-piracy campaign is a story for another time – have already become tired clichés, but the film and its depiction of the confluence of drugs, gangs, violence, political power, and police repression remains eerily prescient of recent – and certainly future – events.

In Alemão’s case, the added bonus is that a newly installed cable car, modeled on Medellín, Colombia, can soon begin operation.  The idea is to ferry passengers from various hills in the Complexo directly to a nearby train station.  While sound in principle, an architect friend who works for the firm that designed it was emphatic that the spacing of the cable car stations makes no sense and that it’s a vainglorious infrastructure project for election purposes (there was a presidential election in October 2010).

Rio’s prognosticators anticipated that by the end of the year Mangueira would be subject to the UPP – Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora (Police Pacification Unit).  Already past its second birthday (the first UPP was installed in the Favela Dona Marta, where MJ shot “They Don’t Care About Us” and where Madonna dropped in for a visit last year, in November 2008), UPP is the word on everybody’s lips – from Zona Sul beachgoers to favela residents alternatively anxious and hopeful about what the future will bring.

For funkeiros it’s a universal loss, as even more recent events have depressingly shown that the state is returning to the bad old days of the early 90s, when funk rose from the urban periphery and its mixture of black youth, crass lyrics, and disadvantaged communities terrified the powers that be.  With the arrival of the UPPs, the equation was very simple: no UPP = baile and UPP = no baile.  However, those lines are being blurred as ever — Cantagalo and Pavão/Pavãozinho hosted New Year’s eve bailes, though the police, it seemed, were in control when it came to the closing time.  Ladeira de Tabajaras, another Zona Sul favela, has a UPP-sanctioned baile that has been universally panned by every funkeiro I’ve talked to.  The trick, it seems, is extricating funk from the patronage of the drug traffic.  Bailes are fun, engaging, exciting, and satisfying not exclusively because there are 14-year-olds with guns walking around — maybe they are for some of the most exocitizing of gringo visitors, but first and foremost its sound & bass — though also lyrical content, which again is now subject to police censorship insofar as throwing MCs into the clink is concerned.

Sure, funk is played in every club in Rio and there are plenty of places to go that aren’t overpriced Zona Sul clubs, but, to paraphrase innumerable dancehall tunes (and the comparison is more than apt), “likkle ghetto yutes” (jovem pobre favelado, or something like that) don’t necessarily have that opportunity.  And if an MC is in jail, well he or she isn’t singing anywhere much less in a favela baile da comunidade.  Not to mention the cultural loss if one subscribes to the Chuck D theory of “rap is CNN for black people.”  Funk é a Rede Globo da favela.

Zuenir Ventura’s Cidade Partida (Divided City) began his analysis of the roots of Rio’s contentious urban violence by looking at the Bossa Nova era of the 50s and 60s, nostalgically remembered as romantic beachside evenings in the Zona Sul, playing guitar while staring longingly at Corcovado (where Christ the Redeemer hangs out) and not worrying about a 12-year-old in surf shorts sticking you up for your watch.

As the New Year came and went, with the hordes crowded Copacabana Beach for midnight fireworks and offerings to Yemanjá, goddess of the sea, the police will have the neighborhood on lockdown.  Despite some pickpockets, one could very easily sing paeans to the smooth contours of a bossa nova beat without worry, the noise notwithstanding.  At a Christmas concert in Copacabana, the state Secretary of Security, José Mariano Beltrame, who oversees the UPP, was serenaded by fans with cries of “Way to go!” “Show them who’s boss!” “That’s a real man for you!”

Upper class Brazilians, so petrified that they’ve installed a continuous high-tech architecture of security at nearly every corner (from cameras to razor wire to gated entrances to armored cars) feel impotent in the face of the growing poverty they have unwittingly abetted through social and economic exclusion.  They have projected their lost sense of control onto Beltrame, a modest bureaucrat but at least a real life figure, unlike fictional, but universally adored, Capitão Nascimento from Tropa de Elite 2.  (When the first movie came out, he appeared on the cover of Brazil’s Time equivalent as “O Novo Herói Nacional.”)

The favelas that ring the Zona Sul – with the notable exception of Vidigal and Rocinha, which are surely in the crosshairs – pacified, we might be heading for Bossa Nova Era: The Sequel.  The raw, rough reality of funk is an unwelcome intrusion on that vision, and thus the geography of the baile has been pushed out of the center of the power elite – the Zona Sul – and what remains is back on the periphery, where it began.

Funk is only one dimension — though a prescient one, perhaps a canary in the mine — of the ongoing transformation of Rio’s landscape, especially the landscape of hillside and peripheral poverty embodied by favelas, conjuntos, and loteamentos irregulares.  As umbanda worshippers sang call-and-response about “raízes africanas” (african roots) and dove belly-first into the sea, white dresses and all, the new year in Rio is pregnant with possibility for good and for ill.

*                     *                     *                  *

For quality, alternative media/information sources in English on Rio, favelas especially, check: RioReal Blog, Catalytic Communities, RioOnWatch, and Good Hood News.

Just over a week ago, as I settled onto a couch in MC Doca’s living room, a Globo News reporter announced that funk MCs had been sent to prison for apologizing crime. A YouTube video of MC Ticão and MC Frank singing about how FB, the dono (owner) of the recently police-invaded Morro de Alemão was hiding out in rival faction Rocinha. The report next showed an armed blond police woman–with heavy makeup and perfect hair–shouting and banging on an apartment door. The camera revealed two shirtless, tattooed MCs, Frank and Ticão, who are brothers, blinking away sleep. Cut to a table with a watch, a ring, and a few chains. “The police encountered various gold chains” the reporter intoned. Tremendously successful MCs with gold chains?!? How incriminating!

MC Smith, MC Max, and MC Didô had also been imprisoned. They also lived in the two communities recently occupied by the police: Morro de Alemão and Villa Cruzeiro. The deputy accused the MCs of using the Internet to share music making “apologizing” crime and criminals, forming a gang (with the other MCs), associating with traffickers, and doing “marketing” (yes, she used the English word) for drugs and criminal factions.

Next the report announced that MC Galo of Rocinha had been arrested in a traffic blitz in Leblon. He had an arrest warrant for marijuana possession from 1998 and for singing “proibidão” (“very prohibited” music). The police evidence? A YouTube video of Galo singing in Leandro HBL’s and Diplo’s Favela on Blast. None of the press using the clips contacted Leandro to ask permission. And whenever Leandro has used Globo’s footage, he’s had to pay. A lot.

The video, which Globo used, is Galo’s top hit on YouTube.  The clip, they chose, compares the hard life of the MC to the hard life of a drug-seller. It’s not, even “proibidão.” So, why did Globo weave Galo–who had been arrested a day earlier–into the story? Perhaps to build sentiment against Rocinha, a community speculated as a target for police invasion and “pacification.”

Predictably, none of the reports look at the roots of “forbidden” funk–which refer to drugs, violence, and criminal factions. A common story among funkeiros goes that in the mid-nineties when the various judges prohibited bailes funk in clubs, typically in working class suburbs, the parties and the music moved into favelas. Farther away from police repression, some bailes began to be financed by criminal factions. At the same time funk’s base in Miami Bass & freestyle evolved into the Candomblé- and samba-influenced tamborzão beat.

I visited the MCs in prison yesterday along with MC Leonardo, the president of APAFUNK, and DJ Marlboro, who’s credited with recording the first “funk carioca” album in 1989. We met with the MCs in a classroom above the underground prison. After one guard allowed us to enter with cameras and voice recorders,  another returned to confiscate the camera and voice recorder of two human rights reporters. I hid my point-and-shoot camera. Until the guard came back shouting, “The meeting is over! Stop singing. No cameras!”

Click here to view the embedded video.

When asked if he ever expected to be jailed for his songs, MC Smith responded, “This is a political game that’s happening in Brazil now, so yes…. Ivete Sangalo lives in Bahia. And what’s that? Carnaval, carnaval ‘fora da epoca’ [out-of-season, all the time] and she sings about what happens. And I live in a community that was taken over by the state… one of the most dangerous in the world. And I live in a community with a high risk of violence, a criminal base, high rates of prostitution. And therefore I’ll sing what I live. And what I think. This is freedom of expression. Not only me, but for Max, Ticão, Frank, Didô.”

When will the criminalization of funk carioca stop? People point out how City of God is “proibidão” that was Oscar-nominated. Yet, funk suffers prejudice unlike high-class art. After the police invaded Vila Cruzeiro and Morro de Alemão and failed to capture “bandits,” it seems that they chose easier targets: MCs with “proibidão” videos on YouTube.

MC Galo-Funk-Se Quem Quiser (words MC Dolores)

MC Smith e MAG- Aqui o Bagulho é Doido

"ABC of Citizen Jail: Graduating Citizens"

"Suffering and Smiling"

I guess were kind of beating a dead meme on this one- (and I guess I’m kind of becoming the joke blog post guy around here) but for real… if you dont fuck with Wayne Marshall we probably cant be friends.

Normally I delete all the boring press releases I get in my email but this one caught my eye and I thought the readership here might enjoy it.  Nice to see that the indigenous people in this country still have a sense of humor after centuries of genocide, mis-appropriation of tribal funds and general attempts to erase their nations, culture and selves.

For immediate release: Contact: Kerry Birnbach: 212-825-0028, ext. 212

April 1, 2010 kbirnbach@nyccah.org

Iroquois Leaders Assail Government Benefits for Illegal Immigrants;

Say Aid Should Be Denied to Anyone Entering U.S. in Last 25,000 Years

Tribal Leaders Blast “Broken Borders” that Allowed in Dobbs, Levy, Buchanan

Leaders of the five Native American nations that comprise the Iroquois League – comprised of the Mohawk , Oneida , Onondaga , Cayuga , and Seneca peoples – issued a joint statement today declaring anyone who entered the country without their permission after members of the League arrived (here between 25,000 and 60,000 years ago) to be an illegal alien who should be denied all government benefits as a first steps towards deportation. Under the proposed rules, approximately 98 percent of the current U.S. population could be considered illegal immigrants.

Said the statement, “Since we granted no permission for outsiders to enter the country after 23,000 B.C., anyone who did so is an illegal alien and should no longer be able to receive government welfare payments in the form of corporate agriculture subsidies, tax credits for stadium-building, mortgage interest deductions for vacation homes, or food stamp benefits. In the meantime, if they cannot speak any of the Iroquoian langauges, such as Mohawk, they should leave. People should simply accept that America always was, and always will be, an Indian Nation, and must wake up and realize the existential threat posed to our very existence by the broken borders that allowed in Lou Dobbs, Steve Levy, and Pat Buchanan. The only thing sadder to us than watching trash litter the landscape is watching people were immigrants themselves slamming other immigrants.”

Human beings originated in Olduvai Gorge (in present day Tanzania) about 2.5 million years ago. Kikuya tribal leaders from that area responded to the Iroquois in a statement today that said: “We believe that the Iroquois are illegal emigrants. Since they left our land 2.5 million years ago without our permission, they really have no right to be in North America either.”

In a related development, 10,000 angry Tea Partying Medicare recipients protested against themselves today, demanding that “government health care keep its grubby hands off our government health care.” Said one protestor, “I simply hate myself for benefiting from a program that proves that everything I stand for is flat-out wrong.”

Mark Danner is one of the good journalists. His work navigates nearly impenetrable messes of deceit and deception like the 2000 Florida vote recount, the nefarious path to the American war in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. Military intervention in Reagen era El Salvador… the list goes on- but I think when you have Susan Sontag call you “one of our best, most ambitious narrative journalists” you’ve pretty much fulfilled your journalistic duty to the world.

One of my biggest fears during the election was that once/if Obama was elected there would be a psychic closure on the Bush years. In a more utilitarian sense, I am afraid that people are so excited about entering a “new era” that they  forget that there is a lot of unfinished business from the last 8 years that needs to be sorted out. Danner’s latest piece, “US Torture: Voices From the Black Sites,” which appeared in the new issue of the New York Review of Books on Monday, is doing some of the heavy lifting. It contains detailed accounts of interrogations of “highvalue detainees” at secret “black site” prisons. An excerpt from the piece – about a tenth of it – appeared on the OpEd page of Sunday’s New York Times. It’s a potent reminder that the clean up process has just begun.

Wayne says PDFs are the new MP3s- so here is a PDF of the whole article as it appeared in the New York Review of Books. This is painful to read, and while for some it might be confirming what they thought they already knew- there’s something deeply moving about reading first hand accounts of the abuse against “our enemies.”

Mark Danner “US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites” PDF (9 pages)