“Funk is approaching a fifth dimension,” São Paulo-raised DJ-producer Mu540 (pronounced musao) tells me over the booming, distorted funk bass. “You have funk as a musical movement, a cultural movement, a social movement, an enterprise – the next step is political.” It was a statement befitting a music culture that has become firmly woven into the social fabric of Brazil, but let’s rewind a little bit.

A couple of days earlier, when I’d just landed in São Paulo, the first thing that struck me was the soil in Ibirapueira Park. It was rich, almost golden, and spoke to the unparalleled diversity that makes up South America’s largest city. It’s the product of (both voluntary and violently otherwise) migration from around the world since the 15th century but, in the last 40 years, this fertile soil has also given birth to funk music. 

Many outside Brazil will know the genre as baile funk (referring to the parties, or balls, in which it could be heard), or perhaps recognise its signature percussion: um-cha-cha-um-chacha. The lively party sound is rooted in the hip-shaking electro rhythms of Miami bass and early hip-hop emceeing, which found themselves in Rio de Janeiro’s favela slums in the 80s. There, they mixed with the local indigenous and African diasporic rhythms to create a sound entirely unique to Brazil: loud, movement-focused, and adorned with half-sung, half-rapped lyrics describing life in the run-down hills overlooking Rio.

“Since the emergence of funk in Brazil, its evolution has been constant,” says São Paulo DJ Caio Prince of the sound’s dissemination throughout Brazil over the following decades, becoming somewhat of an umbrella term rather than a singular genre. There’s its original form from Rio, funk carioca, São Paulo’s funk paulista, the illicit, gang-related funk poibidão (prohibited), the flashy, materialistic lyrics of funk ostentação (ostentatious), the eerie, screeching samples of bruxaría (bewitching), to name a few.

Despite this specificity to Brazilian society, however, funk very much mirrors the hip-hop story of over-policing and repression by authorities. Right from its onset, the genre has been maligned by mainstream media for its association with the favelas and the lawlessness that accompanies them. Parties are regularly subject to police crackdowns and have even faced proposed bans altogether. 

It’s hard to miss the prejudice built into these portrayals, given that funk is one of the few means of expression available to the favelas’ underprivileged residents, who have long been ostracised from performing in licensed clubs. In recent years, these issues have been compounded by an increasing appropriation of the sound by Brazil’s middle class for the very same up-market venues that favela artists are turned away from, smearing funk MC vocals over house beats and sanitising the beautiful chaos and social polemics at their core.

This is one of countless conflicts that funk has found itself at the centre of; elsewhere providing a safe space for queer partygoers in a country that, for decades, had the highest LGBTQ+ murder rates in the world, and becoming a means of articulating encounters between Brazil’s rich and diverse communities. It’s in the context of all of this and more that Mu540 made his powerful declaration that night in São Paulo.

Below, we speak to five São Paulo funk artists innovating on the genre and leveraging it against the status quo.

MU540

When I sat down with Mu540 at 9pm on a Saturday in December, he still had two flights to catch and three sets to perform before the night was over. With a career spanning three decades, Mu540 is one of the biggest champions of funk music in Brazil today, and, through his latest EP, 4x4, he has set his sights on making sure the culture gets the global respect it deserves. 

Firstly, the project stands as a resistance to the appropriation of funk by mainstream clubs. “I’m here to say that’s not how you produce funk,” Mu540 tells me. “These middle-class, high-class DJs don’t respect the music and therefore they don’t know how to mix it properly”. Rather than transposing funk vocals onto house beats, 4x4 weaves funk into the language of the music itself, retaining the genre’s signature percussion pattern while also incorporating four-on-the-floor house kicks.

But Mu540’s ambitions don’t stop there. “Why can Skrillex, who’s clipping and distorting everything, play on the biggest stages and even win a Grammy, but when a São Paulo DJ does it it’s not recognised?” he asks. “I think funk is going to hit numbers as big as these in the next few years.” 

DJ CAIO PRINCE

Making his DJ debut in 2019, rising star Caio Prince is a true student of funk in all its forms. His sets lean heavily on São Paulo’s cacophonic funk bruxaría, while also including elements of funk ritmado (featuring polyrhythmic and melodic elements reminiscent of the African musical traditions), funk consciente (characterised by a slower and more striking BPM). 

As a queer, working-class artist from the favelas, Caio Prince believes that funk isn’t just about throwing good parties, but also a social force to be mobilised against the status quo. “Funk is a Black and working-class musical genre that still faces repression and prejudice from conservative sectors of society,” he explains. “This is why it is essential to celebrate the greatness of this cultural movement and recognise that, despite ongoing persecution, funk continues to change the lives of many people in the favelas.”

“As an LGBTQ+ person, I found that I could truly feel welcomed and safe at these parties,” he continues. “[Me] being on the rise in the funk scene – a space that, until recently, was almost exclusively occupied by cisgender heterosexual men – is, in itself, an act of revolution.”

MC THA

MC Tha’s 2019 LP Rito de Passá is considered one of the greatest bodies of work to come out of the funk scene. Tracing its roots beyond the American influences of Miami bass and hip-hop, she arrived at ancestral Afro-Brazillian religions and traditions that foregrounded funk’s emergence. Far from the profanity and crime so emphasised by mainstream media, MC Tha’s perception of funk is spiritual, standing for the embracing of religious and cultural diaspora within Brazil. 

Then it hit me: before funk went to MPCs, it was Afro

– MC Tha

“In 2016 I joined an Umbanda temple, an Afro-Brazilian religion, and I noticed they were playing funk during the ceremonies,” she explains of this landmark intervention. “Then it hit me: before funk went to MPCs, it was Afro. Although it seems obvious, talking about Terreiro [the environments in which the Afro-Brazillian macumba religions emerged] and funk has its challenges because most funk DJs, MCs and entrepreneurs are supporters of evangelical churches. Brazil, despite being a so-called secular country, is extremely violent towards religions of African and indigenous origins. It's funny, funk and macumba both suffer from the same problem: racism.”

MC PH

With one of the highest monthly listeners of any artist in Brazil, MC PH represents the aspirational side of funk. He was raised on hip hop and trap, and came up during the era of São Paulo’s flashy funk ostentação, fusing all of these influences into a poppier funk-trap sound with mainstream appeal.

“We used to make music while thinking about what people wanted. Not boasting, because we didn't have anything, but kind of prophesying stuff,” MC PH told Brazilian journalist Felipe Maia during a panel on Boiler Room x Ballantine's True Music Studios: São Paulo's opening night. It speaks to his upbringing in the deprived Vila Medeiros neighbourhood, and to funk’s ability to open up new possibilities for Brazil’s impoverished youth. “Today, I thank God that I can talk about what I have actually experienced.”

GEZENDER 

With elegant bleached-white hair, a calming demeanour and outfits that hark back to goth days gone by, DJ-producer Gezender stands for a subcurrent of São Paulo’s club scene tangential to funk. As funk finds its socket in the canon of global electronic music, Gezender’s Sangra Muta collective represents the opposite flow, of international house and queer party movements being infused with the local specificities of Brazil.

“When Sangra Muta started, I didn’t know of any other electronic music party in Brazil, though a lot happened in the 90s,” Gezender tells me. “Now, we have a lot of mainstream LGBTQ parties with electronic billings. The same DJ, on the same night, can play house, techno, psytrance and gabba which is crazy! I think that connects with the internet generation.”

“More electronic music is being made in Brazil, but it’s not necessarily electronic Brazilian music. We are creating a new style and I’m so proud of the LGBT community for that,” he continues. “People tell me it’s tribal gabba or Latin core, but I don’t know how I feel about that. Like, why do you have to say it in English?”