Chasing Bohemia

by Carmen Michael

  ‘Of course,’ I laughed heartily, and plugged the nervous air with an unbroken discharge of words. ‘We were just conversing about how wonderful last week’s samba school was. The bin? Oh, you know how Latin people are. They get so easily excited about things. All that racket makes for a great samba evening, though. So where are you from? Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester? That’s nice. Are you ready? Fabio is ready, aren’t you, sweetheart?’

  They looked at Fabio beside me, sweating whiskey like a werewolf, his pupils dilated, and his hair in a wild Afro, and then looked back at me.

  ‘Great then,’ I said, not giving anyone a chance to change their minds. I winked at the red-haired girl. I stopped two passing cabs, shoved them inside, took five hundred reals off them, and threw ten at Fabio to buy some drinks. By the time they departed, his emotional pendulum had reached its mid-point, and he was sitting contentedly between two kids from Manchester in the back seat. As I watched the car disappear down the first curve in Joaquim Murtinho, I could hear him yelling happily out the window in English, ‘Bye, my love.’

  We made it down to the cabaret by 10.00 p.m., only to find it inexplicably filled with elderly people — a good percentage of them walker-frame bearers — and their families, as opposed to the cigar-smoking millionaires and scantily dressed waitresses of our fantasy expectations. The low red lights we expected to find hanging over each white-clothed table were absent; the room was lit instead by garish overhead illumination that left nothing to the imagination. We hid ourselves away in the changing rooms and rehearsed one more time while children from the party ran among our feet. We remembered at this point that we had never sung into a microphone, and broke the grim news to Foguette. He told us to hold it close. A few minutes later, the band on before us finished their set and came backstage, disappointingly dressed in casual t-shirts and shorts, in stark contrast to our lush cabaret wear.

  We made our way onto the small stage without attracting attention, and were finally looking down on a large selection of Rio’s theatre community, or at least their grandparents and extended families. For a moment, everything seemed like a really bad idea, but Dominique flashed a movie-star smile, told me to think of the record deal, and we were away. It was now or never, and the crowd were as interested and attentive, or at least as drunk and deaf, as they were ever going to be.

  Turn around … A little off-key? Yes. Doesn’t matter. Turn around … It was a rough start for Bonnie, but we were enthused by a group of backpackers who started slam-dancing in front of us to the final bars of the song, even if they had crashed the party, as Rubems told us later. We missed Foguette’s cues for ‘Ain’t No Sunshine,’ and I played the verse chords wrong. ‘Jolene’ was passable, but since the crowd was largely Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, they failed to appreciate the New York-cool angle that I was trying to give to the music. The crowning moment of the evening was our later substitution of ‘Heart on a String’ into the slot of ‘I Will Survive’, a momentous decision that saved us from utter humiliation. We received lukewarm applause, which dissolved quickly into sounds of drunken conversation. The performance was, according to Foguette, alright, much to the disappointment of Gustavo who was hoping for a ‘Triumphant Success’, or at the very least, a ‘Tragic Disaster’, to give him something to talk about at his next cocktail party. Rubems told us we were wonderful, and invited us back to play at the next function. When I told him this later, Fabio said slyly: ‘He just wants to sleep with one of you,’ to which Dominique smiled sympathetically and said, ‘envy is a terrible thing, isn’t it?’

  Although Rubem’s invitation strangely did not materialise, the next time my mother inquired, I told her I was going to start singing cabaret in Rio de Janeiro. There was a long pause at the other end, after which she launched into another conversation about money, education, and visas. In the end, to get her off my back, I said cheerfully, ‘OK then, I’ll come home and marry an accountant from the tax office in Canberra. Will that make you happier in your old age? To know everything is nice and safe and dull?’ It was an old threat, but it always worked on my parents, who were small-business people and farmers and would rather their daughter become an abattoir worker than marry into the public service.

  ‘Why do you have to be so extreme about everything?’ asked my father, the man who sold the family farm at thirty years of age and took his four children to live in a hippy commune while he got one of the first degrees in his family. I didn’t know, so I just gave him the same answer I give to all questions about my life, ‘Why does anyone do anything in life?’

  –13–

  Murder on the Dance Floor

  Oh, Oh, Oh, I’m gonna kiss your husband,

  Oh, Oh, Oh, I am kissing your husband.

  – MC NEM, ‘Rio de Janeiro’

  After our brief disagreement about tours, I hadn’t seen much of Chiara since her return. I noticed her a few times sitting under the arches, but she was in her own world, remote and unreachable among the street kids and dealers and whores, drinking beer and talking in the harsh, strange tongues of street Brazil. She didn’t go to Ta’ Na’ Rua any more, nor did she mention Ararei. Capoeira was finished. The reason was not entirely clear, but I gathered something terrible had happened in Europe. It had to do with a capoeira instructor and his money collection box. When she relayed the story that they’d had t-shirts printed and distributed that read, CAPOEIRA DUBLIN: PUT THE MONEY IN THE BOX, I didn’t ask any more questions. Some things don’t need explaining.

  ‘Carmen!’ I heard her call one night, and stopped to see her emerge from the shadows of the arches, the dilated pupils of the black street-kids shining behind her in the dark.

  ‘What are you doing tonight?’ she asked nonchalantly.

  ‘Going to the samba, probably,’ I said with a shrug.

  ‘Samba, samba, samba,’ she said with a condescending smile. ‘We are in Rio de Janeiro, and you are hanging out at sambas. Don’t you want to do something wild? That nobody else has done before?’ The Irish accent she once had was completely gone. She was a Latin woman now.

  ‘What’s wrong with samba?’ I asked.

  ‘Samba is dead, Carmen. Dead.’

  ‘It’s hardly dead,’ I protested with annoyance. ‘Fabio’s samba on Friday is packed, and Carnaval …’

  ‘Carnaval!’ she guffawed, not letting me finish, ‘Carnaval is for tourists. Listen to the street. Can you hear samba here? Look around, darling, and listen.’

  I sighed, wondering where her line in anthropological rebellion was going this time, and looked around reluctantly. On the Rua Joaquim Silva, the machine-gun bass of Carioca funk was beating out of a car-boot stereo while groups of street children twisted and turned their lithe little bodies, some making the sign of a gun with their forefinger and thumb. A car drove slowly by, the sound of funk flowing out its windows. It was true that there was very little samba actually on the street. Samba was contained — if only because it needed musicians. Funk was like hip hop or techno; it poured out of cheap radios and car boots, didn’t need a band, and was guaranteed to provoke upturned noses from the elderly and middle class. I shrugged. Whether it was the voice of the street or not, it didn’t change the fact that, compared to the tinkling melodies of samba, funk was about as kind to the ear as a pneumatic drill.

  ‘So you see what I mean?’ she said without waiting for my answer, her previously mocking expression now replaced by a warm smile of solidarity. ‘Of course you do. Then you will come with me on Friday night.’

  ‘To where?’

  ‘To the funk ball, of course.’

  ‘Dunno. Are you sure it’s not too dangerous?’

  ‘I’m sure it is too dangerous.’

  ‘Chiara! Let me think about it …’ But she had already gotten up and was walking away. She stopped at the corner to call back to me, ‘You arrange the car, OK? I’ve lost my credit card. Just make it happen. Pick me up on Friday.�
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  AT MIDNIGHT on 2 June 2002, an ambitious O Globo journalist by the name of Tim Lopes went undercover to investigate the prostitution of minors and the drugs trade at an illegal funk ball, a baile funk proibidão. Carioca funk, an aggressive hybrid of rap and Miami Bass, which uses the backbeat of machine-guns to sing about everything from polygamy to drug trafficking, was the latest musical contribution to spill out from the favelas and into mainstream Brazilian society. Lopes went into the notoriously violent favela of the Complexo Alemão wired up with a hidden camera — although, unsurprisingly, the police didn’t find that when they found his body a week later, cut up into little pieces by a samurai sword. The people of Rio were horrified. Certainly, O Globo had never been a popular paper in the favelas — it supported the brutal military dictatorship, and even now pays scant attention to the systematic abuse of human rights that occurs in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro every day — but it still seemed a little rash of Elias ‘Maleuco’, or Mad Elias, the notorious drug-trafficking don who apparently gave the order.

  In the three years that followed the murder, as the police dragged in the perpetrators and the Brazilian media hunted out the motives of the traffickers for such a horrific crime against a mere journalist, the new sound of Carioca funk found itself dragged into the witness box of public opinion. The headlines roared with claims that the new sound of the favela ‘incited violence’, ‘apologised for drug trafficking’, and even ‘impregnated women’! The Brazilian public were outraged. New laws were written banning lyrics that apologised for violence, public balls were closed down, and the MCs went undercover. It is a debate that still polarises the city today, although if the popularity of proibidão funk stars such as Mr Catra is any indication, it would appear that some are less outraged than others.

  ‘I’M GONNA EXPLODE through your door in less than five minutes,’ the thirty-seven-year-old funk MC, already being heralded as the movement’s godfather, screamed to his promoter through a walkie-talkie over the roar of our rented Fiat engine. It certainly seemed plausible as we raced along the notoriously dangerous Linha Vermelho (The Red Line) in north Rio, passing through police blocks at 150 kilometres per hour. At first I settled back into my seat, decided to put my faith in Mr Catra, and tried to relax with the thought that Rio roads must be a little like German autobahns, that everyone drove like this, and that my driver was in control. That was until we passed a block of police who were intelligently positioned inside the highway wall taking sniper shots at the favela, while the gangs on the other side fired back in response, scattering the cars in front of us like toys.

  Then I realised that Mr Catra was probably driving like that because he didn’t care if he died, or if we did either, for that matter. He simply had one of those devil-may-care philosophies on life that said, ‘Live each day as it comes because you might not be here tomorrow.’ It was not at all like Germany. Cars veered on the road in front of us, and Mr Catra accelerated through them, bellowing, ‘Fucking idiots. The police are snipering the favela from a public highway again’. He looked across at me self-righteously, gesturing with one hand, ‘They put public lives at risk.’ I nodded, then looked to the back seat for confirmation from my companion Chiara that we were driving with a lunatic, but she was laughing, her dark hair flying around her face, happy as an angel of Charlie Manson, and simply leaned in to grab me by my forearm and say, ‘He’s so cool, isn’t he?’

  There was no really defined purpose behind our research of Carioca funk, except, perhaps, to satisfy dear Papa Rimoldi in Milan — Chiara had recently informed him that she was retraining in investigative journalism, in order to extend her trust fund into her thirties. In truth, I suspected that Carioca funk was just another pretext for Chiara to meet beautiful Afro-Brazilian people. She loved black people: black children, black artists, black dancers, black intellectuals, black axe-murderers. She didn’t discriminate, as long as they were black.

  ‘It’s the new voice of the favelas,’ she’d told me before we left on the Friday evening to accompany Mr Catra on his rounds of Carioca funk balls in the city.

  ‘It’s a giant fart,’ Fabio had countered as we left, ‘derived from the ingestion of too much processed American culture.’

  He was opposed to our ‘field mission’ on the basis of the level of danger and the quality of the music. He had gone so far the previous day as to give me an ultimatum — to choose between samba and Carioca funk — indicating that these two musical styles were mutually exclusive and that to like both, therefore, was impossible. There was now open warfare between Fabio and Chiara for the stake of my musical tastes.

  ‘He’s just pissed off because samba is dead. It has been stolen by the white middle class of Brazil,’ Chiara assured me, throwing a dismissive look in his direction.

  Fabio just smiled as he swung idly in the veranda hammock. ‘People have been saying that for years. I can assure you, my little middle-class princesses, it will survive well after this shit they are trying to call music has come and gone.’

  The target of Mr Catra’s explosion that Friday evening was The Riviera, a garden-lined club on the beachfront complete with swimming pools, Mathuin-inspired fountains, and ridiculous door-entry charges. Our convoy of cars screeched to a halt at the front of the club, and a sea of excited white faces parted as Catra and his crew stormed into the club. It’s a posh concert venue, The Riviera. Bow-tied waiters crisscrossed the velvet-curtain-lined hall, serving drinks in steel ice-buckets to a well-heeled white crowd. At the front of the hall the wild-child types were already waiting, swinging their lady lumps as the girls in the favela do, only their Lycra tops were from Gang and worth three hundred reals a piece, and they were rebelling against their parents, not society. I met one of them later that evening, a blonde teenage girl in a ripped white t-shirt that read ‘Can’t Touch This’, and asked her why she liked funk.

  ‘Because my father hates it!’ she cried, revealing a mouth full of expensively braced teeth as her floppy-haired boyfriend strutted beside her. In the background, the latest funk revelation, MC Frankie, screamed out ‘Ela, ela, ela, quer’ — loosely translatable as ‘She, she, she wants it,’ — among other references to anal sex and polygamy.

  Later that night, on the other side of town, we stood in between two facing walls of a hundred speakers where punters had been corralled into a tunnel vibrating with the blast of funk proibidão, or illegal funk. This was the Fazendinha, within the same Complex Alemão where Tim Lopes had been murdered. Voluptuous women, a good percentage of them transvestites, their parts barely covered by strips of diamanté-studded denim, were grinding their way to the ground in moves that left little to the imagination. Men stood behind the girls making the obligatory sexy thrusting moves. Bondes, trains of bare-chested youths carrying AK-47s, threaded their way through the crowd, thrusting their weapons in time to the music, although they were not just dancing together because they liked each other’s company. The funk dances are charged with symbolism, and the formation of the bonde itself is no less than a metaphor for the invasion of another favela or territory. The atmosphere was loud, raw, and unapologetic, and the kids looked right at home.

  They call it funk, but it’s not funk as we know it. The heavy bass line imitates the crack of a machine gun, while the MCs shout out rap-style rhymes about their conquests in the bedroom and on the frontline of Rio’s most violent favelas. According to Article 6 of Law 3410, which prohibits music and proceedings that apologise for criminal activity, the music is illegal and the balls can be closed down — if the police get through the barricades at the front of the favela, that is. Even if they do, rumour has it that, for a mere 60,000 reals, they’ll turn a blind eye.

  This is a scene now repeated throughout Rio de Janeiro every weekend in every favela, and in half the playboy clubs of the rich Zona Sul — the latter minus the AK-47s and the mentions of the drug dons, of course. The critics say that it’s vulgar, denigrates women, incites violence, and
represents the ‘dumbing down’ of the rich musical culture of Brazil, but none of that is stopping Carioca funk from consuming the hearts and minds of Rio de Janeiro’s party generation. The favelas are blazing, the nightspots are swinging, and the teenagers are hysterical once more over Brazil’s latest musical odyssey. Edited versions designed to escape the censors are selling like hotcakes. The walls of DJ Marlboro’s Big Mix Studios, the home of commercialised Carioca funk, are adorned with platinum disks signalling sales upwards of 250,000 copies. Even foreigners have moved in for the kill, with the new English sensation, MC MIA, Maya Arulpragasm, releasing an English version of Carioca funk for the bloodthirsty London locals.

  Funk has Brazil’s samba musicians throwing their hands up in despair. The traditional samba pagode session has been relegated to brief opening spots for the funk MCs at balls, and the kids wouldn’t know Tom Jobim if they saw him in the street.

  ‘Funk is the death of our music culture,’ Fabio grumbled moodily one night in Lapa as a group of sambistas playing on the street were drowned out by the sound of an anthem Carioca funk song that gave youthful fans a DIY guide on how to rob a car.

  ‘Music needs a rhythm, a melody, and a harmony. Where is the melody and harmony in funk?’ he shouted in frustration. ‘The MCs of this movement are not musicians.’

  He had a point. For a music style that draws its roots from the unlikely source of inspiration that is Miami Bass, one can hardly expect its proponents to be a rich source of musical culture. Mr Catra cited, and with some uncertainty, Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osborne as some of his influences, while his counterpart MC Sapão gave a nod to Stevie Wonder and Mariah Carey in an internet chat-room recently. Many of the artists cite black music such as soul, hip hop, and reggae as their inspiration, but there is surprisingly little reference to other Brazilian genres such as samba or Afro-Brazilian music. Carioca funk can hardly be described as beautiful music, nor are its lyrics particularly inspirational. However, those who think this means funk lacks the punch of other musical styles are missing the point. Unlike samba, which draws hard on the achievements of classical guitar and prides itself on the fusion of European and African styles, Carioca funk has wholly excluded the old world from its equation. It is not delving into its roots, nor looking to Europe for intellectual guidance.