It’s an Inside Job

Anyone who already knows me is probably aware that I have and always will have a deep fascination with indigenous booty musics. Miami Bass, New Orleans Bounce, Detroit Ghetto Tech, Crunk Hip-Hop, Chicago Ghetto House, Dancehall, Baltimore Club(obviously!)… at some point I've been unnaturally obsessed with all of these sub-genres.

So of course my interest was piqued when I heard about Favela Funk(or Baile Funk, whichever you prefer) a couple of years back. It was first described to me by Skiz Fernando who had just returned from a 2 month long trip to Brazil as an unholy marriage of Miami Bass and Baltimore Club with kids rapping in Portuguese over it. I was not let down by the 2 CD-R's he burnt me of some of the stuff he had collected while down there. Soon after Essay dropped the "Rio Baile Funk: Favela Booty Beats" compilation.

I dove right in, eventually meeting a DJ from Rio on Soulseek with whom I swapped my collection of Baltimore club .mp3's with his stockpile of Favela tracks. All in all it was about 10 hours worth, enough to realize unless there was a major stylistic shift within the genre I didn't really ever need to search out more.

Favela Funk started popping up on the blogs and net magazines as soon as the Essay comp. and Diplo's Baile Funk mix dropped. It seemed inevitable that a bastardized watered down hipster version of the sound would pop up. Would it be from LA? NY? Would Diplo himself, who had been credited with "discovering" the genre by Rolling Stone do it with the release of the M.I.A. album he helped with?

Surprisingly no, while Diplo has continued to mine the sound for his productions he's kept the urgency of the sound in tact while cleaning it up for North American and European audiences.

So it was a surprise to me when scrolling through the last few months worth of blogs, Pitchfork articles and what have you for what I have missed out on that I saw it. I stumbled upon the name Bonde Do Role on the list of performers for the Pitchfork Festival this summer. A little research into it and I had discovered that it was a Diplo pushed act from Brazil.

I found the Myspace page and was immediately off put by the photo.

These didn't seem like the favela kids I had imagined when told about the origins of the music, they looked like art school kids. But it said from Brazil so I reminded myself not to judge a book by it's cover and gave it a chance.

I wish i hadn't bothered. How much of the music was created by the Brazilians and how much by Diplo I am unsure of, but it was reminiscent of much of the bad art school takes on hip-hop, bass music and club that populate many a warehouse across the US right now.

Melo Do Tabaco opens with your standard Favela rhythm and the vocals are, well Brazilian, but before you know it an Alice In Chains sample comes in. Ok, yeah.. har har. Pretty unimpressive despite the chuckle I let out when Lane's voice popped in the first time. It was the second song Melo Do Vitiliago that took it too far. A sample of Salt-N-Peppa's Push It is mashed with AC/DC's You Shook Me All Night Long and comes across as a third rate Too Many DJ's mix. And much like most of the mash-up genre the joke is old halfway through being told.

The only thing I've taken away from checking these guys out was that while this may signal the end of the relevance of a genre that never quite became relevant at least it is self-imploding before our hipsters could ruin it.