Dave Moynihan mentioned in an off-hand manner in hyping his 'Hat on the Wall' night that he'd just come back from Brazil bearing Favela Funk. Quick as you like I emailed him offering all manner of bounty in exchange for a CD of the stuff. Dave has cherry-picked his fave tunes from native comps with names like 'Funk Neurotico' and has parcelled them on without much in the way of track names, not that I care an awful amount.
This stuff I've decided is the missing piece in my vision of what I'm dubbing "Shanty House." Shanty House is the new strain of post World Music engaging in the same cultural and social dynamics that have given us Crunk and Grime in the first world and Dancehall in JA. Detractors might bemoan the need to give Favela Funk, Kwaito and Desi a brand name. However, like it or lump it these forms are always going to exist on the peripheries of most people in the west's experience of music. If they aren't called something specific then they'll be less absorbable in their own right, and conversely will be viewed as an extension of World music. The concept of 'World Music' is inextricably intertwined with concepts of the natural, the earthen, and the rooted. However, the new wave of global urban music is mercilessly hooligan in it's agenda, synthetic by choice and necessity, often produced in a crucible of urban existence yet more extreme, precarious and violent than that which characterises the temperature of New York, London, Berlin.
Part of the immediate confusion with Favela Funk, or Funk as it's more commonly called, is it's name. The use of the word funk is interesting. It's almost as though the original term no longer exists, as if it has no meaningful signification and is thus up for grabs. Naturally one would expect the Brazilian Portuguese to be more semiotically cavalier with someone else's tongue. On first acquaintance the music has immediate musical associations: Tone Loc's "Funky Cold Medina", Kid Frost's "La Rasa" and the Boo Yaa Tribe, but crucially (and in consequence the 'House' signpost of my soon-to-be-forgotten neologism) shades of Miami Bass, Dynamix, Ladi Luv, DJ Battlecat even 2 Live Crew all of which exhibit an extremely techno-esqe linearity to their music*. But there's more, a strong flavour of Man Parrish's "Hip Hop Be Bop Don't Stop", DJ Jimi's pre-crunk masterpiece "Where They At" and almost ironically Plaid's "Scoobs in Columbia." I'm sounding like one of those wine critics ascribing the scents of honey and autumn to red plonk.
Samples of squawking chickens, decks spinning backwards, berimbeau loops, conga, cowbell, splashing 808s, breaking glass (right out of the Bam Bam songbook), a disorientating 3 choruses per song, crowds singing drunkenly, samples of smeared tropicalia march bands, traces of prowling distorted basslines, mentasm/torque stabs, singers making like donkeys, looped vocal hooks, and always these blank-eyed rap rants more Johnny Rotten than anyone. You could reasonably make a case for the music as the first proper Rock Rap on the basis of these hoarse, terrifyingly demagogical deliveries, and yet they're so propulsively lean, so different from the rhythmically redundant holler of Korn et al.
Just like Grime it's pretty wearing in a ninety minute stretch, but no less desperate and enervated. Like Desi and Kwaito this music makes a mockery of tradition.
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*as a side-note it's worth noting that UK Techno in the form of Autechre, and The Black Dog took a great deal of influence from the crashing Miami Bass sound. Miami Bass might easily have had the rallying the rallying cry of "Electro will never die..."
Posted by Woebot at June 27, 2004 09:43 AM