Sasha Frere-Jones: “Baile funk strikes a balance that all good dance music strives to achieve: between the novel and the repetitious, which allows listeners to remain interested and moving. In Rio, the music is kept alive at weekly bailes, or dances, which take place in the favelas and, occasionally, at ritzy downtown clubs. [Fernando Luis Mattos] Da Matta estimates that there are as many as five hundred bailes a week, and the ten or so that he d.j.s provide him with his main source of income. Though funk CDs exist in Brazil, recordings are not a priority for the musicians. The point is to go to the bailes and dance like mad.”
In Febrary, on his weblog, Frere-Jones said he wasn't “trying to salt Diplo, but his production for Maya's track, "Bucky Done Gun," on Arular, is a direct bite of "Injeção" by Deise Tigrona”, though Diplo wrote in to acknowledge the influence, and seems more eloquent there than in a forum post he wrote criticizing those who downloaded Arular without checking the liner notes. Feel free to make mention of the fact that I've never even been to Brazil much less the drug- and crime-ridden slums of Rio, and feel free to mention that he travels to Rio often, when you address that criticism I have of him, but my issues with Diplo have more to do with benefiting from calling out to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro without providing any evidence he's actually visited one. Not so much a criticism of Diplo but of Brazilian DJ Fernando Luis Mattos da Matta's party in NYC, where“images from a videotape of Brazilian favelas were projected onto the walls around him.” It seems a little tacky that as rich kids dance, thousands die in a war between corrupt cops and equally corrupt drug lords. Feel free to mention the hundreds of dollars I've spent over the years on gangsta rap, which is the 1990s North American equivalent of baile funk.
So enough hypocrisy. I never really understood Miami bass, not that there was much to understand: it was the music most up-front about sexuality and violence, as is baile funk is today. Well, it would be if I understood Portuguese, and which brings me to the most exciting part of it. It's not the beats, which are 40-year-old Brazilian beats mixed with 10-years-old South Florida beats. No, it's the vocals, which are somewhere between speaking and yelling, somewhere between singing and rapping, with almost every artist in the mixes I've heard with vocal chords that have received healthy doses of a certain herbal medicine. Every mix is evidently required to have at least one kid lay down some vocals as well with a woman (!) every third or fourth track. It's actually less often, but still more often than I've heard in other hip-hop mixes (UK grime, I'm looking in your direction, as cool as Lady Sovereign is, she can't be the only woman on the scene).
Insert something thought-provoking about how American hip-hop has long been stagnant (save for Missy Elliott, but even there too) and how non-Americans are experimenting with one of the experimental forms of popular music in the last 20 years here.