Mouthbeats And The Openhearted (The Cars That *Don't* Go Boom, Pt. 2)
2015 is coming up in a couple of months in the Poll, so I scrolled back to eight years ago on KondZilla and GR6 Explode, the two Brazilian funk channels whose archives go back that far.* A couple years ago I'd listened to some bare-bones Bum Bum tracks from 2017, so was already expecting, heading backwards, that I'd find settings that were more spare than those of current funk carioca. And of course the thesis - or at least the hook - of this series of posts is how, for a while, the bass - the bottom - lost its status as the core of the Brazilian funk rhythm. But still, I had a huge shock - jawdroppingly huge - at just how spare 2015 was. And I was also surprised at how young a lot of these performers were. That is, not shocked that, e.g., MC Hariel was once younger than he is now - duh - and not shocked (though somewhat surprised) that so many current performers were making music back then (when some were as young as 17, 16, 12); but was very surprised that those kids were such a big focus of the channels. Of course, this might just be the peculiarities of these two channels in 2015, the spare music and the youth of the performers, the channels happening to pick up on a bunch of kids and the bet paying off prosperously to the present. Nonetheless, here is a treasure trove, early work, voices without much accompanying sounds to cushion them.
That the accompaniments are so unadorned has the positive effect of making the singing feel really openhearted - a contrast to the raspers and bellowers I've been into in 2023. My friend Dave Moore writes via email, "Some of the spareness you identify I don't associate with the bracing spareness in 2020s funk, but with a kind of improvisatory or informal spareness of making music with your friends and a couple of cups or spoons. There's a warmth to the spareness." Exactly.
MC Hariel - Passa Devagar (2015)
I will say, though - to reveal my prejudices and maybe try to sidestep them - that if you'd teleported 12-year-old me from my 1966 world of male early adolescence to this 2015 world of kids singing songs with sexual lyrics, that I REALLY doubt that "warm" and "openhearted" would be words I'd use for either world's social life, Connecticut 1966 or São Paulo 2015. But I'll also say - trying not to derail us too drastically from the subject at hand - that what felt to me in 1966 like a constricted world of teasing and bullying might well have been more of an opening-up and adventure for some of my peers. To me dirty words felt like hate words, and for me that spilled over to any sexual content, and honestly that still colors how I hear lots of stuff.** But I don't know this São Paulo world, and 12-year-old me isn't writing this post anyway, and good for the music for sounding like it could be an opening-up and adventure. Even if it isn't.
Anyhow, in 2014, six months to a year before the songs I'm embedding, MC Pedrinho, at age 12, hit with the song "Dom Dom Dom" including the lyrics, "Kneel down, get ready, and give a good blowjob," getting the attention (says Wikip) of the local state prosecutor because of Pedrinho's age and the sex content - of course these lyrics (especially the imperative to kneel down) jump out at me as more mean than sexy (and strike me as very 12-year-old); but again the meanness (or whatever) is not the only thing going on.*** The adolescent posturing is a container or accompaniment for audacity and energy and experiment. The very earliest video on GR6 Explode is a live clip from several months later ("Se Louco Cachorrera") of Pedrinho and another four of these kids sitting behind him on a step or a stoop, no instruments except mouths and cheeks and hand claps, and the five of them are creating full rhythm and melody, the first sounds being the kid on the far right using his voice as a beatbox. Then Pedrinho grabs another boy's hand in solidarity, runs behind the other four, makes funny motions with his arms and legs as if he's diving forward, goes front again, dances a bit while MC Kevin tickles him and MC Don Juan raps; Pedrinho pulls Kevin's hand back, fooling around, then he sings in a penetrating voice, the guys clapping the clave rhythm behind him.
So anyway, this is where we are. Acks and mouthfarts and dat-dat. Vocalists in place of some of the percussion instruments and rhythm instruments, and voices that sing without the protection and accompaniment of such instruments. (Btw, I think the settings work similarly well for the singers in their twenties.)
MC Neném, MC Magrão, DJ R7 - Parafuso (2015)
On this one a drum is in there with a couple of useful thuds, and a foghorn is blowing smoke, but mostly there's a riot of mouthbeats - it starts with an "ah" repeating on the offbeat, then various clustered staccato yelps and "doo-bitta-doo doo-doo" running with and counter to each other. Of course the words too have their rhythms, even when they're struggling to be heard amidst voicebeats high and low. It's as if you took doo-wop's bouncing balls and pirouettes and changed them to cries and grunts. [Couldn't find lyrics online.]
MC Pedrinho, MC Juninho JR, DJ R7 - Manda Pras Novinhas (2015)
The rhythm is set by a voice that cries "ah" on every offbeat. Percussion and occasional instruments circle around it; but long sections of this are just the singing voice and a few bumps of percussion. [Couldn't find the lyrics, but the kids are saying "putaria" a lot.]
(A couple more tracks with a constant voice on the offbeat are "Assunto Profissional" and "Vai Ficar Ardendo." Like "Manda Pras Novinhas," they're produced by DJ R7. Btw, I assume that on a lot of these, the vocal cry is recorded and then put on the offbeat by the producer, rather than being constantly voiced by someone. But I don't know this.)
MC Robs - Bolado de Mil Grau (2014)
Robs has a strong attack, pushing hard on the beat. I'm obviously not here for the lyrics, but nonetheless the insistent pressure of the singing makes me really wish I understood. The video is a party, with motorcycles. A flourish at the start and end sounds Asian to me (I don't know if that's right, though, or what it signifies).
The lyrics are online (here), but honestly neither Google Translate nor I are getting the idioms. "Several homies have already gone," which I'm guessing is Robs lamenting the death of some friends. "The bite is for a boy/But the break is the favela/It's generation humility/Enclosed, chapel garden." (A later Robs song, "Favela Pede Paz," has been described, praised, as "conscious funk," meaning aware, socially conscious.)
(A similarly "Asian"-sounding track is MC Guilherminho's druggy "Era Uma Casa": a stringed instrument sets up a twang; the voice takes up the melody when the instrument drops out.)
MC Hariel - Passa Devager (2015)
[Video is upthread, but here's the link if you don't want to scroll.]
An extended introductory horn riff. The horns sensibly drop out, though, when Hariel starts to sing, reappearing only as suggestive shards except when he's silent. The percussion instruments, when we have them, sound human anyway. (Might human breaths have been added to them?) [Here are the lyrics, though Google Translate is baffling me once again. A stanza is reflecting the eyes of jealousy: "We are embrazado/Laughing at life/And the repressed/Who envy our conquest."] Gorgeous singing.
MC Menor da VG - Fogo na Inveja (2015)
More motorcycles, more jealousy. The fire of envy. There's a great quasi-harmony: a synth sounding like tire squeals, and the voice singing with it at a dissonant interval. A rhythm voice is the first beat we hear, and it then shows up on alternating offbeats. [Lyrics here.]
MC Lais - Melhor que ta tendo (2014)
A voice far down in the mix goes "ooh" on every beat. Meanwhile, MC Lais sings fast without being staccato, simultaneously excited and at ease. The arrangement gives us lots of space, yet the drums and voice both feel like they're riding the same great water sluice of rhythm. Anyway, there's a human sound deep in the beats; which evokes more pang, more tang. (Here's the music video, which I didn't embed, wanting to use the longer version instead.) [Lyrics here.]
And here's MC Lais a couple of years earlier, "Chifre Trocado Não Dói" (2012), and a similarly voice-boxed track from Pocah (when she was called MC Pocahontas) "Mulher do Poder" (2012). The human beatboxes seem clumsier, as if they're not yet used to living in the rhythm, though I don't know if that was typical for 2012.
FOOTNOTES:
*Bafflingly, just a couple of weeks ago GR6 Explode took a lot of their old videos private, making them unavailable; fortunately the ones I wanted to use were also on YouTube in other uploads (in a few instances they were on a couple of what look like pretend GR6 Explode sites).
**In sixth and seventh grade fear was the walls and the ceiling, but it's not as if it was the whole thing or the only thing I was or did. It's likely that the fear was wrong a lot of the time, too, though of course my memory can't know this - fear, being fear, wasn't testing for counter-evidence to itself. It was too afraid. But also, if you go back to 1966 and look at what I was reading, what I was listening to, discovering, thinking about, how I was conversing with friends, telling jokes, making up stories, a lot of it simply would have nothing to do with fear and bullying, and the entertainment that maybe did mirror some of the fear back at me - hard rock, garage rock, folk, Tom Lehrer, the Beatles - was hardly a disparaging picture of my emotional turbulence.
Anyway, let's say ditto for these kids, that there's lots to the story.
***I'm hoping that "kneel down" doesn't have the servile connotations it has in English. They (MC Pedrinho and MC Livinho) may feel it all as complimentary. "The experienced young lady was born with this gift." Pedrinho's follow-up ("Novinha Tu É Sensacional" with MC GW) starts "Girl you are amazing, you are sensational"; then "Fall with your butt forward/Fall with your butt back" (if the translation software is doing right by this). And let's assume that for some of these kids, "go crazy bitch" is intended as encouragement. Maybe it's taken as such.
[EDIT: I double-post everything here to my Dreamwidth and my Substack, but to induce people to subscribe to the Substack (my Substack is free, so what "subscribing" means is that Substack sends my posts to you via email) I make a practice of adding a Meta paragraph for Substack only. But for this post I've* decided - three months after the fact - that the Meta paragraph is crucial enough that it belongs here as well.
*Well, Clare says it should be the first paragraph. I think putting it first would make the post too comfortable for the reader.
Meta paragraph for Substack: My idea was to merely glance at the sex lyrics but to do so in a way that didn't duck what's in them. Unfortunately, I didn't know how to do right by the lyrics in just a glance, so they took too much space. My intention, in using the rhetorical device of projecting my inner 12-year-old into the funk world, was to give us, on the one hand, someone (a 12-year-old) potentially and believably oppressed by and vulnerable to a terrible male-adolescent environment of bullying and hazing (rather than an adult writer - me - just saying "rough times, possibly"), but also to give us, on the other hand, someone (let's still imagine a 12-year-old) who could potentially be treated as a peer by these kids, be invited to join the excitement and adventure of dirty words and sex talk. Anyway, my three after-the-fact rationalizations for choosing this rhetorical device are (1) it's better than just saying the usual "I don't know what's what about Brazil and these adolescents and their world of the dirty talk and the twerking, though by the way teenagers scare the living shit out of me" etc. etc. etc., since I'd rather we at least pretend to imagine what might be at stake if the kids were us, and (2) I'm not going to pass over what it's potentially like to be a kid subjected to and terrorized by such a world. And let's add a (3), my adult eye in the present, the eye of someone who's known subsequent 12-year-olds and has had scads of mostly non-terrible social experiences since age 12 and who, therefore, doesn't take my 12-year-old as having the final word on either what my 12-year-old world was like then or on what the 12-year-old's, 16-year-old's, 17-year-old's, 22-year-old's São Paulo MCs world was like in 2015. So my inner 12-year-old gets to speak but doesn't get to call the shots.]
This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/389709.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.
That the accompaniments are so unadorned has the positive effect of making the singing feel really openhearted - a contrast to the raspers and bellowers I've been into in 2023. My friend Dave Moore writes via email, "Some of the spareness you identify I don't associate with the bracing spareness in 2020s funk, but with a kind of improvisatory or informal spareness of making music with your friends and a couple of cups or spoons. There's a warmth to the spareness." Exactly.
MC Hariel - Passa Devagar (2015)
Click to viewI will say, though - to reveal my prejudices and maybe try to sidestep them - that if you'd teleported 12-year-old me from my 1966 world of male early adolescence to this 2015 world of kids singing songs with sexual lyrics, that I REALLY doubt that "warm" and "openhearted" would be words I'd use for either world's social life, Connecticut 1966 or São Paulo 2015. But I'll also say - trying not to derail us too drastically from the subject at hand - that what felt to me in 1966 like a constricted world of teasing and bullying might well have been more of an opening-up and adventure for some of my peers. To me dirty words felt like hate words, and for me that spilled over to any sexual content, and honestly that still colors how I hear lots of stuff.** But I don't know this São Paulo world, and 12-year-old me isn't writing this post anyway, and good for the music for sounding like it could be an opening-up and adventure. Even if it isn't.
Anyhow, in 2014, six months to a year before the songs I'm embedding, MC Pedrinho, at age 12, hit with the song "Dom Dom Dom" including the lyrics, "Kneel down, get ready, and give a good blowjob," getting the attention (says Wikip) of the local state prosecutor because of Pedrinho's age and the sex content - of course these lyrics (especially the imperative to kneel down) jump out at me as more mean than sexy (and strike me as very 12-year-old); but again the meanness (or whatever) is not the only thing going on.*** The adolescent posturing is a container or accompaniment for audacity and energy and experiment. The very earliest video on GR6 Explode is a live clip from several months later ("Se Louco Cachorrera") of Pedrinho and another four of these kids sitting behind him on a step or a stoop, no instruments except mouths and cheeks and hand claps, and the five of them are creating full rhythm and melody, the first sounds being the kid on the far right using his voice as a beatbox. Then Pedrinho grabs another boy's hand in solidarity, runs behind the other four, makes funny motions with his arms and legs as if he's diving forward, goes front again, dances a bit while MC Kevin tickles him and MC Don Juan raps; Pedrinho pulls Kevin's hand back, fooling around, then he sings in a penetrating voice, the guys clapping the clave rhythm behind him.
So anyway, this is where we are. Acks and mouthfarts and dat-dat. Vocalists in place of some of the percussion instruments and rhythm instruments, and voices that sing without the protection and accompaniment of such instruments. (Btw, I think the settings work similarly well for the singers in their twenties.)
MC Neném, MC Magrão, DJ R7 - Parafuso (2015)
On this one a drum is in there with a couple of useful thuds, and a foghorn is blowing smoke, but mostly there's a riot of mouthbeats - it starts with an "ah" repeating on the offbeat, then various clustered staccato yelps and "doo-bitta-doo doo-doo" running with and counter to each other. Of course the words too have their rhythms, even when they're struggling to be heard amidst voicebeats high and low. It's as if you took doo-wop's bouncing balls and pirouettes and changed them to cries and grunts. [Couldn't find lyrics online.]
MC Pedrinho, MC Juninho JR, DJ R7 - Manda Pras Novinhas (2015)
The rhythm is set by a voice that cries "ah" on every offbeat. Percussion and occasional instruments circle around it; but long sections of this are just the singing voice and a few bumps of percussion. [Couldn't find the lyrics, but the kids are saying "putaria" a lot.]
(A couple more tracks with a constant voice on the offbeat are "Assunto Profissional" and "Vai Ficar Ardendo." Like "Manda Pras Novinhas," they're produced by DJ R7. Btw, I assume that on a lot of these, the vocal cry is recorded and then put on the offbeat by the producer, rather than being constantly voiced by someone. But I don't know this.)
MC Robs - Bolado de Mil Grau (2014)
Robs has a strong attack, pushing hard on the beat. I'm obviously not here for the lyrics, but nonetheless the insistent pressure of the singing makes me really wish I understood. The video is a party, with motorcycles. A flourish at the start and end sounds Asian to me (I don't know if that's right, though, or what it signifies).
The lyrics are online (here), but honestly neither Google Translate nor I are getting the idioms. "Several homies have already gone," which I'm guessing is Robs lamenting the death of some friends. "The bite is for a boy/But the break is the favela/It's generation humility/Enclosed, chapel garden." (A later Robs song, "Favela Pede Paz," has been described, praised, as "conscious funk," meaning aware, socially conscious.)
(A similarly "Asian"-sounding track is MC Guilherminho's druggy "Era Uma Casa": a stringed instrument sets up a twang; the voice takes up the melody when the instrument drops out.)
MC Hariel - Passa Devager (2015)
[Video is upthread, but here's the link if you don't want to scroll.]
An extended introductory horn riff. The horns sensibly drop out, though, when Hariel starts to sing, reappearing only as suggestive shards except when he's silent. The percussion instruments, when we have them, sound human anyway. (Might human breaths have been added to them?) [Here are the lyrics, though Google Translate is baffling me once again. A stanza is reflecting the eyes of jealousy: "We are embrazado/Laughing at life/And the repressed/Who envy our conquest."] Gorgeous singing.
MC Menor da VG - Fogo na Inveja (2015)
More motorcycles, more jealousy. The fire of envy. There's a great quasi-harmony: a synth sounding like tire squeals, and the voice singing with it at a dissonant interval. A rhythm voice is the first beat we hear, and it then shows up on alternating offbeats. [Lyrics here.]
MC Lais - Melhor que ta tendo (2014)
A voice far down in the mix goes "ooh" on every beat. Meanwhile, MC Lais sings fast without being staccato, simultaneously excited and at ease. The arrangement gives us lots of space, yet the drums and voice both feel like they're riding the same great water sluice of rhythm. Anyway, there's a human sound deep in the beats; which evokes more pang, more tang. (Here's the music video, which I didn't embed, wanting to use the longer version instead.) [Lyrics here.]
And here's MC Lais a couple of years earlier, "Chifre Trocado Não Dói" (2012), and a similarly voice-boxed track from Pocah (when she was called MC Pocahontas) "Mulher do Poder" (2012). The human beatboxes seem clumsier, as if they're not yet used to living in the rhythm, though I don't know if that was typical for 2012.
FOOTNOTES:
*Bafflingly, just a couple of weeks ago GR6 Explode took a lot of their old videos private, making them unavailable; fortunately the ones I wanted to use were also on YouTube in other uploads (in a few instances they were on a couple of what look like pretend GR6 Explode sites).
**In sixth and seventh grade fear was the walls and the ceiling, but it's not as if it was the whole thing or the only thing I was or did. It's likely that the fear was wrong a lot of the time, too, though of course my memory can't know this - fear, being fear, wasn't testing for counter-evidence to itself. It was too afraid. But also, if you go back to 1966 and look at what I was reading, what I was listening to, discovering, thinking about, how I was conversing with friends, telling jokes, making up stories, a lot of it simply would have nothing to do with fear and bullying, and the entertainment that maybe did mirror some of the fear back at me - hard rock, garage rock, folk, Tom Lehrer, the Beatles - was hardly a disparaging picture of my emotional turbulence.
Anyway, let's say ditto for these kids, that there's lots to the story.
***I'm hoping that "kneel down" doesn't have the servile connotations it has in English. They (MC Pedrinho and MC Livinho) may feel it all as complimentary. "The experienced young lady was born with this gift." Pedrinho's follow-up ("Novinha Tu É Sensacional" with MC GW) starts "Girl you are amazing, you are sensational"; then "Fall with your butt forward/Fall with your butt back" (if the translation software is doing right by this). And let's assume that for some of these kids, "go crazy bitch" is intended as encouragement. Maybe it's taken as such.
[EDIT: I double-post everything here to my Dreamwidth and my Substack, but to induce people to subscribe to the Substack (my Substack is free, so what "subscribing" means is that Substack sends my posts to you via email) I make a practice of adding a Meta paragraph for Substack only. But for this post I've* decided - three months after the fact - that the Meta paragraph is crucial enough that it belongs here as well.
*Well, Clare says it should be the first paragraph. I think putting it first would make the post too comfortable for the reader.
Meta paragraph for Substack: My idea was to merely glance at the sex lyrics but to do so in a way that didn't duck what's in them. Unfortunately, I didn't know how to do right by the lyrics in just a glance, so they took too much space. My intention, in using the rhetorical device of projecting my inner 12-year-old into the funk world, was to give us, on the one hand, someone (a 12-year-old) potentially and believably oppressed by and vulnerable to a terrible male-adolescent environment of bullying and hazing (rather than an adult writer - me - just saying "rough times, possibly"), but also to give us, on the other hand, someone (let's still imagine a 12-year-old) who could potentially be treated as a peer by these kids, be invited to join the excitement and adventure of dirty words and sex talk. Anyway, my three after-the-fact rationalizations for choosing this rhetorical device are (1) it's better than just saying the usual "I don't know what's what about Brazil and these adolescents and their world of the dirty talk and the twerking, though by the way teenagers scare the living shit out of me" etc. etc. etc., since I'd rather we at least pretend to imagine what might be at stake if the kids were us, and (2) I'm not going to pass over what it's potentially like to be a kid subjected to and terrorized by such a world. And let's add a (3), my adult eye in the present, the eye of someone who's known subsequent 12-year-olds and has had scads of mostly non-terrible social experiences since age 12 and who, therefore, doesn't take my 12-year-old as having the final word on either what my 12-year-old world was like then or on what the 12-year-old's, 16-year-old's, 17-year-old's, 22-year-old's São Paulo MCs world was like in 2015. So my inner 12-year-old gets to speak but doesn't get to call the shots.]
This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/389709.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.