Funk-Music Doc Favela On Blast Available on Itunes!

The documentary Favela on Blast, directed by DJ Diplo and Leandro HBL, is now available on ITunes.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE FILM ON ITUNES!

Documenting the vibrant and innovative musical subculture that has emerged in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, this film tells the story of Baile Funk through its producers, dancers, parties, mcs and singers. It’s both an engrossing journey through the many pieces that have shaped this music, and also a telling portrait of present day life in the favelas.

The text below is a reprinted review of the film, written by reviewer Shaun Frentner.

FAVELA ON BLAST!
A Review by Shaun Frentner

DJ, music producer and filmmaker Diplo

Cinema, it seems, has never been enough.

During their initial years as a muted medium, motion pictures were a globe-gamboling unicorn magically uniting the planet through their gnostic, prelapsarian eschewment of language proper. Whether you were a propagandist hungry to disseminate party lines to the workers (or fascists) of the world, an avant-gardist glassily eying a means of non-verbal transcendence, or an opportunist lusting for a product that would wash in every quadrant of the newly-knotted web of high-speed transnational commerce, the universalism of the movies was an unprecedented, uncharted goldmine. And yet even before the advent of talkies, cinema has always been involved in a frankly co-dependent relationship with music, often deferring to the elder art form as the true standard-bearer of global understanding. I don’t just mean the virtual tyranny of the soundtrack in fiction film, I’m also talking about the perennial presentation of music as THE panacea at the level of content.

There’s never been a shortage of self-congratulatory onanism celebrating the “magic of the movies,” but when the world’s cameras zero in on the hope of the people, we’re afforded anything from Busby Berkley’s penniless Depression-era warblers putting on a show to the adamant drumming of a noble indigent tribe toppling a dictatorship through timeless rhythms. These days, it seems, everyone’s looking for “this year’s Amandla”. Brazil – a country for whom music has always served as a rallying flag as well a passport – is by no means the exception. As a recent spate of exports bears witness, the mythical “power of music” remains hard currency in Brazilian cinema.

Consider, for example, The Children’s Orchestra (dir Paulo Thiago) and Contratempo (dir. Mini Kerti and Malu Mader), two consanguine indies that pick from the same chestnut tree, hailing the positive influence of music lessons upon Brazil’s young and underprivileged. In Orchestra, a fictionalized account of impassioned orchestra teacher “Mozart” Viera, bringing music to the masses is a matter of life and scandal, if not death. Its story is simple and putatively inspiring: a near obsessive devotee of classical music founds a humble conservatory for teenagers, fighting tooth and nail along the way against a corrupt mayoral machine that sees the locally beloved Pied Piper-like Viera as a potential rabble rouser. Although the starry-eyed conductor has no intention of using his small-town celebrity as grounds for a political platform, the unctuously manipulative burgermeister and his minions pin a staged kidnapping/molestation charge on the naïve Mozart.

However, petty charlatanism is no match for music, and the truth descends upon the villains like a Wagnerian string section: “Art will always win the battle,” pronounces the vindicated Mozart. And if this all sounds a bit too black and white, it is: the world of The Children’s Orchestra is one in which life-pledges are made to dying grandfathers, and the nefariousness of villains is in direct proportion to the hero’s well intentions. (“The authors of this crime must be vanquished!” decries Murilo Rosa as Mozart with raised fingers filled with indignation, fists full of ham)

Dramaturgical weaknesses aside, The Children’s Orchestra is also a film whose politics of music are as problematically naïve as they are earnest (and perhaps perforce of this comes the piece’s overall heartfelt clunkiness). On the one hand, Brazil’s government historically has in fact suppressed music in part because of its demonstrable power to unite, and the film does minimally reflect – or at least refract – that reality. On the other hand, that the mission of Viera’s “People’s Music Foundation” is restricted to the dissemination of the Western European canon is never remarked upon, neither by the film’s characters or by its authors. Where is the samba in all this, or even the Euro-tinged mongrel bossa nova, whose finest composers stand beside Mahler or Bartok? Where, in short, is “the people’s music?”

In the The Children’s Orchestra, the transcendent purity of music for its own sake comes only from dead white men, whose majesty can only be reflected in countless, frontally staged tracking shots of glassy-eyed Brazilians who may as well be witnessing an alien landing in a Spielberg flick. For all its lauding of music’s vitality, the film itself lacks any real musicality, as it uses the art form as an almost icy symbol rather than as an invigorating partner in rhythm and emotion – and all done with that dutiful deference to the Romantic myth of Western genius. Ultimately a tale of a man possessed with bringing Beethoven and Bach to the jungle, The Children’s Orchestra feels like a bizarre marriage of Stand and Deliver and Fitzcarraldo.

The fortuitously titled Contratempo could not be a better counterpoint to Orchestra, as the juxtaposition further shores up the weaknesses of the fictional piece. A modest documentary co-helmed by famed Brazilian soap star Malu Mader, Contratempo is an episodic, leisurely paced look at a round-up of musically gifted teens from the village of Villa Lobhinos. Fame it’s not, however: the filmmakers’ unobtrusive, candid one-on-one style and loose narrative structure make this a statelier, and ultimately more “real” cousin of a “reality” TV program. (Or is that what we used to call “direct cinema?”) Similar to the foundation built by Mozart Viera, a project launched in 2006 has for several years nurtured the passions of young and talented Brazilians, many from the poor side of town. Indeed, unlike Orchestra, this documentary makes no bones about the social function of music in this context. Letting their subjects speak for themselves, Kerti and Mader dramatize how for these kids, it is often a case of forging guns into trumpets and cavaquinhos. Tales of siblings lost to gang wars, discussions of tragedies like the infamous Bus 174 hijacking, and so forth catapult the “power of music” dogma through the precious crystal spheres that sterilely surround music in Orchestra.

What comes through so crucially in Contratempo is that playing music is not just an arbitrary safe-haven from the favelas but something that intrinsically makes life worth living. In one scene, a seemingly streetwise boy recalls how his devotion to horn-playing began upon his first exposure to Miles Davis, an experience that “covered him with goosebumps.” We can hear in his voice that this pleasant malady has not left him. Elsewhere, intermittent rehearsal scenes capture that blend of stoicism and tomfoolery born when young artists form a creative community. For some, music holds some promise as a true deliverer from varying degrees of poverty, as demonstrated in a falsely climactic competition in New York, a potential make-it-or-break-it moment for the career-minded members of the group. True, there are a few crestfallen hopefuls visibly dismayed when the group fails to place in the contest, but for most the music seems to be its own reward, a home in itself. And what a polyphonic home it is: while a number of Contratempo’s players are swept away in the raptures of Wagner and yes, Mozart, the breadth of styles and international composers embraced by the students is a guileless testimony to the truly cosmopolitan essence of Brazil’s “people’s music.” Jobim’s bossa nova evergreen “The Girl from Ipanema” is attacked with the sloppy skronkiness that American free-jazz giant Archie Shepp lent to the piece in the 70s, while elsewhere an Edu Lobo tune is transformed into a jaunty, almost muzaky venture that wouldn’t be out of place in an early 60s Hollywood sex comedy. Contratempo never once preaches multiculturalism, it simply records it in action.

A fascinating hybrid of music and culture that receives passing mention in Contratempo is taken on full-throttle in another doc, Favela on Blast: the Brazilian “funk ball.” To the uninitiated, this might sound like some kind of R&B sock-hop, while in fact the funk ball is a Brazilian inflection of perhaps the most globally contagious subculture of the past few decades, rave. On the one hand, rave is never that different wherever it may crop up: as in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere Brazil’s scene is a quasi-underground world of sweaty, rump-shaking bacchanalians held in thrall to an all-night supply of beats, breaks, synth-stabs, MCs, and pirated samples. The greater funk/rave community is always quick to celebrate itself as a supportive family, yet paradoxically (or at least hypocritically) there are inevitable tensions between “big man” DJs and even those self-proclaimed “superstars” of the dance floor. Nevertheless, Favela on Blast – directed by Leandro Wbl and Wesley Pentz – demonstrates the unique spin Brazil has given to the culture, shedding new insight onto a truly worldwide phenomenon along the way.

For those unfamiliar with the complex interrelationship of the modern dance culture of which Brazilian funk is a part, some context is needed. Although every dance community often embraces a multitude of electronic genres (techno, house, trance, etc.), usually one sound defines the flavor and attitude of the scene. As recounted in Favela by a colorful ensemble of funk’s denizens, the hype began in the late 90s when a sub-woofer-heavy, hyper-sexualized dance beat called Miami bass filtered in from the U.S., albeit about a decade after the sound had reached its stateside acme. (While not a particularly inspiring musician, the current mainstream smash Pitbull provides a decent approximation of the Miami bass vibe.) Perfectly following the arc of the dance culture bildungsroman, a gaggle of self-taught teenagers mastered the art of mixing and began to integrate extant Brazilian rhythms into the Miami sound, notably the infectious drumlines of samba. Interestingly, the coupling of samba’s insistent percussion with heavy electronic bass – along with frequently pornographic lyrics – resulted in sounds nearly identical to what American ravers call ghetto-tech and booty house, products of Chicago and Detroit. Great minds and bodies do shake alike?

The transcontinental cross-pollination at the level of music alone makes Favela On Blast required viewing for beat scholars – I myself have followed the umbrella supergenre of “electronica” across three decades and find the world of funk balls both familiar and eye-poppingly new. The innovative use of live mixing-board percussion, for example, is virtually unseen even among the vanguard of American laptop virtuosos. Imagine hearing the frenzy of a drummer like Art Blakey being produced by a boy frantically hunting-and pecking at an innocuous, button-laden metal box and you get the idea. If you are one of those people who think using computers to make live music is an oxymoron, the ground-zero, behind the decks-and-effects footage in Favela will at the very least prompt a serious rethink. However, it’s the panoramic view given to the contradictory, politically explosive milieu that funk embodies which broadens the relevance of this movie beyond bleep-n-bass junkies.

Lest you think we’ve abandoned the “power of music” through-line, Favela on Blast trumps Contratempo in its vaunting of funk as a force to “keep kids off the streets.” Yet this formulation isn’t entirely true: in a sense, funk in particular and rave in general often keeps kids on the streets. Underground dance culture is a perniciously sketchy affair, often facilitated in quasi-legal venues and – don’t anyone fool you – almost always involves some form of drug use (a topic on whose Favela’s lips are moderately sealed). What makes funk different is that the music helps “take back the streets,” giving these kids a sense of togetherness in the face of bleak isolation. Even if the filmmakers possibly have sanitized funk by omitting an occasional gangland contretemps, the overall positivity of the culture is irrefutable, palpable – and in my opinion a greater force for coherent social change than cloistering a few prodigious violinists from the slums into a music conservatory.

This is not to say funk is all sunshine and glowsticks. As with Miami bass, ghetto tech, booty house, and – perhaps the lyrical pangenitor of all of the above – hip-hop, the sexual politics of funk are often, quite frankly, wack. A hefty share of funk’s libretto never strays far from that tired menagerie of bitches, pimp-daddies, hos, and of course that indispensible buffoon, the faggot (in gangsta rap, still a bitch by any name). You can dredge up same tired old defenses: “you don’t know what ‘these people’ have experienced; “yeah, but you gotta respect his flow;” “yeah but there ARE bitches, son!” and so forth, but in the end the whole deal just sucks. At the same time, there is something about funk that sets it apart from this offensive morass. True, the “female empowerment” we see in funk seems limited to female MCs verbally cat-fighting with same-sex rivals, bigging up their sexual prowess, and belittling the lack thereof among their male suitors. And yes, funk balls’ stages are replete with nominally clothed dancers hired for the purpose of vibrating their proffered asses with the speed and precision of a home appliance (in Chicago, these are called “booty hos”). Nevertheless, despite these conventions, the overall culture of funk-lovers comes off as strangely liberated. Rigid gender roles are plentiful, but absent is the sense of oppression, domination, and outright hatred toward women that makes so much contemporary hip-hop complete and utter shit. Funk is still about sex – and what’s wrong with that? – but even with its flaws, the prevailing good-natured spirit of funk prevents us from wanting to take a shower when it’s all over.

Such politics of funk are not lost on the filmmakers by any means – and its politics are not limited to the realm of the symptom, either. Scenes in which beatific, pre-tween street urchins joyously parrot ass-and-titties funk anthems – disturbingly charming to begin with – are deftly intercut with gnarled samba poets chanting chastened acapella funk-eulogies to the favela’s benighted. The overdetermined, clashing values of funk and “people’s music” are clearly seen by Favela’s directors, and equally important, to the purveyors of funk itself. One interviewed funk DJ, for example, responds to the ubiquitous accusation that funk balls have taken the “poetry” out of Brazilian popular music: “these critics expect poetry to be about golden sunsets rising over the hills, but what does that have to do with our lives?” In spite of, because of, all its problems, funk is the popular poetry of contemporary Brazil, precisely because it has the elasticity to unite and the honesty to face, if not accept, the world it reflects. As David Bowie said, “these children that you spit on are quite aware of what they’re going through.” As Favela on Blast makes so clear, the citizens of funk balls are the real children’s orchestra.