'Let the music take you': Rio funk through the eyes of a gringa

For the Italian journalist Maurizia Tinti, Brazilian funk is more than a cultural expression of the favela residents, it is a portrait, their attempt to escape social invisibility.

Maurizia Tinti estudou o movimento do funk carioca do morro para o asfalto, das favelas para as paradas internacionais Source: Supplied

Highlights

• Funk, a musical style from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, is considered one the largest mass cultural expressions in Brazil’s musical history.
• The favelas are working-class neighbourhoods characterised by informal buildings, high population density and insecure property rights.
• Journalist Maurizia Tinti spent ten months in Brazil researching funk music as part of her international exchange course at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.

She spent ten months in Rio de Janeiro, going up and down the favela hills that surround the city, interviewing the residents, listening to their voices, their music, going to places that even locals wouldn't go. 

Maurizia Tinti was in Brazil during one of the pivotal moments of funk’s history, when the 'music of the favelas' started to descend from the hills and reach the city and urban fringes.  

The rhythm, the lyrics, the story behind the music took Maurizia, originally from the small Italian town of Faenza (58k residents), to a journey through one of Rio's deepest cultural roots.

Maurizia started her research asking herself questions. She was curious to understand how the music of the favelas, then labelled as an ‘apology to crime and sex’ was taking some of its leading DJs to prison.

Back then the music was strongly seen as “promoting crime”, when in fact, the DJs argued they were only describing daily life in the favelas.  

In 2011, the genre began to move from the favelas and 'invade' the city – trickling down from the favelas to the streets of Rio de Janeiro, moving from favela's 'bailes' to nightclubs in Rio.

Maurizia Tinti (terceira da esquerda para a direita) no Bar do Tonhao, Morro do Pinto, Rio de Janeiro Source: Supplied

“Why do musicians, funkeiros, go to prison for singing? I wondered what the music was about, what messages was conveying. That's how I decided to learn funk, dance, and the lyrics that spoke openly about sex and violence,” says Maurizia, now a content producer at SBS Italian in Melbourne.

Maurizia was at the first ‘Rio Parada Funk’, in 2011, considered the biggest funk party in the world and one of the first events to recognize the movement’s cultural strength.

Maurizia Tinti no Morro do Vidigal: dez meses no Brasil estudando o movimento funk Source: Supplied

"The ‘Rio Parada Funk ’can be thought of as an emblematic case of the tactics that funkeiros adopted to face the marginalization and criminalization that the movement itself had been suffering since the 90s’," she says.

Maurizia's research was published translated to Italian for Dada Magazine: Sex and sexuality in the contemporary funk carioca music scene later  

The funk beat, the dance and its inherent sexuality were also part of Maurizia’s research, who, in addition to learning the lyrics, also learned to dance funk.

Crianças brincam em uma pequena praça na favela Complexo do Alemão. O Complexo é uma das maiores favelas no Rio de Janeiro Source: Getty

“People say that Brazilians have a musical rhythm in their blood, but that is not all, they have an almost ritualistic attitude of letting themselves go completely to the sound of music. I love to dance, but there is always some limits in the movements, in the head. In order to dance the samba, or the funk carioca, you have to forget everything and let the sound take you, after 4 hours dancing you leave the dance floor as someone else,” explains Maurizia.

Estudos foram publicados na revista italiana de antropologia Dada Source: Supplied

“Funk is a dancing game with a partner, with whom you dance, despite the sensuality, it is a relationship of great respect. The fact that I was a gringa, an Italian, who didn't know how to dance like them, that was not a problem, it was something more like ‘we are here, we are together’.”

You can read Maurizia's dissertation on funk carioca music genre and her findings here. 

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