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<h2 class="articleOpinion-standfirst article-standfirst">Youth music style from slums of Rio de Janeiro comes under fire for excessively sexualizing and commercializing children</h2>
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<span class="date">June 27, 2015</span>
<span class="time">5:00AM ET</span>
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by
<a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/profiles/b/donna-bowater.html" title="Donna Bowater" class="articleOpinion-byline--link">Donna Bowater</a>
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<span class="articleOpinion-byline--delimiter__ampersand">&</span>
<a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/profiles/m/priscilla-moraes.html" title="Priscilla Moraes" class="articleOpinion-byline--link">Priscilla Moraes</a>
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<p>RIO DE JANEIRO — Jonathan Costa was just 7 years old when the youth courts barred him from performing a form of the <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/genre/music-brazilian-baile-funk/id1229" target="_blank">popular Brazilian musical style funk</a> in Rio de Janeiro.</p>
<p>Thrown into his simple schoolboy hit about flying kites and playing
soccer on weekends were references to “picking up chicks with big butts”
<i>(“eu já vou pegar, um filé com popozão”),</i> which a judge deemed inappropriate.</p>
<p>The son of Rio funk royalty, Costa was considered the first MC <i>mirim,</i>
or junior MC, when he started recording funk in 1999. Looking back,
Costa — now 21 and a father of one — said it revealed double standards
in Brazil. “If I was barred from singing the phrase ‘chick with a big
butt,’ we should ban Carnival,” he said, “because Carnival is available
for all kinds of children, of all ages, and Carnival has a lot of
nudity, many women with big butts.”</p>
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<div class=""><img style="margin-right: 0px;" src="http://america.aljazeera.com/content/ajam/articles/2015/6/27/adults-fear-brazilian-teens-getting-too-funky/jcr:content/mainpar/textimage/image.adapt.990.high.brazilfunk_3.1435275216836.jpg" class="textImage-image textImage-image--4847642171436497215 " alt="Costa" height="665" width="443"></div><div class="image-captionContainer">Funk DJs, MCs and others generate about $720 million a month in revenue.<span class="image-credit">Priscilla Moraes</span></div>
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<div class="text"><p>A recent trend of more provocative child <i>funkeiros</i> has once again put <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/18/brazilian-funk-music-rio-_n_2324231.html" target="_blank">Brazil’s culture of funk</a>
under scrutiny and, with it, a legal and social tangle regarding child
protection and freedom of expression. Child performers of both sexes
have run afoul of the law for their explicitly sexual lyrics, provoking a
fierce debate over <a href="http://theculturetrip.com/south-america/brazil/articles/favela-funk-brazil-s-booming-street-music-scene/" target="_blank">sexual and commercial</a> exploitation.</p>
<p>In April public prosecutors in São Paulo launched an investigation into several junior MCs, including <a href="http://www.latina.com/lifestyle/news/young-brazilian-singer-mc-melody-controversy" target="_blank">MC Melody, an 8-year-old schoolgirl</a> whose lyrics include “To all the haters, here’s my reply, if you’re ugly or pretty, it’s fucking good to be tasty” <i>(“Para todas as recalcada / Aqui vai minha resposta / Se é bonito, ou se é feio / Mas é foda ser gostosa”).</i></p>
<p>Styled on <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/andersonantunes/2013/08/30/could-brazils-latest-music-sensation-anitta-be-a-global-superstar-in-the-making/" target="_blank">racy pop-funk singer Anitta</a>, MC Melody has amassed <a href="https://www.facebook.com/mcmelody.com.br" target="_blank">500,000 fans on Facebook</a>, where photographs showed her in suggestive poses and clothing, promoted by <a href="http://extra.globo.com/noticias/brasil/mc-melody-de-8-anos-causa-polemica-pai-defende-so-porque-ela-canta-funk-15737518.html" target="_blank">her father, MC Belinho</a>.</p>
<p>A number of boy MCs have made professional videos in which they grind with adult women, including <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71Ve0gc72qg" target="_blank">13-year-old MC Brinquedo</a>, whose lyrics are very sexually explicit. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiPcl01Xjrk" target="_blank">MC Pedrinho</a>,
13, was recently barred from performing anywhere in Brazil, because of
his lyrics, including ones about sleeping with sex workers; if he
violates the order, he faces a fine of 50,000 Brazilian reals (about
$16,100).</p>
<p>“They are children and adolescents singing and performing
inappropriate choreography for their age groups, especially the strong
erotic content and sex appeal,” said Eduardo Dias de Souza Ferreira, a
public prosecutor in São Paulo. “The practice conveyed in these videos
and lyrics exacerbate sexuality and make all the efforts of policies and
programs against STDs, AIDS and teenage pregnancy look like a joke.”</p>
<p>Prosecutors said they are investigating KL Produções, which was
behind several other junior MCs, for promoting children singing
derogatory lyrics. Neither KL Produções nor MC Belinho could be reached
for comment. MC Melody has since started performing children’s pop
instead of funk.</p><div class="insetColumn-two has-text" style="">
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<p>Born in the favelas, funk, with its throbbing <i>boom-cha-cha, boom-boom-cha,</i> has been a signature sound of Rio music and culture since the 1980s. Using a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvZhwcFJ_aw" target="_blank">repetitive drumbeat known as <i>tamborzão</i></a><i>,</i> artists began recording explicit favela anthems and achieving mainstream success with a light, or <a href="http://theculturetrip.com/south-america/brazil/articles/favela-funk-brazil-s-booming-street-music-scene/" target="_blank">censored, version for mass consumption</a>.</p>
<p>Among the subgenres are <a href="http://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/07/05/forbidden-funk-music-censorship-in-brazil-doesnt-want-you-to-be-listening-to-censorship/" target="_blank"><i>proibidão,</i> or prohibited funk</a>, which deals with drug crime and violence, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FBUgu2Vg7E" target="_blank"><i>putaria,</i> or slutty funk</a>, reflecting the sexual freedom of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rio-Baile-Funk-Favela-Booty/dp/B00082ZSSE" target="_blank">Rio’s funk parties known as <i>baile funk</i></a><i>.</i></p>
<p>Some argued that the music developed as an expression of the
realities of life in the city’s poor, violent and socially deprived
favelas, which often fell under the rule of drug gangs or militias.</p>
<p>“I would say prohibited funk emerged as a cry for help, not a cry of
encouragement,” said Costa. “It’s telling the daily life of the
community, reporting where the political system doesn’t enter, where the
police don’t go up, where there isn’t a good public hospital.”</p>
<p>But as police presence increased in many of Rio’s biggest favelas, <i>proibidão</i> was often replaced with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm5XfyQlSDQ" target="_blank"><i>ostentação,</i> or bling funk</a>,
with lyrics focusing on possessions and money. The turnaround of
successful artists was rapid, spreading faster, thanks to social media.</p>
<p>Alex Cutler, 33, who began <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/world/americas/don-blanquito-funk-star-and-rios-bravest-gringo.html" target="_blank">performing funk as Don Blanquito</a>
after moving to Rio from Los Angeles eight years ago, said the culture
of funk had changed. “It’s the music that no one can sit still to. I
don’t think it just has to do with the favela anymore,” he said. Funk
was once “the cry of the favela,” he said, but it developed some
negative aspects, including the economic exploitation of children by
adults.</p>
<p>“These kids who are 8 years old — someone is behind them and trying
to make money off them, for the most part,” he said. “I think it’s
totally ridiculous. You’re killing a childhood. And most of the time,
the message the kids are sending isn’t positive for kids their age.
These young kids are talking about gold chains and cars, but they don’t
know anything about that. If you have someone smart behind it and you’re
able to capitalize on it, then I’m not against it. But it takes away
from the purity of being a child.”</p>
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<div class="adaptiveImage section">
<div class=""><img style="margin-right: 0px;" src="http://america.aljazeera.com/content/ajam/articles/2015/6/27/adults-fear-brazilian-teens-getting-too-funky/jcr:content/mainpar/adaptiveimage/src.adapt.960.high.brazilfunk_2.1435275216836.jpg" class="" alt="Don Blanquito" height="351" width="527"></div><div class="image-captionContainer">The
genre’s appeal has spread far to the north. Funk singer and composer
Alex Cutler, aka Don Blanquito, has made a name for himself on the scene
in Rio after arriving from Los Angeles.<span class="image-credit">Courtesy Don Blanquito</span></div>
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<p>Yet there are those who suggest the recent outcry over junior MCs is
an overreaction from a hypocritically conservative country currently
considering whether to lower the age of criminal responsibility to 16.</p>
<p>Writing after the public prosecutor launched its investigation into
MC Melody and others, Adriana Facina, a social anthropologist at the
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said, “One of the great merits of
funk as art and a cultural manifestation is to bring these
contradictions that no one wants to see and that our society prefers to
face by supporting a reduction in the age of criminal responsibility. A
child dancing sensually is something looked at in horror, but minors
sent to abject and inhumane Brazilian prisons is accepted.”</p>
<p>Carlos Palombini, a musicology professor from the Federal University
of Minas Gerais and an expert in funk, said it was complex social
terrain that the child stars were emerging from, in which sexuality and
commercialism were clashing in notoriously deprived areas. “The question
is that some children are more subject than others to exposition of the
language of adult sexuality as omnipresent in TV commercials and even
in children programs — that these children [then] are forced to mature
precociously because of the social conditions they are subject to and,
more importantly, that their parents have found that the use of such
language by their children in music is a way to commercial success,” he
said.</p>
<p>He said he did not find the trend of junior MCs worrying, adding, “I
am inclined to think it’s always legitimate, since I have not yet come
across one case in which such fuss would appear justifiable. There are
much more serious matters to which the public prosecutor remains
indifferent.”</p>
<p>At <a href="http://www.fmodia.com.br/" target="_blank">FM o Dia, the radio station with Rio’s largest audience</a> and where Costa hosts a popular slot for his family’s record label, the former Prince of Funk has a different perspective.</p>
<p>He admits that as a producer, he tries to “polish” some of the
graphic content. “Today, I am totally against the kind of music some MCs
sing,” he said. “Funk is a musical sector like any other, in which
there are good things and there are also failures.”</p>
<p>“So we can’t generalize and say that we are seeing a new generation,”
he continued. “This generation already exists. It’s just that we don’t
work with it and we won’t work with it. We will work with the guys that
want to improve, who want to take funk forward, who want to bring a good
energy. We’ll work with this public.”</p><p><a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/6/27/adults-fear-brazilian-teens-getting-too-funky.html">http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/6/27/adults-fear-brazilian-teens-getting-too-funky.html</a><br></p></div></div></div></div></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div>carlos palombini<br>ph.d. dunelm<br>professor de musicologia ufmg<br>professor colaborador ppgm-unirio<br><a href="http://goo.gl/KMV98I" target="_blank">ufmg.academia.edu/CarlosPalombini</a><br></div><div><a href="http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Carlos_Palombini2" target="_blank">www.researchgate.net/profile/Carlos_Palombini2</a><br><a href="http://scholar.google.com.br/citations?user=YLmXN7AAAAAJ" target="_blank">scholar.google.com.br/citations?user=YLmXN7AAAAAJ</a><br></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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