In Rio, millions move to the violent beat of urban funk - funk music and gang activity in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 12, 1994 | by Adam Brown

On Friday nights, teenagers from No de Janeiro's north-side slums crowd into nightclubs featuring popular `nervous dances,' where rival gangs are welcome as part of the entertainment.

About 800 gang members shadowbox and scream threats as the whirling neon lights and pounding metallic music engulf a nightclub on Rio de Janeiro's poor north side. In moments, eight bouncers rush up to separate them.

It's the start of a violent ritual - Rio's funk music scene - which draws more than a minion poor youths to the city's dance halls every week.

On this typical night, festivities start when one gang member kicks another in the head. A bouncer clubs the attacker in the stomach. The boy, gasping loudly through rotting teeth, a testament to the grinding poverty that is his life, lies on the floor under gyrating pink and yellow lights. But by now, 30 other young men have broken through security with flying kicks and open-palm punches against their rivals. Regrouping, security guards break up the row with clubs and rubber whips. Throughout the seven-hour dance, a skirmish will explode every minute or two.

The roots of the funk scene go back to the 1970s, when teens in Rio slums discovered soul music. In the last decade, however, funk music dropped its political themes for lyrics more attuned to daily life.

In this world, a disc jockey earns his fame by mastering the timing with which he scratches needle on vinyl; in fact, disc jockeys are more lionized than the musicians themselves, who set their generally untrained voices to synthesizers in makeshift studios.

Fans, or funkeiros, may pride themselves on the price tags of their running shoes, but they build their reputations on savagery. "This is normal," says one teenager standing outside the dance club in Rio's Pavuna slum. "When somebody gets violent, security kicks him out. We're just having fun."

Not everyone considers it fun. Last year, street fights among funkeiros killed at least 11 gang members and wounded thousands of others. Crossfire has killed or injured many bystanders, among them the elderly and children.

Marlboro, a famous Rio funk disc jockey, says the cause of this violence lies outside the nightclubs, where the smell of sweat gives way to the reek of sewage among the rickety houses these teenagers call home. Some teens work at menial jobs, running errands or shining shoes. Some steal, and a few sell drugs. Overall, they account for more than 30 percent of the population in Rio's 550 hillside slums. Entire families often live on monthly incomes of less than $100. "Poverty is the root of it:' Marlboro says. "These people's lives are so bad they see no opportunities. The only way they earn praise from their peers is through violence."

Friday nights they escape reality, donning baseball caps, expensive sneakers and Bermuda shorts - clothes they've either stolen or saved for a year to buy. Then they march out, en masse, toward one of the 150 funk nightclubs in town.

Most of these dances are peaceful: Armed drug dealers at the clubs discourage any violence that could attract police and public attention. But the largest dances are held in a bleak no-man's-land, where rival gangs are welcomed, apparently, as part of the entertainment.

For a cover charge of about $3, up to 5,000 people attend these "nervous dances," as they are called in funk slang. The underpaid, overworked city police officers rarely intervene in the violence; when they do, it usually results in truncheon blows and shots into the air that panic the neighborhood and provoke gangs into vandalism sprees. Last year, gangs battered about 300 city buses and damaged a number of buildings during their rampages.

The streets of middle-class Rio woke up to the danger of funk music dances early this year when a gang of 40 funkeiros barricaded a street in the Tijuca neighborhood to stop a bus on which two members of another gang were riding. The gang beat the pair senseless, then shot them dead in the middle of the street.

Around the same time, 100 funkeiros trapped 10 rivals in the middle-class suburb of Botafogo, brandishing forks with two prongs bent backward. After the attack, nine of the 10 limped away, beaten and punctured by the forks. One was unable to stand up, and the gang stoned him to death.

In response, outraged residents accused dance organizers of fueling violence to sell more tickets. Dance organizer Romulo Costa, one of the most powerful figures on the scene, has started calling the police for help. "If police increased security at the dances, the people who go only to fight would stop going, and we would have no problem," he says.

But Manoel Ribeiro, a sociologist working with poor youths, says funkeiros have no respect for police, so heavy-handed law enforcement won't work. Society, he says, must turn funk music around and use its energy constructively.