Baile Funk: When a sound goes global

I was first introduced to Baile Funk during a friends gathering in 2017. While completing our undergraduate degree, we would get together after lectures, surrounding a speaker to decompress from the day. Coming from our respective countries across Africa, dancing, discussing and listening to the latest music would be a way of sharing experiences and memories. The 2010 funk hits were reminiscent of the genre’s bassy sound, propelled by the likes of Furacão 2000 and DJ Marlboro in the 1980s to early 2000s. When Baile Funk first hit the UK, the genre was still in its early adoption. Though it stood out from what was popular at the time, the craze around 2017 wasn’t quite as widespread as it is today. The piercing sound effects and drumming patterns that demand movement without seeking permission from the listener still characterise the genre in my body and hearing. 

Over the last four years, Baile Funk has taken the electronic scene by storm. You don’t have to look hard to find music events across major cities such as London, Berlin, Paris or New York with DJs and collectives lined up to play the genre, like DJ Ramon Sucesso’s time-space bending Beat Bolha (bubble beat) set at Primavera Sound in 2024 or TH4YS, who also played at the festival. It’s difficult to pinpoint whether this trend preceded what I’d like to call “Brazilification” (note: not to be confused with the original meaning of the term) that has concurrently been taking place in the last few years across popular culture. I’ve been using this term loosely to describe the influence Brazilian culture has had in popular culture, primarily through music, dance and fashion. Of course, this isn’t the first wave, the early 2000s are not too far from a distant memory, as the national football team’s sporting success put Brazilian culture on the map. Instead of Baile Funk, songs such as Mas Que Nada and Magalenha by Sergio Mendes accompanied this era. 

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan attributed this phenomenon as an effect of electronic media shrinking the world into a global village. Irrespective of temporal or spatial boundaries, the world remains vast yet simultaneously connected. For sounds that emerge from communities that are placed at the peripheries of society, the internet provides a democratic ground to share and distribute that culture worldwide. Jack Self similarly notes the ongoing result of the internet and age of information on cultural production in his essay for 032c. Prior to instant communication, he notes, there was no such thing as the contemporary. What once distinguished a specific location is now ubiquitous.

Baile Funk’s history is a complicated one, extending beyond what we typically associate with its characteristic three-kick (Tamborzão) drum beat or viral Passinho dance. Behind the hypnotic combination of Afro-Brazilian rhythms and sampling of popular music from North America, the backdrop of Baile Funk is a never-ending war between police and marginalised communities living in the favelas. Next to the idyllic landscape that entices a life of ease in Rio’s Zona Sul or the cityscape in São Paulo that promises an opportune future, there’s another side that often goes unseen but is heard through the music. Baile Funk is protest music, defying laws of restriction enforced by the state. 

"If your party is at midnight, and you’re playing house music, the police won’t go there to stop it –– it only happens when it’s funk," says D.Silvestre, a DJ and music producer who perceives himself as an outsider of the genre as well as the city of São Paulo. Born in Rondônia, a state in the Northeast of Brazil, his musical background is far different from the music he is making today: a new iteration of the genre characterised by glitchy textures and distorted bass lines. 

“Both [Grime and Baile Funk] movements started from people wanting to express their struggle, the anger that they had and how unsatisfied they were with the government,” says Peroli, a music curator and founder of collective Perifa no Toque, which began as a protest to the criminalisation of funk back in 2019. “At that time, the only way to listen to the genre was by going to the actual Baile Funk street parties because we were not allowed to play it in most of the clubs.” She also remembers the early 2000s when artists would use their music to express criticism and frustrations towards the Brazilian government. Furacão 2000 was one of the main events at the time documenting the early careers of musicians such as Anitta, Valesca Popozuda and Tati Quebra Barraco.

While the state and police force may impose strict laws to restrict noise levels, the internet has provided a space where MCs and DJs can share the music and footage from the bailes freely. The internet offers an environment where space can be somewhat governed by the people rather than enforced by those in power. Whether you’re playing Singeli in Tanzania, a Balani Show in Mali, Gqom in Durban, or Baile Funk in a Brazilian city, permission isn’t needed for your sound to be heard on the other side of the world. For genres such as Baile Funk, where it is oftentimes criminalised, the digital world is grounds where such rules can be broken, or at the very least, tested. People exercise freedom they aren’t always afforded in real life to play music whenever they want and at whatever volume they wish. On platforms such as TikTok and SoundCloud, the rawest form of funk gets shared. To cite Legacy Russell, the internet in this instance creates an Other-space beyond the status quo.