Hispania

Brazilian president Bolsonaro has rejected the seriousness of the COVID-19 global pandemic that has gripped the world in the boreal spring of 2020, refusing calls for social distancing and quarantines to save Brazilian lives, and leaving the precariously crowded favela communities, often lacking essential resources and where state action has historically been missing or sporadically and violently imposed, vulnerable to a devastating loss of life. Favelas, however, were not left completely unattended. Along with community organizing and support, some have been given instruction, clean water, and soap by drug traffickers that have controlled favela life for some time. Notably in Rio's Rocinha favela, the Commando Vermelho cartel circulated a flyer on social media informing residents of a curfew to be enforced for the good of the community, framing their role as community safeguard and protector, using media and popular culture to tip their polemic public perception as both favela scourge and succor more in favor of the latter. [End Page 630]

The use of media by the Commando Vermelho is not unique to this current pandemic. It is part of a history that Paul Sneed uncovers, through research conducted in the 1900s and early 2000s, in his monograph on the Brazilian electronic funk music genre that emerged in Rio's favelas in the 1980s and 90s. That the same Rocinha favela and Commando Vermelho mentioned above figure prominently in Machine Gun Voices: Favela and Utopia in Brazilian Gangster Funk speaks to this longstanding history and its contemporary iterations. Sneed reveals how Rio's funk music has been both media and medium for favela drug traffickers to shore up their reputations, and how mediated popular culture may resonate as political discourse on the hardships of favela life.

Sneed gives us an intimate retelling of his years living in Rocinha and his personal journey from funk disparager to understanding the importance of the genre as a medium for social and political discourse. Through insightful analysis of key funk music songs, from lyrics to sound composition, and an ethnographic account of the funk music scene in Rocinha, he shows how funk and particularly proibidão or gangster funk were "often accused of making an apology for crime" (188). Sneed's innovative argument, however, is not to disprove such claims. Rather, he argues: "Indeed in its heyday proibidão did make an apology for crime, though what this meant was more complicated than one might expect . . . What appeared as merely an 'apology for crime' was also an implicit condemnation of the social norms in Brazil that had created high levels of class, race and gender disparity and produced a social welfare system dependent on organized crime for its very existence" (188–89). Sneed shows how funk music allowed for a "negotiation of consensus" and acted as a "staging of power of the drug traffickers," requiring "at some level the acquiescence of the population and their dependency upon the drug traffickers" (183).

Notably, to a repertoire that includes strong beats, turntable acrobatics, rapping, synthesizers, and musical cadences that borrow from forró, and freva, Sneed elaborates on a funk aesthetic informed by and in dialogue with the sounds of violence that mark favela life. The title of his monograph takes its inspiration from what Sneed calls musical gunfire. Analyzing the funk song "Rap das armas" ("Firearms Rap") by MCs Cidinho and Doca, he underscores the "striking onomatopoeia of vocalized gunfire" the MCs create imitating the sounds of a machine gun (184), and notes other examples of firearms as lyrics and music and beats turned into weapons. Sneed shows how funk compositions became a ground upon which music and the sounds of favela realities were gathered—a geographical space and aural sensation.

Sneed argues that proibidão funk "reflected the favela even as it helped to shape it, naming names, mentioning places, reporting what was going on and the rules of how one must behave to survive in the world...