Had a brief conversation with Columbia's OTHER totally amazing ethnomusicologist, Ana Marie Ochoa about the rise of interest in Rio's favela 'funk'. Ochoa has spent a considerable amount of time working with members of Brazil's slums, and hadn't heard that this portion of the musical output had made it hipside (via Diplo, no?) in the last year or so. I first heard favela hip hop thru the unsurprising source Luke Fishbeck, and was immediately struck by the incredible joy and desperation that was bound up in it. Is the magnificent Douglas Wolk the only person who feels "uncomfortable about feeling like the genre matters more than the artists," which goes a long way, I think, towards thinking about how kinda messed up it is to enjoy an empoverished culture's products without understanding the people and their situation in any way. Just a thought - It's easy to say that 'favela funk' sounds like Miami booty bass, because of the sound, but what about the people who make it? Sniff sniff, doesn't it sound exotic? I would love to read what a scholar of Brazilian pop music has to say about this phenomenon, not for the least because I expect that these anonymous MCs have a story worth hearing besides what gets rapped over Bittersweet Symphony (also, to hear some, follow the Douglas link, he has a link in his VVoice article).

Anyway, this gets to the whole musicologist/ethnomusicologist n' 'it's just good jams' v 'these jams mean something besides just the body rock' viewpoint that hip hop writers have been so amazing at blending (and calling to attention as important, the level of social conciousness in OG hip hop writers is astounding) for the last 15 years. It's often astounding to me that I still find writers/critics who think that it's okay to write about music as if it exists in a vacuum, as if it only performs for you in your bedroom without any flesh-bound artists, industrial processes, marketing strategies, or peer influences. The words lazy, irresponsible, elitist, disengaged come to mind - but I meet smart people who do it, and I know that the truth of writing is that deadlines must be met and we can't know it all...Alas, I wonder for the end of the omnipotent tone taken most especially when one knows little about the world behind the jewel case. That's why Douglas' piece, which begins with both 'i love the booty' and 'i know that it's not the whole story' is an amazing piece of work on the subject - he is fixing himself in space and time, giving his considerable ears and mind to something but leaving room for the fact that he isn't the end opinion, and in fact, that he's just the beginning.