Funk Power! Amplifying, Pacifying, & Legislating Brazil’s Most Popular Music

Funk Power! Amplifying, Pacifying, & Legislating Brazil’s Most Popular Music

NOTE: This lecture is in Room B544.

In July 2024, Brazil recognized funk carioca—an Afrodiasporic electronic dance music with roots in American funk, soul, and hip-hop—as a cultural symbol, despite its contested history. Alexandra Lippman shows how controlling public sound is central to sovereignty, citizenship, and the production of difference. Furthermore, the battle to control funk, from the police silencing bailes in pacified communities to laws declaring it ‘culture,’ exposes the multiple, contradictory forms of power that lie at the heart of Brazil’s democracy.

Host or Publisher Dept. of Ethnomusicology, UCLAalpert