Erotika is a strip club in Copacabana. Linox is a band with a new album. They meet over whiskey and feathers. Erotika is a strip club in the Prado Junior district, one of dozens of inferninhos (“little hells”) where you can meet prostitutes in Copacabana. Linox took over last Wednesday for the release of their new […]
Love Diplo. This is his new music video, Express Yourself, and it just hit the web. Diplo and a DJ named Marlboro brought Brazilian funk international in the mid-2000s. Check out their 2005 profile in The New Yorker and read up on the origins of The Funk Phenomenon in XLR8R, which calls Marlboro the “godfather of favela funk.” Want to […]
Happy Birthday Bob! Mariana Aydar gifted Rio with a gorgeous open-air sunset show in Arpoador, the surf section of Ipanema Beach, on Bob Marley’s birthday. (Sponsored by Matte Leão, the Coca-Cola owned unofficial iced tea of Rio de Janeiro. Sorry for the juxtaposition). Mariana Aydar is an MPB artist – that’s shorthand for Musica Popular Brasileira, […]
Rio’s new police forces may have shut down the famed funk parties in Vidigal and Rocinha, but the Sunday night funk party in Rio das Pedras has been going hard for years. Since Rio’s pacification forces (UPP) have been retaking control of strategically located and highly visible favelas like Vidigal and Rocinha from drug traffickers, they’ve also […]
Meet the kind-of Eminem of Rio’s kind-of hip-hop scene, but SO MUCH HARDER. The New York Times calls him Rio’s Bravest Gringo. His stage name, Times correspondent Simon Romero says, roughly translates to “Sir Whiteboy.” Real name: Alex Cutler, born and raised in Los Angeles, MBA from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. But to fans of […]
Sou Foda (“I’m the shit”) is the best worst music video of 2011, and with over 11 million views, one of the biggest memes to hit the Brazilian web this year. The group is called Os Avassaladores, literally “The Overwhelmers,” they’re five friends from the Vigário Geral favela in Rio, and they’re about to overwhelm your face off: […]
Get down with Gaby Amarantos, the reigning queen of technobrega, “Beyonce of Pará,” and hypercolor aficionado behind one of Rolling Stone’s most anticipated albums of 2012. The album is called Treme, she’s launching it after Carnaval in February, and Xirley is the first hit single off the album: Tecnobrega, literally “tacky techno,” is a dizzying mash-up […]
Exhibit A: BandaUó. Mickey Mouse sweater? Check. High-waisted hot pants on a transgender singer in a Hard Rock t-shirt? Check. Hawaiian print, mustaches, glitter lipstick, blood and a hypercolor ginger? Check check check check check. This is Shake de Amor, a cover of Willow Smith’s brilliant Whip My Hair, by tecnobrega band Banda Uó: Banda Uó is part of […]
Tecnobrega, literally “tacky techno,” is a mash-up of music genres and revenue models in northern Brazilian city of Belem. Ronaldo Lemos, a professor at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, breaks it down in an excerpt of the digital music documentary Good Copy Bad Copy: Chris McGowan, author of The Brazilian Sound, writes about the tecnobrega business […]
