VA - Rio Baile Funk: More Favela Booty Beats (2006)

When jungle announced "I bring you the future," the music's knowing quality rendering in advance all critical pronouncements slightly redundant. Most of the time, though, the future in music is a trick of perspective. Like the hidden shape in a magic eye picture, it emerges suddenly under the right conditions, made of the same material as the music had been before, but somehow expressing a different topography. And then, just as suddenly, you can't see it anymore.

Could Brazil's funk carioca express the same message, and would we (know how to) listen for it if it did? I don't speak Portuguese and you probably don't either, but something about the unambiguously lustful tone of its MCs suggests that temporal dislocation is the last thing on their minds. But what makes funk carioca in 2007-- once we've moved on from the genre-hopping thrill of simply knowing what it sounds like, once we've adjusted to the sad realization that its biggest impact on Western pop was probably in providing the ballast for Gwen Stefani's "Wind It Up"-- such an urgent proposition is precisely this strangely disconcerting quality: Listening to Rio Baile Funk: More Favela Booty Beats, you can hear snatches of a potential future emerging from the sedimented pop-culture muck of the past.

The first of Essay Recordings' Rio Baile Funk compilations portrayed funk as uncomplicated, pop-focused party music, similar to dancehall and soca at their most friendly. Simple electro beats gave way to brief flares of sampled Afro-Brazilian percussion, MCs chanted earworm vocal hooks, and melodies were ripped shamelessly from the annals of popular music. Two years on, the music's fundamental ingredients are unchanged, but this brilliant sequel feels like an entirely different proposition. With few memorable songs or choruses, More Favela Booty Beats is undoubtedly less of a pop phenomenon than its predecessor, but it's much better dance music: the grooves are tighter, denser, and more heavily invested in exploiting the mind-bending qualities of syncopation inherent in the collision between Afro-Brazilian percussion and digital production. Less content than before to be mistaken for a simple composite of old school electro and Brazilian MCs, it's not so much that funk has gotten more subtle or sophisticated (if anything the sound is even baser) but rather that it's now clearly and resolutely its own beast, drawing from a host of influences but in thrall to none of them.