Like her colleague MC Pipokinha, Ari Falcão sounds insistent, grabbing, enticing, potentially lacerating.
Ari Falcão (prod. Christopher Luz) - Toma Xota Na Cara [flashing lights]
In addition, though, she's got a rich singing voice that's capable of great gobs of sadness.
MC Pipokinha & Ari Falcão (prod. DJ Glenner) - Sensação
MC Pipokinha & Ari Falcão (prod. DJ Glenner) - Ampulheta [flashing lights]
Have only found lyrics for "Sensação," so far. Its words don't know how to talk about anything but sex, far as I can tell; anyway, they won't acknowledge the melancholy. ("Just put it all in your wet body while I suck you," and on like that, not particularly inspiring in themselves,* at least as rendered by Google Translate.) The song's videos - there are two of them - are equally free of sorrow: a romp in the clothing store, then someone's awful idea of a sensuous photo shoot. Maybe sentiment, what I discern of it, can only exist when it's being passed over.**
In addition, Ari Falcão gets drawn into favela funk's craving for sonic experiment. This, w/ producer DJ Traka, is the barest buzzy riff and chatter clatter, and mouth rhythm, and it's still a dance party.
Ari Falcão, MC ZL (prod. DJ Traka) - E Esse Pacotão Aí [flashing lights]
But now she throws a party that resolutely won't get started. Fodder for a future Why Mucus Slacks blogpost (scroll down to (6)) to celebrate tracks that don't get on-track.
Ari Falcão, Pucca Tsunami (prod. Digdin) - Você Prefere Whisky Ou Cerveja [flashing lights]
So what's this delicately high melody doing here? - like a ray of sunrise intruding on the nightlife:
Jheny Jheny, MC Bragança & Ari Falcão (prod. DJ Alvim Mpc) - Deixa Sua Marca [flashing lights]
*A writer at the letras.mus.br site has a more hopeful view (again, it's being translated by a bot, so may lose something): "The language used is purposefully vulgar and explicit, which can be seen as a form of empowerment, where the artist [MC Pipokinha] claims the right to speak openly about her body and her desires. The collaboration with Ari Falcão adds a layer of dialogue and interaction, reinforcing the idea of reciprocity and consent in the sexual context." Btw, I assume that Pipokinha and Falcão are smart, that there's intelligence, their minds at work, in their acting out; but this doesn't necessarily mean I'm ever going to understand it. Or that I can't be disappointed by lyrics. That the site writer's terms - "empowerment," "consent" - are teacher's pets' buzzwords make them false even when they're true. I tend to associate intelligence with a sense of complicity and compromise, myself. But anyway, good luck to all these people. Regarding complicity, does telling your producer, in song, "I just want a piece of you inside me (the dick)," make this more emotionally complicated than what I thought when I called the lyrics "uninspiring" an hour ago, when I wrote the above? Inspiring or uninspiring for whom? Empowering for whom? At whose expense? Complicated for whom? How do we know? Who decides? Was the writer whom I've just called a teacher's pet empowered by what s/he/they wrote? Conforming? Both? Neither?
**[UPDATE: Found a couple more lyrics: (1) Ari does a duet with Grazi Arlequina on "Te Amo de Graça," a boring sing-song, but not about sex; quasi-interesting lyrics about not always telling the truth but not breaking up. (2) Ari features on MC Erik's "Sacada," mostly sex again, but smart words that have a strong sense of obsession, addiction, the lovers pulling each other in, while danger lurks outside, "It's midnight and the forecast is for a fight," then "The sun was rising and there was only botada, breakfast in a different way," which is witty. The music is duller, though. (Might botada be one of the derivatives of botar, "to put it in"?)]
[EDIT: Something that didn't come across to all readers, so to be clear: I mean this post as fundamentally VERY favorable commentary on Ari Falcão's music, the sort of thing that if I were to read it I'd say to myself, "I've got to pay attention to this Ari Falcão person, right now!" I especially LOVE the six tracks I embedded. Of course, my loving contains ambivalence and lots of ignorance, and maybe in the writeup the ignorance and ambivalence overwhelm the rest. That often happens with the way I write, and I don't necessarily think that's a flaw in my writing. But maybe I need to do a second post.]
Meta paragraph for Substack: "Teacher's pet" is a complicated insult, since I've always been the teacher's pet par excellence, the student who challenges the teachers not by walking out of the classroom with an attitude of dismissal but rather the one who gets the teachers to praise him for challenging them, whose continued challenge is a continued engagement. But the offense at the lyrics site - the pet, the kiss-ass, the contaminated classroom - is that when the site writers say "empowerment" and "consent" and "social resistance" (see below), those are answers that have been given in advance by the teacher. So affixing those terms to favela funk is not a product of genuine thought but rather just the ingenuity of coming up with textual "evidence" to support a predetermined answer. --Well, how do I know this, that this is what the site writer is doing? This is sure what it feels like to me, this time and many times. These post-collegiate teacher's pets are my people, in a way, even if I don't know the site writers themselves. But, as kinda-sorta one of them, I will say that their giving predetermined answers is a form of lying, and in any event, "empowering" doesn't necessarily mean "interesting." Checked the site to see if "empowerment" applies to, say, MC Teteu*** in 2019, who doesn't seem much older than 13, telling the girls that he'd be their Santa Claus, or MC Pedrinho in 2014 at age 12 going, "Kneel down, get ready, and give a good blowjob." The site does find "empowerment" in Teteu: "The lyrics play with the idea that the real Christmas gift that MC Teteu offers is his own sexuality, described in a direct and straightforward manner, which can be interpreted as a form of empowerment and expression of one's own identity"; also says that the song "can be seen" as a form of social resistance, reinterpreting a Christmas song in terms of a marginalized group's values. (My experience on American playgrounds makes me wonder how restricted those values are to "marginalized" groups.) Unfortunately, the site punts on Pedrinho, running an expurgated version of the lyrics, replacing "Ajoelha, se prepara e faz um boquete bom" with "Ajoelha se prepara e vai descendo até o chão," so the young girl's special gift is merely for the dance floor rather than for blowjobs. Anyway, I'm not trying to make some "gotcha" point - I really don't know how life works for Teteu or Pedrinho or Pipokinha or Ari Falcão, and even if I did I don't think there's a clear answer regarding oppression and empowerment, what these lyrics mean, or that I know how these songs work for their audiences. Pedrinho probably doesn't have an answer. That's why I made my post on Pedrinho and the like so deliberately conflicted - to show that what's conformity for one 12-year-old can be adventure for another, and that adventure and conformity can be simultaneously in play for the same person. And the reality for the performer might not be the reality for the kid in the world that receives the song, say a kid who wants to get out from under all his dangerous peers, the ones who like the song. But also, the teacher's pets aren't just lying, they're making a mistake. To put it in 1960 U.S. high school terms, it's as if they're saying the social structure is just the "the popular kids," with the tough kids being the social resistance - when the actual social structure, using 1960 terminology, is Socs (pronounced SOSHES, the socialites, the popular kids) vs. Hoods. More accurately, the social structure is Socs and Hoods and sometimes Beatniks, or in '80s terms it's Jocks and Burnouts and sometimes Freaks, and so on for different decades, and it's not a completely stable or motionless system. But my point is that the Rocks, Hoods, Greasers, Grits, Burnouts, Dirtbags, Jells, Skaters etc.**** are part of the social system, not an alternative to it, and they also wield power and have popularity within it. And by my analogy,***** favela funk would fit in among the Hoods, maybe with some Beatnik tendencies - though as I said, the system is not motionless, and one's location is not necessarily fixed; but to the extent there is social motion, it's not necessarily "progressive" either, and one of the Pets (i.e., one of the members of a Socs subset called the Brains or the Intellectuals or the Student Council types) conjuring the letters s-o-c-i-a-l r-e-s-i-s-t-a-n-c-e on their laptop doesn't make it so.
***Confusingly there's more than one MC Teteu, maybe even three of them, and the bio sites in English scarf up and conflate the info for all of them as if it were a single person; but I guarantee that the MC Teteu who sings "Dingo Bell Sou Seu Papai Noel" in 2019 was not born back in either 1997 or 1988, as various bios claim. And his singing is so good, so perilous, I was hoping for more than the obvious Santa joke that I found when I belatedly made my way to the translation.
****Would appreciate it if in the comments some of you'd update me on the most recent 30 years of social invective.
*****In order to make my point I'm making a deliberate "mistake" myself here, since the social system I'm lifting for my description is actually more for the inner suburbs than the city, not to mention the weird situation of school, where students are neither employers nor employees; and of course I'm giving you class terminology but not racial terminology; once we add in race it makes the system more complex, and in São Paulo we're talking about an urban area. But the point is, members of the social groups get their current power and popularity from within society, and somewhat supported by society, even if society includes class conflict and culture wars, multiple motions, people resisting and caving in to each other.
This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/392881.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.