Noite De Crime (DJ Wesley Gonzaga, Artist Of The Year, 2021)

[Note to my Substack subscribers: Many of my Substack posts will, like this one, be a crosspost from my Dreamwidth. But as a reward for letting me clutter your inbox, I will include at the end a paragraph of special Substack-only content, something meta or admin or about process. Also, speaking of admin, I think the Queen's coronation was the last time I didn't fix a typo or change wording or add a footnote after first hitting submit, so it's always useful to check out the actual Substack post rather than just the email. Is also useful to check out the Dreamwidth post for comments that I don't double-post here. Also, Dreamwidth, unlike Substack, allows for tags, which I tend to use as comic relief. And for archivists, my Dreamwidth/LJ goes back to 2006.]

DJ Wesley Gonzaga's "Sarra Nela Com Fuzil" may be the greatest example I've got of a particular strain of funk carioca, the tendency to subordinate or delete the bass entirely and make the rhythm come down from the top, voices or clave or handclaps or mouth farts or beeps or screeches or samples or squiggles. 2021 might turn out to have been the peak year for this - the hot upper register - prior to everything giving way to the deep rural beats from the north or the reverberating trap thuds from the even farther north.

But this isn't my post – if the post ever comes – on that tendency. I may not have a lot more to say about it than the phrase "rhythm comes down from the top," actually.*

—Dave's already written this better than I'll be able to: "For a good stretch this song is propelled primarily by a gun being cocked and a synth piano line that sounds like what happens when you're about to change the battery in your smoke detector and it chirps right in your face. And it fucking rocks." And, about baile funk in general: "Sounds and timbres that don't belong in songs at all that somehow *anchor* them, verses shouted in from the back of the room that still take the spotlight, horrible noise that can somehow stay horrible even as it makes you want to dance." (Read his full comment here.)

When "Sarra Nela Com Fuzil" was getting drubbed in the 2021 People's Pop Poll, and LZM wrote, "I like the rawness but I still think it could do with better mixing,"** I countered with "This does tap something primal. But I think it's a pretty well-honed aesthetic, esp. how Gonzaga uses one set of piercing chirps as the architecture, then doubles in with another set."

Jake Linford, who's 20 years younger than I am, delighted me with this complaint:

Anyhow, just remember, when someone talks about Wesley Gonzaga's screaming ear-shattering laser fire, on the one hand, and someone talks about Wesley Gonzaga's severe but serene sonic architecture, on the other, we're talking about the exact same notes.

So, "rhythm comes down from the top," "piercing," "architectural severity."

BUT here's a Gonzaga track that's even more challenging, DJ Wesley Gonzaga & MC Laranjinha "Noite De Crime," because of how it puts the severity to the test.

The potent malignant piercing electronic smoke-alarm screech is the Roman arch that sits authoritatively atop everything, defining the space for the gruffness and arrogance below. But here Wesley Gonzaga's letting the clutter splatter up from underneath: an attention-grabbing rap and a seemingly out-of-control silly sample.

MC Laranjinha has a great squirrelly snaky voice that he usually wastes on tough-guy posturing but here he's the perfect squirting darting sweating punctuating human element amidst the sample and the squeals and the scratches.

As for the sample, each year "Call Me Maybe" has seemed ever more vanilla in relation to the love it receives but here it's so much at odds with the rest that it feels more like sweet-sounding radio static, or like the stray hair that got in the milkshake.

I sometimes think of these funk producers as like Monet working away on his haystacks, catching how the haystacks look in one light, the next song being a variation in another light, or another dark, and the next is another – so this time out, Gonzaga is Monet going to sand and sleet but the haystacks still shimmer.

*Yes, May '23 is a bit late for my '21 Artist Of The Year post, but then I've not only yet to do my actual 2021 singles list and year-end writeup, I've yet to do 2018, 2019, 2020, or 2022 either. I hope this post cracks the dam a bit.

**

Meta paragraph for Substack readers: My practice was to do my Artist Of The Year post in June of the following year, so this is 11 months late, which – as the first footnote above indicates – is not so bad, for me. Anyhow, one of the mental blocks against getting this written was my struggle with how to best use pejoratives as praise words – they risk coming out too cutesy or too posturing or both (e.g. this tweet, which I nonetheless liked enough to put as my pinned tweet for about a year). Nonetheless, pejoratives for praise, along with scare quotes and various ironies, are absolutely essential, not just to express wild ambivalences but also to wrestle with the contamination of language, the way it's saturated with built-in social hierarchies – pejoratives as praise being a way of inverting or sidestepping the hierarchies or implying counter-hierarchies or drawing on competing hierarchies and jailhouse aristocracies as the various stools one is endeavoring to fall between - while still spraying one's own hierarchical value judgments as one tumbles. There's Dylan's "She knows there's no success like failure, and that failure's no success at all," embracing your failure and being discontented with it too, and Meltzer's "Jean Tinguely's self-destroying machines have sometimes not worked and have thus failed to fail." (The Aesthetics Of Rock, p. 8.) And sometimes it's just fun.

MC Pipokinha awaits.

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/388563.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.