São Paulo’s Virada Cultural, a 24-hour mega-party featuring more than 900 acts, put the best and the worst of São Paulo on display last weekend. Despite headlines dominated by crime, Claire Rigby had a great time, alongside millions of others, and argues that these kinds of events should be a source of pride for the city.

By Claire Rigby

Headlines – “DEATHS, ROBBERIES AND MASS MUGGINGS MAR THE VIRADA CULTURAL” – “DEATHS AND MASS MUGGINGS: CULTURE LOSES OUT TO VIOLENCE” – “VIRADA OF THE MASS MUGGING” 

São Paulo’s population, waking up after another Virada Cultural, the city’s annual 24-hour cultural marathon, could be forgiven for shuddering with horror at São Paulo’s newspapers over their Monday morning coffee. But for millions of people who attended the festival downtown, the papers seemed to be talking about a parallel event. Not that the robberies, injuries, and even the shooting and death of a young man who ran after the thief who had taken his phone, didn’t take place.

They did; and there was definite tension in the air at times, especially in the early hours, when the mix of thousands of revelers, untold gallons of alcohol, and the carnavalesque all-night party – not to mention the smouldering social tensions that are the mark of every major city, not least São Paulo – took their toll.

But alongside the undoubtedly bad news, there was precious little good news to be read about the Virada Cultural (‘Cultural All-Nighter’), an event that brought an estimated total of 4 million people onto the streets over the course of 24 hours, starting at 6pm on the night of Saturday 20 May. Filling the streets of SP’s dilapidated, occasionally lovely Centro with music, art, dance and theatre, and with hundreds of official food stalls and unofficial beer-sellers, the ninth annual Virada set audiences washing up and down the town to watch shows by thousands of musicians – there were some 900 acts spread across 120 locations – and dancing through the night to everything from techno to samba, lambada and funk carioca.

Art projections filled the Vale de Anhangabaú, where artists and collectives had created 15 installations, including a bridge by BijaRi whose LED lighting glowed in response to the people crossing the valley on it. An art/activist installation Conjunto Vazio, by the collective CoLaboratório, projected Batcave-like lightning flashes onto empty buildings all over town, and under the Viaduto do Chá, grown men and women screamed in excitement as they flew through the air on immense swings attached to the viaduct overhead. Street performers, dancers and theatre companies attracted unlikely, ragtag audiences to their pop-up shows, roping in bystanders and parading them up and down the valley; and George Clinton and P. Funk played to a rapt crowd at 3am, as a tango orchestra struck up 500 metres away at a lonely Estação da Luz. The mesmerizing Gal Costa played a difficult, moving set of new music from her album Recanto; and as Sunday wore on, Racionais MCs, Brazil’s most powerful, important rap group, played a cathartic, euphoric, packed set, also featuring an impassioned speech by the group’s much revered leader, Mano Brown, in which he criticized crime during the event. The band’s previous appearance at the Virada, in 2007, had ended in confrontations between military police and fans that turned to rioting.

We walked the streets for most of the night and again on Sunday afternoon, joining audiences at stages all over the region, home to some of São Paulo’s most historic buildings, and criss-crossing the streets from one show to another, aided (if the light was good enough, and shining at the right angle), by the black, hard-to-read Virada maps and programmes, distributed in their thousands and displayed on structures erected at street corners. The city’s ubiquitous columns of cars were nowhere to be seen, and even some of the roughest of Centro’s troubled streets, which are also home to Cracolândia, an itinerant, crack-riddled no-man’s land, were busy with people strolling from place to place.

None of this is to pretend that all was well with the world at the Virada: it wasn’t. São Paulo is an immense, pressurised megacity with more social injustice and indeed, more rigidly delineated class segregation, than most. It also has a chronic crime and violence problem every night of the week. There’s no doubt about it: assorted pickpockets and muggers were having their own mini-festival of crime at the Virada, while at least one immense band of forty thieves organized a series of arrastões – mass muggings in which individuals or sections of the crowd are surrounded, robbed, and attacked if they resist. I saw a scuffle break out as we passed along Avenida Rio Branco around 3am; and I heard a pop-pop-pop, and saw people running, at what might or might not have been gunshots around the same time, a hundred yards on. (I don’t think it was gunshot, despite the stampede, but I note it here as a possibility.)

And yet as frightening as the contact with crime, violence and sheer drunken disorderliness must have been for anyone on the receiving end of it, it’s what sometimes happens at mass events, especially when mixed with alcohol – and especially when they bring haves and have-nots together in such a sudden, unaccustomed manner.

Super-sized street events always attract the kind of people who disrupt, fight and rob, even in much safer cities. It happens at London’s Notting Hill Carnival, and even, as Vincent Bevins, editor of this blog, points out, at San Francisco’s Gay Pride Parade.São Paulo, arguably, needs more Viradas, and more events like it – it’s what a new surge of street festivals is all about, most recently the Anhangabaú da Feliz Cidade festival that took place in May, as a kind of mini-precursor to the Virada. For every citizen who lost a phone to the thieves (even Senator Eduardo Suplicy wasn’t immune, taking to the stage before Saturday’s opening show by MPB queen Daniela Mercury to ask for his stolen credit cards and ID cards back – then patting his pockets to find his phone also missing) there were hundreds of thousands whose Viradas went off without incident.

I was struck by the overwhelmingly negative press coverage of what was in many ways, and for hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, a successful, enjoyable event. In a telling example of the press’s choice of focus, one headline in the newspaper Agora, a populist broadsheet, read MAYOR HADDAD ADMITS HE NEVER EXPECTED SO MUCH VIOLENCE, over a story in which the mayor, in office since January, also said, ‘From Friday through to Saturday the register of violent crime was identical to that from Saturday to Sunday’. Hardly inspiring words on the city’s problems, but a dash of perspective, albeit a sobering one, on Monday morning’s seemingly hysterical headlines. Describing the smooth running of the Virada’s 900 shows, with just two delayed or with other problems, the mayor went on, ‘What were of most concern was the question of [public] safety and the incidents that occurred above all between 2am and 6am. We had more reports than we’d predicted, but nothing out of the ordinary in an event with almost 4 million people.’

It’s tough to know what the media coverage means. Some have suggested the media may have been especially hard on the new PT mayor. Infographics showing levels of crime and violence at previous editions of the Virada seem to show more or less similar results. But beyond that, a whole tier of the city’s society (the same tier, in the main, who would never dream of attending a mass event attracting huge swathes of people from the city’s poor periphery, as the Virada does) may well have been  put off attending not only the Virada, but all manner of street celebrations and festivals – a growing and much celebrated tendency in São Paulo. Violence and crime are chronic problems. But they’re not a reason to abandon the streets any more than SP’s wealthy already have done. Events or even venues at which the classes mix are extremely few and far between in SP, as the city’s affluent areas and the vast periphery that surrounds them run on parallel tracks, in parallel realities. Moments like the Virada, filing the streets with people, huddled at the crossroads in the patchy streetlight, trying to make out what it says on the map, ought to be celebrated.

Brash Funk Carioca emerged in the 1990s from the illegal underworld of Rio’s favelas. Now, in a nod to North American rap traditions and Brazil’s new economic moment, a group of kids in São Paulo has hit it big using the music to celebrate conspicuous consumption.

By Dom Phillips

Wearing gold chains and baseball caps, two young men drive Lamborghinis past palm trees and up the driveway of a huge, white mansion. A bugle sounds. And the beats begin.

As does a luxurious party, in which Brazilian rappers Backdi and Bio G3 perform surrounded by women in short, figure-hugging outfits, while sipping champagne, gambling, and smoking big cigars.

This is the new video for their song ‘Vem Com Os Trutas’ – literally, ‘Come With The Trouts’, but ‘trout’ here is street slang for friends. Published on March 18, the clip has already been seen over 70,000 times on youtube.

And its depiction of an expensive lifestyle in which conspicuous consumption reigns supreme is another sign of how much one type of carioca funk, Brazil’s distinctive and hugely-popular, bass-driven hip hop dance music, has changed.

This is funk de ostentação, or ‘ostentation funk’, and it is, says Bio G3, made for a socially-mobile Brazil. “People are doing well. They stopped complaining,” Bio G3 – Cleber Alves, 29 – told From Brazil.

“A champagne já tá no gelo e as gatas tão na sofa,” the pair chant in the track: “The champagne is already on ice and the gatas (literally cats, but slang for hot girls) on the sofa.”

In one scene, Bio G3 gently kisses the enormous silver cross hanging on a pendant around his neck in the mansion’s bathrooms while a glamorous blonde watches entranced – though whether that’s by the rapper or the jewellery is, perhaps deliberately, left ambiguous.

Ostentation funk is last year’s hit, and there are hundreds of videos like this, in which expensive champagne is lovingly poured (close-up on the label); motorbikes and jet-skis are ridden; and pool parties are packed with curvy girls in bikinis dancing lasciviously.

The blue 100 real notes (worth $49) – the highest denomination in Brazil – feature heavily. This video by MC Guime, called ‘Plaque de 100’ (100 Plaque) has been seen 23 million times. In it, he flaunts a R$100 note with his face on it.

In this video for his track ‘É Fluxo’ (It’s Flow), São Paulo MC Nego Blue parties on his own private plane.

A cigar is lit with a R$100 note in this video for the track ‘Os Invejosos Vêm’ (The Envious Come) by Rio artist Menor de Chapa.

Carioca funk, or just funk, as the sound is often known, has been around for decades in various forms. In its current incarnation, as a brash, confrontational ghetto music, since at least the late 1990s. The sound is characterised by clattering, electronic beats, over which rappers, or MCs, deliver rhymes about sex, violence and life on the sharper end of Brazilian society.

“Rap, for Black America, is like our CNN,” Public Enemy vocalist Chuck D once remarked. As Brazilian hip hop is a much more specialist sound, concerned more with protest – a “manifesto”, as Bio G3 calls it – it is funk that fulfils this role in the country. Although, musically, the sound has more in common with the Miami Bass that inspired it, or with dancehall reggae.

Funk has long been associated with the Rio de Janeiro favelas it came from. But with funk de ostentação and its glorification of the conspicuous consumption that is so rife in Brazil, São Paulo seems to have stolen Rio’s funk thunder.

In ‘Vem Com Os Trutas’, Backdi and Bio G3 chant:

“São Paulo não é bagunça tem que manter o respeito/é selva da pedra, terra da garoa,” they add. “São Paulo is not a mess, it has to maintain respect/it’s the stone jungle, the land of drizzle.”

The city’s legendary work ethic even gets a mention when the rappers declare: “Nos temos dispozição de matar um leão por dia” – literally, they are ready to kill a lion every day, a phrase often used by entrepreneurs and workers to describe meeting the challenges of the working day.

“Consumption in São Paulo is bigger, the city is bigger,” said Bio G3. “Today, funk in Brazil is São Paulo, no doubt.”

This is all a long way from funk’s beginnings at illegal parties, or bailes, often run by drug gangs deep in Rio favelas where police rarely trod. British journalist Alex Bellos wrote about the scene in the magazine Mixmag in 2001, and returned to the subject in 2005 in this excellent Observer Music Monthly piece.

This Brazilian documentary Favela On Blast is one of a number of films made about the genre.

Initially despised by the Brazilian upper classes, funk soon took acquired a certain cachet: dangerous, edgy, ghetto. In 2005, it was even rather daringly played at the Christmas party of a famous, and very mainstream Brazilian television presenter I attended. Now it’s heard all over Brazil.

Wth ostentation funk, the style seems to have come full circle: Backdi and Bio G3 also have a song called ‘Classe A’, the term for the highest-income segment of Brazilian society. And there is even a documentary about ostentation funk.

Bio G3 used to do hip hop, but switched to funk eight years ago because he saw he could “reach a bigger public”. He claims to have invented ostentation funk in 2008 with an ode to his expensive sunglasses called ‘Bonde de Ju Ju’. But it is over the last 12 months that the style has caught fire.

“I didn’t imagine the impact it would have,” he said. “It became gigantic, it became mass, so today we represent this category.”

Brazil too has changed since funk first emerged from Rio’s favelas. Perhaps the music needed to change with it. As Vincent Bevins noted in his piece about class last week, around 40 million Brazilians rose out of poverty over the last decade – many of them into what is usually called classe C – or class C.

This is usually described as a new middle class. Though it could be argued that class C resembles more the British working class of the 1960s and 70s, as they bought their first washing machines, colour televisions and foreign holidays.

It is class c that drives Brazilian consumption, which in many ways drives the economy. As a result, the upper A and B classes have had to become used to the sight of Brazil’s nouveau riche on flights and in restaurants that were formerly reserved for the rich. A new reality they frequently complain about.

And while the Brazilian economy isn’t growing very much any more, people are still spending. The Central Bank said in March that family consumption would grow 3.5% this year, driven by credit and near-full employment. Sales of luxury imported cars, such a staple in ostentation funk videos, keep growing.

And ostentation funk, too, has crossed over from the music’s traditional fan-base in lower income groups to high society. Bio G3 has performed at upscale São Paulo clubs like Pink Elephant and Royale. “We are talking about consumption, and this began to please class A and class B, not just C and D,” he said.

Released in 2012, ‘Classe A’ was aimed in both directions.

“The song is about consumption, but not just consumption, it is also about attitude. To be class A, is not just a condition, it is a personality, a quality,” he explained.

In short, he seemed to be saying, it’s about having style. Albeit with a heavy dose of bling – ostentation like this is nothing new in American hip hop. Nor are some Brazilian funk artists adverse to simply nicking a few glossy scenes from US rap videos to insert into their own productions when their own production budgets don’t quite stretch to it.

There is social mobility too within the funk music industry. In 2005, Alex Bellos wrote about a Rio funkeiro whose hit had not provided a way out of the favela. When Rio MC Deize Tigrona recorded her hit ‘Injeção’ (Injection), in which a doctor’s injection serves as a thinly-disguised metaphor for anal sex, she was working as a maid.

Bio G3 was born in the poor, outer São Paulo suburb of Tiradentes but now owns three imported cars, including a BMW. “I bought a house for my parents, so I’m in a better condition than I was,” he said. “But it’s not the limit.”

All photos screen shots from “Classe A” and “Vem com os trutas”

On Sunday, I published this article on the rise of rap music in Brazil, featuring quotes from interviews with Criolo and Emicida. Below is the (relatively) complete transcript of the interview with Emicida. Criolo transcript coming next.

In the in-depth discussion, Emicida he takes on a broad set of issues, and doesn’t shy from controversy. He compares Brazilian rap to US rap. He calls out Brazilian media as “racist” and “ridiculous.” He calls for land reform and better treatment of the poor and indigenous.

“At the closing ceremony of the Olympics, we put on display all the things we love to sell to foreigners – native Brazilian culture, capoeira, samba, but these are all things that are being killed back at home.”

Click here to read the original LA Times article, or click “continue reading” below to see the full transcript

VB is Vincent Bevins, EMC is Emicida

VB What is Brazilian rap? How is Brazilian hip hop different than hip hop in the US?

EMC: Well, both countries have distinct literature, and this influences the forms the rhymes take and the way the words flow. English is a much more monosyllabic language than Portuguese, so you [English speakers] can find different lyrical solutions whereas we have to employ some more clever subterfuges. Our poetry is different, but the themes were the same: the ghetto, the margins of society, drugs, violence, ascendance.

From the beginning of the 80s until the early 90s, we were highly influenced by everything that came from the US, so a lot that happened in Brazilian rap, just like in other countries at the time, was basically just ripped off from what the Americans were doing.

But then it began to take on Brazilian elements. I can see in [1990s left-wing rock group] Nação Zumbi some spoken word music, something like rap, but with tambores and more Brazilian instrumentation, in this case derived from Northeastern Maracatu. Then you have Marcelo D2, Rappin Hood, Filial. The themes changed, the metric schemes changed.

But I think the main difference between our hip hop and US hip hop is that here, we’ve been more daring, because the market is smaller. There, the market is so big, and they have to supply a demand according to certain standards and certain requirements.

People outside Brazil see a similarity here now with the moment that American hip hop went through in the 90s, the famous “golden era”, where they were flirting with jazz, with soul, when so many revolutions took place. And we’re going through that moment, but with one addition: in addition to knowing jazz, to knowing soul, we have this huge cauldron of Brazilian music to drink from.

So that’s it – we’re able to insert elements of our culture without losing what is so rich in rap – its simplicity and its impact.

VB: It seems there’s another similarity with the 1990s – the rap scene here is now entering the mainstream. Why did that take so long here, and will that change Brazilian hip hop, like it did the in the US?

EMC: I think the delay was partially because of our posture. Racionais MCs, Brazil’s greatest rap group, had a rule of not appearing on TV. A lot of people were influenced by this, and even if they didn’t agree, refused to interact with the media. That created a blockade. But as the years passed, some people pierced that blockade. That’s been developing slowly for 15 years.

But it’s a delicate question, because now we may be losing that freedom that I spoke of, because now we need to sell…we’re creating a demand and now maybe we have to sell millions of CDs…but one thing that comforts me is that the major groups continue to be independent. Racionais MCs, Rappin Hood, MV Bill…so we still do have this freedom. It has been the radical political discourse that brought hip hop the respect it enjoys now.

[[Editor’s note – Racionais MCs did appear at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, where their video, “Mil faces de um homem leal” won. It’s not a compromising video, to be sure – it celebrates radical Marxist guerilla Carlos Marighella. When it won, Emicida jumped up and cheered]]

VB: But you talk with everyone, right? You talk to Globo, etc.

EMC: Right.

VB: So why don’t you personally agree with that old prohibition?

EMC: Let’s start with the main point: we started making music because we want to change the world. We started making music, because, before anything else, we want to show that art could change our reality.

So, any show that respects me, that respects my music, I’ll go. I’m relaxed there. My mother was a domestic employee, cleaning the houses of the rich, and I’ve always lived between these two worlds. I always wanted to build a bridge, not a wall, between them.

VB: So what brought you into the rich neighborhoods as a kid?

EMC: My mom had no one to watch us, so she took us to work with her.

VB: Let’s talk about that. How else did your childhood, your personal story, affect your music?

EMC: Damn, that question is big as fuck, isn’t it?

VB: Ha, yes, yes. What parts stand out especially?          

EMC: Man, I had a relatively tranquil childhood. There were some tough paths, such as the loss of my father.

VB: What happened?

EMC: Well he died in a fight, you know? A fight with my cousin. He pushed him and he hit his head and later died from cranial trauma. That was in 91-92. That really affected me. From then on I became a real quiet kid, and I found my escape in comics, in those stories, and in music. I started to read a lot because I wasn’t going out to play with the other kids.

That’s when hip hop entered my life as some kind of therapy, you know what I mean? I wasn’t talking to anyone. I still have a hell of a time with that, but I can write a song about a certain theme.

And on the streets the kids were going to paint graffiti. Today there’s a lot of talk of rap, rap, rap but at the time it was the hip hop movement. B-boys, graffiti, DJs, MCs, all of that. It wasn’t a market, just a scene. Market came later.

VB: And what were the musical influences when you entered that scene?

EMC: Well my dad was a DJ, he played at dances.

VB: What did he play?

EMC: Black music – Earth, Wind and Fire, The Manhattans, Dionne Warwick, Marvin Gaye…so I was close to that. I got to know rap later, and I got to know Brazilian rap before American rap. So if you listen to “Pânico na Zona Zul”, by Racionais MCs, it’s very similar to Public Enemy. But I thought Public Enemy was ripping off Racionais MCs! Crazy.

Later I got into Cypress Hill, Tupac, Notorious BIG. You know, we always gravitated to the “gangsta” side of hip hop. Boney…

VB: Boney?

EMC: Bone, Thugs, N Harmony. But here we called it Bone. Lost Boys, and Wu Tang Clan. When Wu Tang Clan arrived it was crazy, I got the cd as a present from a rocker friend. They’d given it to him saying it was rock. And he said, “This shit isn’t rock!’ and gave it to me.

VB: But if I’m going to compare Brazilian hip hop with American hip hop, there are more similarities with the 90s – it is more intelligent, more poetic, and political than hip hop tends to be now in the US. Now it’s club music, party music.

EMC: Without a doubt.

VB: Like, we have songs about taking shots of tequila. Is that going to happen here?

EMC: I think the themes will change, but I pray that people here will opt for quality. But we have a unique opportunity, because we can look at everything American hip hop did, and we can grab the things we think were correct, and leave aside the errors.

There will be new names here rising here as a result of the press attention. But it’s been the same there. At the same time that you have 50 cent or Ja Rule, you also have on the other hand KRS One, or Mos Def, You know? Talib Kweli. Artists closer to hip hop’s roots.

VMB: What do you want to do with your spotlight. What was the thing you said at last year’s VMB, for example?

EMC: It’s a part of a song, called “Samba do fim do mundo”. It’s about the revolution…for common people, you know? We’re seeing new horizons. It goes like this:

We are the debunkers of Carnaval/
Runaway slaves on digital drums/
The phoenixes of Ash Wednesday/
The Landless Workers Movement of the social networks/
We know where kids come from, don’t be alarmed/
Like the kids know where weapons come from/
Money comes from Jews. Oil from Arabs, businesses/
But the blood and sweat is always ours

It’s about an agrarian reform in Brazilian music. It’s necessary. Just like the rich landowners dominate physical space in Brazil, this works as a metaphor for the media and communications conglomerates that dominate Brazilian culture.

I think Brazil is going through a new moment, getting to know itself as a result of social networks. For example, it’s a huge victory to have an artist like Gaby Amarantos, from Belem do Pará, who comes from completely outside of the standards dictated by the culture industry in Rio and São Paulo. It’s amazing to see her be able to succeed.

VB: That works as a metaphor, to be sure, the agrarian reform. But do you think Brazil needs real land reform, literally and physically?

EMC: Yes. I think we need it urgently. At the closing ceremony of the Olympics, we put on display all the things we love to sell to foreigners – native Brazilian culture, capoeira, samba, but these are all things that are being killed back at home. They’ve just passed a law approving quotas for black students in universities and people took to the streets protesting, can you believe that? We put our indigenous population on stage in London, while we build the Belo Monte damn that will throw them off their land. Brazil has been killing our indigenous population for 512 years without the slightest bit of remorse.

VB: You’ve just launched a company and label, Laboratório Fantasma. Why?

EMC: I want to grow. KL Jay [[Dj and producer of Racionais MCs]] always said: “If you give people a dirty cup of water, they’ll drink it. If you give them a clean one and a dirty one, they’re going to drink the clean one.” That’s what we’re doing here. The idea is to give people an option.

We saw that our music was being sold in the streets, and that meant we could really be part of the culture of the people. So now you have both someone like Ivete Sangalo, signed on Universal and hugely present in the media. And then you have Emicida. The option is there, it’s there in the streets, and the people buying music in the streets now what is going on. Even with the police chasing them around for selling pirated cds, they know.

In Brazil there’s a culture of trying to kill off all other options. Take a look at our media…what can I say? Now, they can finally be questioned. They’re in panic because of social networks. That’s ridiculous in the 21^st century. This is something the big newspapers haven’t learned to deal with.  We had a big paper like Folha de S. Paulo actually sue a blog for being called Falha de S. Paulo [[São Paulo Fail]], you know? That is ridiculous in the 21^st century. If you believe in what you’re saying, you have to be able to say it.  And these same guys love to talk about freedom of speech.

VB: What do you think of Brazilian media generally?

EMC: They’re ridiculous.

In reality the papers here function based on the interests of a small group of people that don’t want to relinquish power in any way. They’re the people that have been running Brazil for 500 years. They’re the descendents of those that came over on the first ships from Portugal.

I’ve always considered the Brazilian media to be extremely racist. And it is.

VB: You said you descend from slaves. What are your roots here in Brazil?

EMC: Well, my mom and my dad were born here in São Paulo. But my grandparents are from Bahia. In Brazil, it is fucked, because after the Revolta dos Malês the elite came down with a vengeance. They burned all the books, and burned all of our possibilities of finding out who our ancestors were. So I don’t know where I come from. And that’s tough, because if you don’t know where you’re from it’s tough to know where you’re going.

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[[Note – the transcript is translated, and edited for length. If anyone wants access to or wants to publish the original in Portuguese, get in touch with me]]

Brazil’s reigning musical deity has given his blessing to its newest national poet. Criolo has broken out of the the ghetto, but he has taken the ghetto with him.

by Dom Phillips, in Rio de Janeiro

The thousands packed into Brazilian rapper Criolo’s show last Saturday at Rio’s cavernous Fundição Progresso were already jubilant when God walked in. God’s appearances are rare these days, and this one came unannounced.

God was silver-haired, wearing what appeared to be an elegant, if casual, blue-grey Nehru suit and what was most definitely a huge smile. He danced enthusiastically with Criolo as the two performed the rapper’s biggest hit, the bitter ‘Não existe amor em SP’ (‘Love doesn’t exist in São Paulo). God takes many guises, as any good Christian knows. In this case, his name was Caetano Veloso. And the response that greeted his arrival on stage was suitably ecstatic.

I am joking, of course. There are a number of religions in Brazil (Catholicism, Evangelicalism, a spiritualist movement that combines Christianity and reincarnation, inspired by 19th Century French philosopher Allan Kardec, who in turn has given his name to more than one soccer star, amongst others, but I digress…), and Veloso is not a God in any of them.

But he is a sort of demi-god in the stellar universe of Brazilian pop, or MPB, one of those stately, dignified, intellectual figures – philosopher kings, if you like – that Brazilians adore and admire and whose opinions are both venerated and newsworthy. Like fellow MPB artist Chico Buarque, and perhaps, if only in São Paulo and at the breaking point, former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

Both Caetano and Buarque have given Criolo their all-important blessing: Caetano even performed the same duet with the rapper at the Brazilian MTV Awards, where Criolo won three prizes for his debut album ‘Nó Na Orelha’. His appearance on stage at Criolo’s show was not just a surprise, but a powerful endorsement of how far into Brazil’s pop mainstream Criolo has reached.

Released in 2011, ‘Nó na Orelha’ (‘Knot in the Ear’) has become that gift horse that the music industry calls a ‘crossover hit’ and never looks in the mouth. It has spread beyond Brazilian hip hop’s natural base of disadvantaged youth living in poor suburbs, the perifería, or shanty towns, favelas, to land in the living rooms of the descolado (switched on, cool) Brazilian bourgeoisie. And it deserved to, for the intelligence and sensitivity of its lyrics, for the dexterity with which it blends rhythms as varied as bolero and samba with hip hop beats and luxuriant melodies. For songs of quality that can be sung along to.

Thanks to its success and shows like this, Criolo has become a crossover urban artist with mainstream appeal – much like British rap group Massive Attack in the 1990s, or British Sri-Lankan singer/rapper M.I.A. this decade. He is perhaps the first Brazilian rapper to do so.

Unlike in the United States, where the appearance of an in vogue rapper like Nicki Minaj or M.I.A. on a Madonna album is of benefit to both sides – Madonna gets the youth cred, Minaj and M.I.A. get the visibility of a duet with the Queen of Pop – Brazilian rappers are not part of the pop culture mainstream. Hip hop is a culture apart.

When saccharine pop singer Wanessa Camargo wanted a guest rapper on a pop-rap hit, she chose an American, Jar Rule.

Rio has its own, frenetic, tinny, electronic style called ‘funk’, whose lyrics are frequently x-rated. A style more reminiscent of hip hop’s North American roots thrives in São Paulo’s endless asphalt jungle, out in the periferia, where Criolo has been rhyming for 20 years.

Like classic New York rappers such as Nas or Guru before them, the better São Paulo wordsmiths don’t just deal in cliché. Criolo’s song ‘Não exist amor em SP’ describes a bleak, urban hustle of bars packed with empty souls, where greed vibrates and vanity excites. Caetano wasn’t alone in recognising its poetry.

I interviewed Criolo for a music magazine in December 2010, in the far-flung São Paulo favela of Grajaú where he grew up and was still living in with his parents. Their house was piled high with books: his mother Vilani ran a ‘Philosophy Café’ in Grajaú. Later, his performance was the highlight at a festival of independent hip hop, held in a stiflingly-hot warehouse by a reservoir.

Then, wearing the shirt of his football team, São Paulo’s Corinthians, he performed an uncompromising set of hardcore urban hip hop over a backing tape to a crowd of hundreds of the faithful. Now he has a backing band – and is dancing on stage with God, looking every centimetre the rock star, charismatically jerking in a white collared shirt as if possessed by invisible demons. In one of Rio’s biggest venues.

A handful of songs – all sung, not rapped – took the sound in intriguing new directions. But hip hop also made its presence felt – a forceful guest appearance by another São Paulo rap star, Emicida, playing the much smaller Circo Voador next door that night, set the crowd jumping, as did performances of the album’s rawer rap tracks.

Grajaú was not forgotten: a member of the favela’s community samba ensemble, O Pagode de 27 (27 Pagode – or street samba) put in a guest appearance, in the troupe’s red and white, soccer-style strip. Nor were richer members of the audience able to buy their way into a cordoned-off ‘VIP’ area stage front – as they were at the show British rock singer Morrissey performed weeks before. Criolo’s crowd is as varied as his music is democratic. Brazil’s first crossover rap star may have successfully broken out of the ghetto, but he has taken the ghetto with him.

Dom Phillips is a British journalist and writes for The Times of London, Bloomberg View, The Daily Beast, People Magazine, and British Soccer magazine 442. He has been in Brazil since 2007 and now writes From Rio for the From Brazil Blog. He is the author of Superstar DJs Here We Go (Ebury/Random House 2009).