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Check out this video of a gift give away in the favela Tavares Bastos.

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Here is an article from the Independent Gap Year:

Brazil sometimes seems to sweat pheromones through its borders. The homeland of Gisele and Ronaldo (take your pick, you know you want at least one of them), and the sensual grotesque that is Rio’s carnival.

None of them, though, glowed with sweat, tension, and glamour as much as Fernando Meirelles’s hit film, City of God. Based in the favelas,more than 500 squatted slums of Rio, the film lugubriously, sensually, and distinctly voyeuristically took in the guns, drugs, and gang warfare scene of the favelas in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. The film brought the favelas worldwide fame, and, of course, the attention of gappers looking for adventure.

The favelas are still a dangerous world for the outsider. Built to keep the poor isolated from the city centre, they are run very much according to their own rules. The best, or at least safest, way to see them is by volunteering with a gap year volunteer organisation that has a recognised project in one the community centres.

It was the danger that brought Louisa Gibbs to the favelas. “I liked that initial feeling of being scared, the challenge of it,” she says. “I didn’t want to go travelling, I thought that didn’t demand a lot.” Inspired by books by missionaries working in Rio’s slums Gibbs, 19, went to teach English with gap year charity i-to-i for four months earlier this year.

Out and about for 12 hours a day, Gibbs for the most part listened to the advice not to go out in the favelas after dark. But one night she ventured out with some friends to one of the notorious funk parties in the Prazeras favela. “The men standing outside with huge guns were a bit daunting, but it was fun,” she says. “I really like the music, although it was a bit strange having eight-year-olds serving you drinks at the bar.”

Drawn in by the danger, it was the sense of community that she remembers most. “The people were amazing, really open,” she says. “The first day I got there they came up and were hugging me.” Gibbs is starting a degree in Latin American Studies at University College London this autumn. She hopes to go back to work with i-to-i in the favelas over Christmas.

Arriving in the favelas can be a daunting experience. “To get in to the favela I had to walk up a flight of 200 steps with this big mountain of shanty towns behind it,” says Nicholas Menezes, who spent a month from June to July in the favelas learning Portugese and teaching English with Volunteer Adventures. “And I was scared, my heart was beating. You’d see these people looking out at you but you didn’t want to make eye contact.”

Menezes came to see the favela not as a slum but as a working community, with its own rules and systems of justice. The only muggings he heard of during his time there happened on the tourist beaches of Rio. “The favela works,” he says. “I felt more safe in the favela than outside. A lot of people are scared to go out. It’s weird, it works both ways.”

Menezes, 29, is not your conventional gapper. After six years in the City he quit in January with a list of 10 things to do before he was 30. He wanted to be in Brazil to watch the World Cup. In (he hoped) the winning country. Obviously that did not work out, but, he says, he still got a lot out of teaching. “You have to break down the kids you teach,” he says. “They know they’re a tourist attraction, that they have this reputation for being tough, but by the end of it I gained their trust. It was really cool.”

Of course, there is more to Brazil than just the favelas – and more to volunteering than teaching English. Katy Gines spent four months in 2004 in Recife volunteering at a day care centre for children with cancer and a hospital with Gap Activity Projects.

The only trouble she had was when she was mugged on a sightseeing trip to the cultural centre of the city on election day. She was pickpocketed at the carnival by packs of entrepreneurial street kids. “You’d see little kids just coming up and grabbing your pockets,” she says. “But it was OK. We had nothing on us.”

What made her stay was her host family. “We got on brilliantly, really well,” she says. “They were really welcoming.” One of their daughters came to stay with Gines’ family from August to Christmas last year and she has just been invited to another’s wedding.

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By Doug Gray, Senior Reporter

RIO DE JANEIRO – Though imported as ‘Baile Funk’ around the world, the name given to the often primitive, always pounding sounds of Rio’s hillsides, raves and definitely not the affluent condos of Barra, is simply ‘Funk’ or ‘Funk Carioca’ (pronounced ‘Funk-ee’ in Rio due to the keen avoidance of finishing any word with a closed sound) to Brazilians.

From London to Berlin, Baltimore to Lisbon, Baile Funk has been adopted as a cutting edge and vital new musical form, really only heard outside of Brazil since the turn of the century despite its roots going all the way back to the 1970s and 80s.

UK journalist and promoter Elle J Small has been throwing Baile Funk parties under the name Rio Rox in England since 2004 and remembers her first exposure to the sound;

“It was my first trip to Brazil in 2003 and it was the raw energy and simplicity of the beats that I was attracted to.” Within months of returning back to England she had used her new contacts to begin her own Funk parties in London.

Put simply a ‘Baile’ is a dance, and ‘Funk’ is the music played there, the kick-drum and sample-led music born in Rio de Janeiro out of the Miami Bass sound that had become popular in the 1980s. Literally hundreds of Baile Funks are held across the city every weekend and though some still carry an essence of danger and edginess, they have become incredibly popular with young travelers and tourists desperate to take an authentic slice of the rich favela culture back with them in a time where sanitized tours have become the norm.

While there are a few communities where even locals would fear to tread, and their bailes are not recommended without the absolute assurance of a well-connected local for accompaniment, the likes of Castelo das Pedras in Zona Oeste regularly receive tour parties of foreigners. Being in a ‘dry favela’ the dangers associated with the drug gangs of other areas are avoided at Castelo, and the biggest threat to your safety is the waterfall of fireworks raining down from the roof unannounced throughout the night.

Elsewhere in the city, Eu Amo Baile Funk (I Love Baile Funk) is a ubiquitous poster seen all over billboards advertising their latest parties at Circo Voador in Lapa. Often the ‘Guarda Velha’ or Old Guard (stealing a phrase from their samba cousins) take to the stage here – pioneers such as Mr Catra, DJ Marlboro and MC Sapao are regularly booked for what are safe and popular, if not 100% authentic, Baile Funks.

Last year DJ Marlboro was booked to play to the millions gathered on Copacabana Beach on New Years Eve, further indicating the mainstream acceptance of the genre that he himself was integral in shaping back in the 1980s. Reaction to his appearance was mixed however, and those who continue to feel the music glorifies drugs and violence argued that there was no place for Funk at such an event, despite the positive messages of much of the music.

Earlier in the year The Rio Times reported on the overthrowing of a law used to close down bailes based on often excessive safety regulations. To underline their argument the ‘Association of Professionals and Friends of Funk’ appeared in court to underline the cultural validity of their music and show to the city that they are to be taken just as seriously as samba and bossa nova as a key musical movement in Rio.

What will follow in this section over the coming weeks is a brief history of the sound of Funk; where it came from, where it is going, and what the future holds for both the sound and the ‘Funkeiros’ who created it, offering an insight to this vital and constantly-morphing sound to hopefully make its message and its importance better understood.

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A Short History of Baile Funk
By Doug Gray, Senior Reporter

The Formative Years – Rio’s Black Music Explosion

The name Funk Carioca is taken directly from the musical genre pioneered by James Brown in the mid 1960s after he seized upon Little Richard’s funked up rock n roll, ripping out the horns, upping the bass and creating his signature groove. That and the funk of Rio in the 21st Century have only their name in common, however, as well as an undeniable ability to move a dance floor. Instruments were binned in favor of the 808 drum machine, singers replaced by MCs and samplers. Producers took hold of funk and remixed into something quintessentially Carioca – Baile Funk.

Along with soul music, ‘traditional’ funk was picked up and taken to the hearts of kids in the major cities of Brazil in the 1970s as an entirely new and thrilling sound inaccessible via the predominantly white, middle class-controlled media, though only a handful of DJs lucky enough to be on the receiving end of a trip to the US could actually get their hands on the music. Brown had the moves, the attitude and the clothes to make the kids want to be like him, and his music forced samba down the pecking order in their attentions.

To get hold of the records, fans like DJ Nazz had to call in favors with airline stewardesses, import/export companies, whoever they could find to help fuel the burgeoning desire for this new sound taking over from the traditional Brazilian rhythms. As the rich playboys of Ipanema and Leblon discovered clubbing, so too in the poorer neighborhoods live bands became less and less integral to parties and DJs became increasingly popular.

Unusually in a city of such rich live musical history, the pioneering Bande Black Rio were one of the few domestic purveyors of the 70s funk sound taking the city by storm, a group assembled by Soul Grand Prix from the best musicians around to capitalize on the popularity of the music. By and large, the DJ with his imported records was taking over.

The likes of Nazz and DJ Big Boy began with home made set-ups and handfuls of tracks by the likes of KC and The Sunshine Band, Kool and The Gang, Average White Band and of course James Brown, and for the people of the north zone and favelas, this burgeoning party scene was the only means of hearing this exciting new form of music.

With rapidly rising popularity these humble beginnings were soon outgrown, and the sound system culture that had begun at the turn of the decade exploded. Like-minded DJs and aspiring promoters began hosting huge block parties, with the MC singing rough Portuguese translations over the original vocals. The sense of belonging for the mostly black audience fueled the Funk parties’ popularity further still, and with a military dictatorship in power and imposing tight censorship over mainstream culture, they became rebellious, untouchable, and, ultimately, highly profitable.

Journalist Silvio Essinger, author of ‘BATIDÃO – Uma História do Funk’, the only comprehensive volume published on the subject of Funk eloquently summarizes the situation;

“The scene got huge and the authorities were becoming worried. There were literally thousands of kids dancing to funk at any of the hundreds of bailes happening every weekend in the poorer neighborhoods of the city. These guys were earning a lot of money, the parties were unregulated, and sound systems like Soul Grand Prix were taking over neighborhoods with literally hundreds of speakers pumping out funk all night long.”

The money coming into the scene helped it expand quickly and soon DJs were able to take cheap, chartered flights to the US to pick up armfuls of music and bring them back for the baying crowds. “In much the same way as occurred in Jamaica” Silvio continues, “DJs would scratch the names off the records and leave just a reminder as to what they were, keeping other sound systems from stealing tracks and reinforcing the fierce independence of the scene.”

When journalists began to pick up on the new movement, by the end of the 1970s it had become something of a victim of its own success and while Zona Sul’s clubs got busier, the block parties’ popularity waned. The underground taken over, the music no longer so new and exciting, they had seemingly run its course.

New tracks like Sugarhill Gang’s “Rappers Delight” (1979) may have hinted at what the future would hold by introducing rapping as a progression of emceeing, but with the arrival of Disco the whole movement became more mainstream, and the interest shown by the middle class took it into new and, for the purists, unwelcome realms; the radio, onto television – even beginning a daily novela (soap opera) with the black music bailes as the recurring theme.

Fortunately for those seeking the next new sound, in 1982 a track was released that would change the face of black music in Rio for good. Years of lovingly crafted imitation and enjoyment of the sound of 1970s black America would rapidly take on its very own persona.

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Here’s a teaser for a documentary that will began filming this coming spring. Check it out.

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Also check out the film Favela Rising

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LOS ANGELES – A group of civic activists, united by faith and a belief that the poor economy in the interior of Los Angeles is a social injustice, is preparing to offer bus tours of some of the city’s grittiest pockets, including decayed public housing, sites of shootouts, and streets ravaged by racial unrest.

After a VIP preview last month, LA Gang Tours expects to open to the public in January, giving tourists a look at the cradle of the nation’s gang culture – the birthplace of many of the city’s gangs.

“This is ground zero for a lot of the bad in this city. It could be ground zero for a lot of the good, too,’’ said Alfred Lomas, a former Florencia member who has become a leading gang intervention worker in South Los Angeles and is spearheading the tours. “This is true community empowerment.’’

The nonprofit group plans to offer two-hour tours at an initial cost of $65 per adult, with profits funneled back into the community through jobs, franchised tours in new areas, and microloans to inner-city entrepreneurs.

The concept appears to have no equal in Los Angeles – for good reason, some people might contend. It seems to echo, more than anything, the “slum tours’’ of such sites as India’s Dharavi township and Rio de Janeiro’s “favelas.’’ Those tours have been lauded as innovative economic tools and mechanisms for humanizing poverty and attacked as exploitative and voyeuristic.

The Los Angeles tour comes after months of planning and is offered in a spirit of education and public service. Lomas, who will lead tours at first, plans to talk about important chapters in the development of the city’s core, such as how housing restrictions shaped ethnic enclaves and the formation of gangs.

Other aspects may raise eyebrows. Selling shirts painted on the spot by a graffiti “tagger’’ is one thing. But one backer said he also hopes to stage dance-offs between locals; tourists would choose a winner and fork over a cash prize. It wasn’t long ago that organizers decided against a plan to have kids shoot tourists with water pistols, followed by the sale of T-shirts that read: “I Got Shot in South-Central.’’

“It’s going to be fascinating – but really controversial,’’ said Francisco Ortega, a field staffer with the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission and a respected mediator and neighborhood adviser in South Los Angeles. Ortega said there could be great value in “sensitizing people, connecting them to the reality of what’s on the ground.’’

“But the other side is that it could come across like a zoo or something,’’ Ortega said. “It could be perceived as demeaning for the people who are living in these conditions.’’

City Councilwoman Jan Perry said she has offered bus tours of South Los Angeles herself – but those were for real estate leaders she was trying to persuade to invest in the neighborhood. She said South Los Angeles could benefit from an effort to demonstrate “the potential of the community.’’ But she said some aspects of this kind of tourism could go too far.

“It’s not right to put people on display,’’ she said.

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