“Law for Whom?”: responding to sonic illegality in Brazil’s funk carioca

Abstract

Music and sound constitute an important site of politics in Brazil. Debates about laws regulating music and performance--particularly when related to historically marginalized genres--provoke debates about citizenship, belonging and inequality. Despite being Brazil's most popular contemporary genre of music, funk carioca (funk from Rio de Janeiro) faces multiple legal challenges. Various state laws have criminalised or banned live performances of funk. Furthermore, funk producers and DJs flaunt copyright through intensive, unauthorized sampling of American hip-hop, freestyle, funk, and other genres. Despite pervasive sonic and musical illegality, funk musicians imagine the law as a source of protection which should work for them. In response to funk’s illegality, musicians focus on lawmaking to declare the genre popular Brazilian “culture” and on educating artists on copyright law.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.