![]() Over time, the original American instrumentals were warped. “It was like Star Wars combined with Elvis Presley and these crazy, sped-up electro beats that I’d known since I was 11 years old.” The producer Switch, who, alongside Diplo, co-produced M.I.A’s baile funk–sampling single “Bucky Done Gun,” still remembers his first encounter with a baile funk compilation. That didn’t diminish its allure for outsiders. ![]() “It was considered to be the music from the poor and the criminals,” Haaksman says. in the 1980s it thrived in Rio’s poor neighborhoods and, much like hip-hop, was stigmatized and linked with violence and drug dealing. The music was once built from samples of up-tempo electro-rap records that flourished in the U.S. The German DJ Daniel Haaksman, who released one of the first compilations of baile funk outside Brazil, in 2004 ( Rio Baile Funk: Favela Booty Beats), did so in part because “it was impossible to get ahold of the music in Europe.” Not only that, “In Brazil, you couldn’t get any funk records if you traveled to the south or Bahia,” he remembers.īut much has changed in baile funk over time. This worldwide interest in baile funk contrasts with the genre’s roots as a resolutely local phenomenon based in Rio de Janeiro. “I hear it on almost every dance floor that I am on.” “It’s having a global impact,” Venus X adds. And, in turn, baile funk has started to move to the rest of the world. Four of the 100 most-popular songs on YouTube the week of January 11 were baile funk songs from Kondzilla, and the success of the genre on the world’s biggest streaming service has helped the music to spread around Latin America: “In the Dominican Republic where my family’s from, ten years ago you would never hear a baile funk song now you hear it integrated into nightlife very seamlessly,” says the DJ Venus X, founder of the famous GHE20G0TH1K parties in New York. His success has given baile funk an unprecedented platform for exposure. “But I want it to become the greatest in the world.” “Today it is the most relevant YouTube music channel,” Dantas says of his creation, which has also grown to include management services and a label. If you consider only music-specific channels, just Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, and Rihanna have more followers, and Kondzilla needs a mere 40,000 new subscribers to scoot past Rihanna into fourth place. Kondzilla now has 26.4 million subscribers on YouTube, making it one of the 15 most popular channels on the platform. He decided to devote himself to the form, and a year later, he started a YouTube channel titled Kondzilla that specialized in videos for the Brazilian genre known as baile funk. But when he started making music videos, he realized he had a knack for it at one point, he put together 14 clips in a 30-day period. “I saw I had more talent making videos than doing rap,” he remembers. ![]() In 2011, Konrad Dantas was not having much success as an aspiring Brazilian rapper. From the MC Fioti Video “Bum Bum Tam Tam.” ![]()
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