"culture vulture shit"

Nick Sylvester already said it, but i'll add my take, in part cause i think he's wrong to back off when he does: Diplo's decision on Favela Strikes Back, his hip-hoppy, sample-heavy carioca funk mix-cd, to omit any information about the brazilian artists and songs over which he splices beats derived from The Smiths' "Bigmouth Strikes Again" and The Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams," and Dee-Lite's "Groove Is In The Heart," among others, from the liner notes or track information, is more than a bit fucked up.

Granted, this is a mixtape, and the whole point of mixtapes is that you can experiment because you don't have to pay for the samples. And some of this music will be familiar to people who've purchased one of the other baile funk comps or mixes flooding the hipster market eager for new marginalized global south social movements to exoticize. But Diplo isn't giving valuable space to the next hot MC from Queensbridge or Houston, someone every backpacker worth her salt will recognize before they complete the first rhyme of their first verse, he's buying craploads of favela funk cds and sampling at will. Wesley Pentz doesn't speak portuguese. Which would be fine - some of the funk lyrics are flat-out gibberish, nonsensic transliterations of English hip hop phrases by working class Brazilians who speak no English - but there's a coloniality here i nevertheless find deeply troubling. I don't care too much if Morissey and Marr or Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart are getting stiffed on royalties here. But it's safe to say that whoever Diplo's sampling aren't getting any recognition for their work. Instead, Diplo is presenting himself as a postmodern colonial ethnographer, presenting this music as faceless, timeless, absent of context or meaning.

I want to direct folks looking for a more complex encounter with and reading of Baile Funk to turn to George Yudice's recent book The Expediency of Culture, which examines funk and its funkeiros in illuminating detail and scholarly rigor.