City of Rhyme

City of Rhyme (English and Spanish Subtitles; 84 minutes)

Thanks to movies like City of God and Bus 174, the world now knows something about the violence and exclusion suffered by people who live in the favelas (urban shantytowns) of Rio de Janeiro, but the most violent city in Brazil is really Recife, on the country's northeastern coast. Endemic poverty, the world's second worst distribution of income, and anarchic gang wars make the city almost unlivable for the poor; but at the same time, Recife's culture is among the richest in the world, with amazing african and indigenous dances and rhythms, a long history of popular poetry, and a strong tradition of popular education.

Local NGOs like Pé no Chão combat marginalization with culture, bringing the best of the favela to the center of the city and forcing the city's elite to take responsibility for the injustice if their midst. DJ Big -- artist, composer, and educator at Pé no Chão -- asked Shine a Light to finance an innovative educational project: to record a CD of a dozen street rappers, boys and girls who work, live, and play on the street and who use rhyme as a way to understand and change their world.

Shine a Light is in the process of producing a major documentary about this process, showing how Hip Hop can at the same time teach kids and transform the world. We wanted to make their amazing music available as soon as possible, so you can download it below (click here for copyright information).

1. Entrem (introduction) -- Ninha
2. Viver na favela não é fácil (Livin' in the favela ain't easy) -- Okado
3. Cadê a solução? (Where's the solution?) -- Chipan
4. A violência tem que parar (The violence has to stop) -- Italo
5. Sou do Hip-Hop (I'm part of Hip-Hop) -- Detefón
6. Criança (What is a child?) -- Eliene
7. Break no Pé -- composed by Clécio, Jurandir, and Comedinha
8. I ai Nordeste (There in the northeast) -- Akira
9. Basta de Violência (Enough violence) -- Jurandir
10. Consciência de uma rosa (Conscience of a Rose) -- Vilma
11. Beat Box Mix -- Rodrigo
12. O Terror do Sistema (The system's worst nightmare) -- Comedinha
13. Paz e União (Peace and Unity) -- Jonas
14. Olha o menino na rua (Bonus Track) -- MC Maggo
15. Preparado pra rimar (Bonus Track) -- Zé Brown

Read the lyrics in Portuguese and English here.

At the bottom of the page, you can also read a personal account of the recording of the CD and the show the kids put on in front of 3000 people in downtown Recife. We're excited to be a part of DJ Big and the kids' project for a better future.

I've never seen street kids pour over texts in the same way that they did as they wrote their raps, spending hours and hours writing and rewriting, consulting with each other about a rhyme here or there, trying to figure out the metrification (with another local rapper teaching about the difference between iambic pentameter and quadrameter, the decasílaba...). Then doing research about their neighborhoods, about the history of the city, about race... Three kids also helped to compose the music on the computer, which DJ Big used as a way to teach everything from math (four beats in a measure, four sixteenth notes in a beat, pitch and frequency...) to computer science (all the composing and recording was on the computer). And all of this in an improvised studio in the favela!

The concert... it's hard to get my mind around it, really. It was in a huge colonial plaza in front of a portuguese church, where the brightly painted houses around the square have all been turned into sidewalk restaurants -- the city government put up a huge stage and sound system, and bands come and play almost every night. I got there early to have a bit of dinner, but the rappers arrived before the food, so we shared everything and tried to calm their nerves ("No, I can't eat, I'd just throw it up!"). A couple of the rappers were also part of the video group I had been running, so they took advantage of the time to interview each other and to film the growing crowd.

Pé no Chão bussed the kids' families into the center of the city, and they poured into the square a half an hour later, with that same sort of scared pride I remember seeing in my mom before I performed in high school musicals -- except much more intense. The warm-up band, a traditional afro-brasilian group, began to play, and the crowd began to leave their seats to approach the stage. The rappers all disappeared to get dressed and do the last preparations with DJ Big, who was even more nervous than the mothers, and we got together with the video group to help them think through angles, shots, dealing with the crowd...

Ocado, the first rapper, had also been the most nervous during the rehearsals, the least confident in his own lyrics, but he exploded into the song "Living in the favela ain't easy", an autobiografical piece about the everyday violence and discrimination he'd suffered for all of his 14 years, the way that society makes him invisible, the gangs try to recruit him -- and then make fun of him for not picking up a gun to make money -- but at the same time, the way he uses breakdance and capoeira to escape that, to find respect... All of the other rappers -- singing backup -- joined in on the chorus, and by the end of the song, so did the whole crowd, which had now grown to fill the entire plaza. My guess is about 3000 voices rapping "Living in the favela ain't easy", but it's hard to estimate. What's certain is that the parents sang along, but also middle class university students, intellectuals, kids from other favelas, street kids sniffing glue in front of the stage...

Over the next forty minutes, all of the kids performed their own raps -- Bruno, the intellectual meditating on the death of his friends who had entered gangs; Aquiles mixing traditional music with hip-hop to sing about regional culture; eleven year old Eliene reciting a poem trying to define childhood; Vilma, six months pregnant, condemning domestic violence; little Ítalo, with a child's voice in spite of his 14 years, dressed in a huge winter jacket in spite of the 90 degree air; Rodrigo combining a beat box with an african drum; an invitation to all of the breakdancers to come up and dance to a song that a couple of the kids had composed...

The applause was great, the mothers cried, DJ Big finally relaxed... but the most amazing thing is this: a couple of days later, I went to the Brasilian Social Forum, where a couple of the same kids were going to give a breakdancing workshop to the left wing activists who attend such events. As everything was warming up, DJ Big put Ocado's "Living in the Favela Ain't Easy" on the sound system. People tapped their feet, passers-by stopped... but most amazing of all, some black kids whom I had never seen before stood in the back of the crowd, singing every word. Not just the chorus: every word. Within three days of the concert, a fourteen year old kid's lyrics had become something that people memorize, use to understand their own lives.

And it continues. My last day in Recife, Ocado and Italo asked the new video group whether they would be willing to film a music video for them. Ocado laid the whole script out for me... I'm looking forward to see what they come up with!