Written on the run between bank heists and safe houses, Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual for the Urban Guerrilla is a guide to revolution by a man who deeply believed that violence was the answer. The politician-turned-enemy of the state considered terrorism a tool at the hands of the oppressed, a way for the working class to take their marginal status and brandish it like a machine gun. For all the military’s supposed “intelligence,” Marighella knew that the favelas were a blindspot for Brazil’s dictatorship—physically neighboring its seats of power but far beyond its assumed authority. In a chapter titled “The War of Nerves,” Marighella outlines how to play into the regime’s paranoia by “letting false plans fall into the hands of the police to divert their attention; planting rumors to make the government uneasy… forcing them into demoralizing explanations and justifications in the very communication media they wish to maintain under censorship.”
DJ K’s latest record opens with a sampled threat courtesy of Marighella. “We’ll respond with an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” the revolutionary warns the listener: “The struggle has already begun.” Few are as talented at waging a war of nerves as the São Paulo producer. The artist born Kaique Vieira is a star of bruxaria, a style of Brazilian funk that plays up (and into) the hysteria of the favelas as a zone of nightmares. His 2023 debut PANICO NO SUBMUNDO introduced the musician as the genre’s premier master of horror by mixing slasher movie effects with the warning signs of a rapidly unfolding public disaster. On songs like “Erva Venenos” and “Isso Não é Um Teste,” he interwove samples of evil laughter with emergency broadcasts, pitching funk’s signature high end to a chorus of car alarms and air-raid sirens. With his latest, Radio Libertadora!, DJ K aims to project his party-starting, killer-clown aesthetic onto the chaos of contemporary Brazil. The result is a dance record that wears its political themes like a Halloween costume—great for cheap, campy thrills but falling short of striking any deeper, never mind radical, notes of terror.
If Marighella’s mission was to violently overthrow the government, DJ K settles for the much more manageable task of fucking shit up. Drawing from his experience headlining local mandela parties, DJ K is a mischievous presence behind the decks, as likely to cater to the roars of a packed dancefloor as to blindside his listener with sudden, antagonistic blasts of noise. Unlike the fully cohesive, darksided world-building of PANICO, Radio Libertadora! plays like a clutch of reliably crowd-tested bangers. In place of shadowy jump scares, many songs barrel into action, leaving you little time to catch your breath. “PSY VEM FAZER NENEM” leans hard into funk’s electro DNA, allowing the beat to surge and stutter before cresting into a frenzy of helium-pitched whistling. The constantly shape-shifting “ELA PEGA O BRINQUEDO NA MÃO” cycles through presets from chintzy horns to witchy synth melodies, spanning from cheesiness into jarring discordance. “MEGA SUICIDIO AUDITIVO” is probably the record’s most overwhelming moment of chaos, wielding absolutely seismic blast beats to open up a treble-heavy, tinnitus-inducing portal to Hell. As exciting as these moments can be, DJ K never chases a mood for longer than a song, so they explode in isolation rather than truly reverberate over the course of the album.
Another shift in DJ K’s production is that it has become much more accommodating to his MCs. The results are a mixed bag. Opener “ESTO NO AR A Radio LIBERTADORA” is muted and sped up to form the beat for “ALI PERTO DA IMIGRANTES,” but the former is by far the superior track. Over plucked harpsichord and the recurring swish of a guillotine, MC Renatinho Falcão immediately starts barking orders to go harder and harder, as DJ K rains down punishment with precision-targed synth strikes. Falcão’s performance works because it’s functional and directional; it shows you how to navigate the craziness of the beat as the producer slyly warps it off its axis. Left on their own, none of DJ K’s collaborators are vocally distinct or lyrically gifted enough to match the vividness of his production. Given too much airtime, they tread water over the instrumentals without commanding them. This is exactly what happens with “ALI PERTO DA IMIGRANTES,” “SUA FILHA QUER OS D,” and “TECHNO DE FAVELADO,” where the MCs’ voices are so exposed it practically comes as a relief when DJ K takes a drill bit to your ear again.
Despite shoutouts to Marighella and the fiercely political rappers Racionais MC’s, Radio Libertadora! doesn’t remotely deliver on the promise to “transform [funk] into a visceral weapon of protest and liberation.” Instead these allusions serve as thematic scaffolding for MCs to rage, flex, and hector the listener. “A Tropa do DJ K” and “Sobrevive Contra o Estado” come closest to realist narratives about run-ins with the cops before almost immediately lapsing into horndog boasting. For its radical trappings and professed social consciousness, lyrically the album falls all too comfortably into one of Brazilian funk’s worst conventions: truly disgusting misogyny. There are few women’s voices on the record but plenty of disembodied parts, all of which are treated with as much respect as a second-hand, back-alley fleshlight. Listening to the record as a non-Portuguese speaker with and without knowing what the MCs are saying are wildly different experiences, and rarely for the better. Stupid, horny repetition is a staple of a number of electronic subgenres, but it’s usually secondary to the dynamism of the production. Put up front and center, the repetition of MCs’ lame, retrograde sexual wordplay has the effect of making a truly brilliant producer’s work sound much dumber than it actually is.
Brazil is one of the few countries in the world that rivals the United States in terms of the sheer awfulness of its political class; full of brazenly corrupt and openly bloodythirsty politicians who are as shamelessly in the pocket of genocidal agro-business as they are turned on by the thought of torturing their enemies to death. The Brazilian right doesn’t merely romanticize the military dictatorship but openly campaigns on returning to it. Naturally they’re extremely Christian. To some, funk’s blaring instability is the soundtrack for a state of siege at the very heart of Brazilian society, one that threatens to spill out from the favelas and engulf the entire country in flames. You would hope DJ K could seize on this paranoia, but Radio Libertadora! too often stalls out on hedonism for its own sake. For all the noise it makes, this record says nothing that would truly make the powerful as nearly afraid as they ought to be.
