the badass women from brazil’s black music scene, breaking taboos & proud feminists

By Beatriz Miranda, AFROPUNK Contributor

How The Badass Women from Brazil’s Urban Black Music Are Breaking Taboos and Standing at the Center of the Feminist Debate

Women understand other women’s struggle until the economic, cultural, racial, sexual and ethnical boundaries abruptly tear us apart. At the end of the day, we are the only ones who actually know where we come from.

As a mixed, Brazilian, middle-class, cis woman, I’ll never really get the dimension of what poor, black, peripheral women in my country have been through. At the end of the day, they are the only ones who actually know where they come from.

On the other hand, it does not require more than some lucidity to know that femicide, racism, social exclusion, hypersexualization, objectification, loneliness and domestic violence knocks this social group way, way harder. And it has been like this for at least five centuries.

I will, unfortunately, never get to the core of what poor, black, peripheral Brazilian women have been through. Some of them, however, have been sharing a little from their reality through art, the most powerful thing humans have ever created.

The way black female rappers and funk singers have been addressing highly critical issues of black feminism in the last five years is an unprecedented game changer and paradigm-breaker in Brazil’s music culture.

Forget Simone de Beauvoir: it is time for black women from Brazil’s urban music scene to be (literally) listened to. Singers like Karol Conka, Yzalu, Luana Hansen, Elza Soares, MC Carol and MC Soffia became real badass influencers, even in academic debates.

The power of “Mulheres Negras” (Black Women) could hardly be measured in 2012, when Yzalu released this song. “At that time, it felt like touching a sensitive wound, no one wanted to shed light on this subject”, says Yzalu.

Physically disabled, the rapper from São Paulo shouts out about black women’s resistance and denounces how fucked up the remaining inequalities from the time of slavery in the country are – especially against these women. “We have survived through our absence in soap operas and in the TV ads/ The system can make me a housemaid/ But it cannot make me think like a slave”, asserts the song.

Because the gender debate was not so mainstream in Brazil in 2012, “Mulheres Negras” soon became a reference, even in schools and universities. “This work made the peripheral people embrace feminism, and it positively influenced the way mainstream media sees the gender debate nowadays”, states Yzalu.

If one has ever thought it requires sophisticated concepts and well-grounded theories to problematize gender roles, MC Carol, from Rio de Janeiro, will absolutely destroy this scholar mindset. Her message is as simple and sharp as “My boyfriend washes my underwear and if he is full of bullshit I send him to the kitchen”.

The fact that MC Carol was first told about feminism last year by her entrepreneur does not make the 23 year-old singer embarrassed. At all. On the contrary, she has always been a feminist, as she declares herself. The favela-born rapper has no doubts that her songs have always been about female empowerment and freedom.

By the way, it is not news that we have not been getting man’s respect and attention for female pleasure. We just cannot stand repeating the obvious anymore, and singer Karol Conka seems to have perfectly translated it.

“They talk too much/ Pretend to know how to do it/It is almost hilarious/ He barely knows the difference between a clitoris and an ovary”, complains Karol Conka in the song “Lala”.

Released only three months ago, “Lala” – the onomatopoeic word for when one licks a woman – is a repudiation lyric against the sexist repression of female pleasure, or a sexual liberation anthem by a 30 year-old self-confident woman.

With a raw message, “Lala” targets a “delicate” topic that people still feel embarrassed to discuss. Conka says her pussy gets dry when macho men don’t know how to do ‘it’, and the way she owns her words has been making many guys feel awkward, offended or bewildered. And,that’s just a little of what a badass black feminist attitude is capable of.

For Elza Soares, being a badass black feminist just came naturally, especially after the release of “Mulher do Fim do Mundo” (The End of the World’s Woman, 2015), one of the most soulful and impactful albums of the last two years.

Owner of a rasping, goose-bump inducing voice, the eighty year-old singer means it when she sings “you will regret to have beat me” at “Maria da Vila Matilde” (Maria from the Matilde Village), one of the album’s best songs, which refers to domestic violence against women in Brazil.

Those who still believe that “feminism” is a subject for grown-ups have probably never heard the rhetoric of Mc Soffia, a 13 year-old rapper who learned about black female empowerment with nobody less than her mother.

“In my songs, I talk about sexism and racism, but also that boys and girls should be free to play with what they want, to be what they want”, explains Soffia, who performed at the Rio 2016 Olympics opening concert with Karol Conka.

In “Menina Pretinha” (Black Girl), Soffia affirms she prefers her African “Makena” to the American Barbie doll. “Black girl/ Exotic is not beautiful/ You are not cute/You are a queen”, says the rap, also used in schools.

When it comes to the gender issue in the hip hop industry, the young singer is as critical and conscious as all of the rappers mentioned above:

“It is always a man who makes the beat, the DJs are mostly men, the ones who record, mix and master the audio are men… hip hop is sexist” argues Soffia, who also sings about an Ethiopian Rastafari Rapunzel.

If being a poor, black, peripheral woman in Brazil’ is hard, being lesbian on top of that is another step backwards in terms of social rights. Luana Hansen knows that. “I’ve never been supported by the hip hop movement in Brazil, even being part of it for over 17 years now. It actually only tries to make me invisible”, she opens up.

Luana Hansen: Photo by Renan Perobelli

Invisible, however, is something Hansen could not be even if she tried: having participated in Cuba’s First Feminist Rap Festival and won hip hop music awards, the 35 year-old rapper from São Paulo stands at the front of the line for the legalization of abortion in Brazil  (still a pretty controversial topic, especially with the strengthening of Evangelical parties in congress).

At “Ventre Livre de Fato” (Truly Free Womb), Hansen spits on the face of a hypocritical society that kills so many women every year due to illegal abortion procedures: “Unsafe, done in a clandestine way/Wake up Brazil, this is called slaughtering”.

One of Luana’s most famous songs, “Flor de Mulher (Woman Flower) is the best reply a woman could give to Emicida’s “Trepadeira”, a controversial rap released in 2013 saying that “trepadeira” women (a.k.a. women who enjoy sex) deserve some drubbing. “Living in a sexist and patriarchal system/ Where spanking a woman is a natural thing/ The housewife, the double shift/ She is always oppressed, devalued/ Until when will I be invisible? / Every five minutes, a woman is assaulted”, denounces Hansen.

It’s normal for these lyrics to make you feel uncomfortable. After all, there is nothing comfortable in being reminded of the ridiculous dimension of oppression against black peripheral women. At the same time, it is inspiring how both 13 year-old MC Soffia and 80 year-old Elza Soares teach us about Brazil’s social context in a way that no PhD professor can.