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News > Latin America

Brazil: Rapper Mano Brown Laments Right-Wing Turn in Fans

  • Mano Brown, co-founder of legendary underground Brazilian hip-hop collective Racionais MCs, has condemned the political shift among fans.

    Mano Brown, co-founder of legendary underground Brazilian hip-hop collective Racionais MCs, has condemned the political shift among fans. | Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Published 3 February 2018
Opinion

"Thirty years later and some of our fans have become conservatives," the rapper said. "Nowadays, many of them are right-wing. Our ideas don't have the same effect."

Mano Brown, co-founder of legendary underground Brazilian hip-hop collective Racionais MCs, has lamented the growing absence of political and social consciousness among fans during the group's 30-year anniversary.

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"There's nothing to celebrate... only mourning," he said, adding that when the group emerged they "struggled to exercize their freedom of speech, occupy spaces that were denied us.

"Thirty years later and some of our fans have become conservatives. Nowadays, many of them are right-wing. Our ideas don't have the same effect."

The rapper went on to say he's "Not against gays, not against punk, not against Candomble, as some old fans of the band now claim to be," according to a report in Revista Forum.

Speaking in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, where he took part in the 23rd Atlantida Planeta music festival, Brown said ideas expressed by Racionais MCs in the early 1990s would be "rejected" today. 

"The mentality of periphery neighborhoods has changed," he said, in the wake of former Brazilian presidents Luiz Inacio 'Lula' da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.

"It's impossible to disassociate Racionais MCs from politics and where is the country politically now? The periphery has turned to the right. Rap has turned to the conservative right.

"The type of rap music produced back in the day has become moralistic religious rap, which doesn't tap into the revolution that needs to happen now."

Brown – along with fellow rappers Ice Blue, Edi Rock and DJ KL Jay – formed the Racionais MCs in 1988. The collective, all of whom hailed from Capao Redondo, a periphery neighborhood on Sao Paulo's south side, referred to themselves as "the four most dangerous black men in Brazil."

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