Machine Gun Voices: Favelas and Utopia in Brazilian Gangster Funk by Paul Sneed (review)

Sneed's first contact with Rocinha, Rio's biggest favela, occurred in 1990, a year after the first Brazilian funk record was released in Portuguese.3 At the time he was not interested in researching the music genre but more in the experiences of Rocinha residents and the drug gangs that ruled the favelas (17). Paul Sneed's book Machine Gun Voices: Favelas and Utopia in Brazilian Gangster Funk is the first ethnography about this Afro-Atlantic electronic scene to be published in English. More than a mere outcome of a social context - Rio's favelas - Sneed sees gangster funk as a kind of mediator between drug traffickers and the favelas' inhabitants (214). The literature on Brazilian funk has expanded since Sneed's PhD dissertation in 2003 on gangster funk