Lured in by the promise of an epic after party, the audience at the Los Angeles screening of Favela On Blast at the popular dance club Cinespace was as interesting as the film itself. Produced by Philadelphia native Wesley Pentz, popularly known as Diplo and also one half of the duo Major Lazer, the film delves into the Brazilian Baile Funk culture, a strong influence on his work. The popularity of Diplo led to the unusual make-up of the crowd for a film that would usually be screened in front of a room of musicologist and critics. With a rough median age of twenty-two, and adorned in vibrantly colored sneakers and respective LA hipster dance gear, the audience waited patiently as though they were at a grade school assembly. The Q+A afterwards was a continuation of that dynamic, with Diplo leading the young Los Angeles dance scene into the world of ethnomusicology.
The film itself surpassed expectations in terms of scholasticism, and definitely filled a gap in the Brazilian music movie arsenal. Exposing the contemporary Brazilian funk scene in a classic genre legitimizing way, folkloric qualities and community consumption of the music were at the core of the film, feeling very much like a documentary that would have been created by academics striving to bring Hip Hop into a more legitimate artistic dialogue during the early ’90s. By the end of the film, booty popping seems like a cultural nod rather than a purely lewd sexually charged move and the MC’s contemporary Brazilian poets, rather than chauvinistic mantra makers.
Diplo and the Mad Decent crew without a doubt sent a message with the documentary; however, the more inadvertent message the film relayed was that Mad Decent sees need to legitimize their dance music to the public in some way and has a desire to further contextualize their label in the global music sphere. Promptly after the twenty minute Q+A, Pentz shouts “are you ready to have a dance party?” followed by cheers from the ever patient audience who had their fill of musicology for the day, and perhaps for some, the first does ever. Hopefully there are more of these happenings to come.
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