For many years in various cities of Brazil,baile funk,a genre of music,was looked down upon as the music of the poor. It was rebellious,negative and full of explicit lyrics that dealt with sex and poverty. The pesky and overambitious world of music had conveniently ignored this tropical bass-electronic dance music and then in 2004,Berlin-based DJ Daniel Haaksman brought this genre to the fore and created his signature groove with the release of his debut album titled,Rio Baile Funk Favela Booty Beats. Many international artistes soon followed and baile funk got a new lease of life. The 43-year-old journalist and DJ is now touring India,as part of India Goes 3D festival,to give music connoisseurs a glimpse into this genre. After giving a unique silent performance in Mumbai on Friday night,he will perform in Delhi on April 28. A friend who studied in Brazil in the early 2000s gifted me a CD of baile funk numbers and I was blown away. As a music journalist,I thought I knew everything about electronic music,but this was a treasure trove and I just had to put it out, says Haaksman,who then travelled to Rio de Janeiro,where baile funk is most popular,to discover the genre. Inspired,he released the music a year later in Europe. The perception of this trashy music changed over time. Known for tracks such as Copabanana,Maki man and Kid Conga,Haaksman has a penchant for working on undiscovered and local music forms. From Kuduro a form of dance music that originated in Angola to Kwaito a style of South African house music and Moombahton a house-reggae genre created by an American DJ in 2010,Haaksman plays it all. Obviously,I have added my own style to it all and adapted it to European music sensibility, he adds. While Haaksman performs across the world and is slowly becoming one of the bigger alt music names in the industry,he admits that his style of music is not even counted among the top 10 genres of the world. It will take a long time. Even the music scene in Germany is dominated by techno, he says. This year,he is busy with a unique and exciting project,apart from handling various artistes under his recording label called Man Recordings. None of these local sub-styles and sub-genres of music have been archived nor has anyone ever written about them in the form of a book. I am now working on a project that requires me to give them some concrete presence. For the same,I am looking for a local very Indian music genre that I can write about in this book, he adds. In India for another week,Haaksman is on a look out.
