Dexter and AfroX know what they are talking about: both are currently serving time in the prison. Like an increasing number of Brazilian inmates, they are turning to rap as an outlet for their rage. At the overcrowded and decrepit Casa de Detenco, Latin America’s largest prison, inmates used to spend their days wallowing in anger and despair and dreaming only of escape. Now many stay up late composing lyrics and dream of agents and record contracts. They have found, in the microphone and on the prison stage, something they never had on the outside: a voice, an identity and a shred of recognition in a world that never seemed to notice. “Rap is my life,” says AfroX, the 26-year-old vocalist for 509-E, who is serving a five-year sentence for armed robbery. “Without rap I probably wouldn’t be alive.”
Prisoners are hardly the only Brazilians feeling the beat. Rap, first founded in America’s inner cities, is a far cry from Brazil’s more melodious homegrown rhythms, like the samba and bossa nova. But it has found an eager audience in the favelas, or shantytowns, that hug the outskirts of the big cities. With its hair-trigger beat and ballistic rhymes, rap seems to have special resonance with prisoners. In the last year or so, some 10 separate rap groups have emerged within Casa de Detenco. Though their verses don’t always scan and their acoustics are often reminiscent of traffic jams, these novice rappers are beginning to draw a sizable following, both inside and outside the prison walls. Some popular jailhouse tunes have even found their way onto radio playlists, MTV and the turntables of inner-city hip-hop clubs.
The inmates have plenty to rap about. Brazilian prisons epitomize the bottom tier of one of the world’s most lopsided societies. Half of the country’s 170,000 prisoners are nonwhite (or “dark-skinned,” in the language of Brazil’s census) and under the age of 35. Some 95 percent are male and poor. Two of every three dropped out of school before reaching the eighth grade.
Of all Brazil’s prisons, none is worse than the Casa de Detenco–known as Carandiru, after the nearby metro stop. Swallowing an entire city block at the scruffy edge of So Paulo, Carandiru looks like a housing project gone horribly wrong. Massive tallow brick walls encase crumbling five-story cell blocks, stacked like outsize headstones. Built half a century ago to hold 3,200, the facility now houses 7,240; at times, three or four inmates are crammed into a single cell. To most Brazilians, Carandiru is best known as the site where riot police killed 111 prisoners while breaking up a rebellion in 1992. Authorities planned to demolish the penitentiary after that, but a surge of crime left them desperate for cell space. Now violence and infectious diseases like AIDS and tuberculosis spread easily through its packed cell blocks.
Much prison rap depicts the horrors of life behind bars. “You won’t find me doing debutante balls,” says MV Bill, a popular gangsta rapper who hails from the drug-ridden Rio de Janeiro slum of Cidade de Deus. Bile and bullets are more the jailhouse style. But these rappers also address the more serious problems of the Brazilian shantytowns, like poverty and hunger. “Before we found rap we were poor, black, sons of bitches from the slums,” says Dexter of 509-E. “Now we are poor, black, revolutionary sons of bitches from the slums.”
Where these rappers envision a world of justice and racial equality, record moguls see profits. And they are lining up at the prison gates to cash in. Although no chart-busters have emerged from the prison yard, the prospects are promising. “Apology of Crime,” the 1998 debut album by the Carandiru band Detentos do Rap (Prisoners of Rap), has sold 30,000 copies. Their second CD, “The Nightmare Continues,” is also selling well. “Powder Keg,” by Dexter and AfroX, is a featured cut on Brazil 1, a recent disk produced by Jose dos Reis Encina, a.k.a. Escadinha, a notorious Rio de Janeiro drug trafficker turned Protestant evangelical, who is now serving out a commuted jail sentence. According to Zambia Records, Escadinha’s label, Brazil 1 has sold 100,000 copies, a gold record in the Brazilian market. “Rap is cheap to produce and a growing form of popular music that no recording studio can afford to ignore,” says Wilson Souto, president of the Brazilian division of Warner Records, who recently toured Carandiru prison. “I’m keeping my antenna up.”
Yet more than fat contracts and glory are at stake. The rise of prison rap is also the reflection of a change in policy at Carandiru that has helped soothe tensions at the detention house. Prison officials, once considered adversaries, now encourage inmates to write poetry, paint, box and play soccer. Prisoners are even allowed conjugal visits with wives and girlfriends. Ironically, the bellicose rappers play a central role in keeping the peace. “Yes, the lyrics are aggressive and driven by anger, but rap helps channel the resentment of prisoners who feel they’ve been forgotten by society,” says Mauricio Guarnieri, director of Carandiru.
And that’s good for everyone concerned. Instead of wreaking mutiny and mayhem, prison rapping seems to promote peace, mended ways and even something verging on regret. “Out on the street, I didn’t have much respect for anything,” says Eduardo (Do Rap) Fonseca, a 24-year-old prison rapper with the Detentos do Rap. “I thought I had a chest of steel. I didn’t think twice of boosting a car at gunpoint or shooting it out with the cops. Now, I think about my family. They come on visiting day, and when they go away, a piece of me goes with them.”
Between visits, Do Rap often kills time in fellow rapper Rony’s cell, listening to CDs on his Aiwa stereo system, or watching the news on a 15-inch Samsung color television. Both are luxuries purchased with the proceeds from their best-selling “Apology of Crime” CD. The album preaches that crime, drugs and violence don’t pay. But rapping about them just might.
