In 2025, Brazil’s Congress and city councils have been unusually busy debating what counts as a crime. Not corruption. Not graft. Not billion-dollar betting scandals sweeping football. Instead, lawmakers have tabled 63 separate proposals in just five months—each aimed squarely at funk, the bass-heavy soundtrack of Brazil’s favelas.

The official reasoning is always the same: funk supposedly glorifies drug trafficking, hyper-sexualizes youth, disturbs the peace. Bills call for banning artists from performing at public events, or for withholding state funding if a setlist contains a beat deemed “apologia.” None explicitly say “criminalize funk,” but the target is clear enough.

For young Black artists like Luana Maia, a 23-year-old singer from São Paulo’s Grajaú district, the real crime is the attack itself.

“They’re not just coming for the music,” she says. “They’re coming for us—our community, our voice, our way of living.”

Policing the dance floor

Born in Rio’s favelas in the 1980s and spread nationwide through sound systems and pirate radio, funk has always been policed—literally. Raids on bailes funk remain common, with officers justifying batons and tear gas as “noise control.” But for Caio Prince, a DJ and producer raised in Jardim Miriam, the explanation is laughable.

“These operations don’t just stop parties,” he says. “They cut off an entire local economy—bars, food stalls, kids selling water on the street. They make the culture inaccessible. And they disguise it as fighting crime, when what they’re really doing is repressing Black culture.”

The repression echoes familiar patterns: samba was once criminalized for its supposed ties to vagabondage and disorder. Capoeira, too, was outlawed in the 19th century as a “crime against public safety.” Each of these genres now sits at the core of Brazil’s cultural export machine.

More than music: an economy, a mirror

Funk is not niche. It dominates Brazil’s streaming charts, breaks TikTok algorithms, and fills dance floors from Salvador to São Paulo. But its biggest stages remain the streets. For artists like Prince and Maia, funk is both a megaphone and a mirror.

“It tells the truth about how we live,” Prince explains. “Sometimes that’s about love, sometimes it’s about money, sometimes it’s about pain. People don’t want to hear that truth when it comes raw from the periphery. They’d rather criminalize it.”

Funk also pays bills. For countless working-class families, the culture isn’t just artistic—it’s economic. Dancers, DJs, MCs, graphic designers, video makers, fashion stylists: the circuit sustains jobs far beyond the artist with the mic. Criminalizing funk means criminalizing livelihoods.

Resistance in 808s

For Maia, the music is survival as much as expression.

“Funk and hip-hop are megaphones,” she says. “They let us sing our pains, our wins, and our worldview. That’s pure resistance and pure self-esteem. We create trends. We create style. It’s not explainable—you have to live it.”

She points out what feels like the most bitter irony: politicians spend hours drafting anti-funk legislation while ignoring real public needs—safe cultural spaces, better schools, more youth programs.

Prince agrees, but with a sharper edge. Funk, he says, has already won. It’s too massive to bury.

“The genre is huge now. It’s in the charts, it’s global. The only thing left is to respect it, democratize it, and guarantee safety for the people who built it. Because this music represents Brazil, whether they like it or not.”

A culture under siege

The fight over funk is not just a moral panic—it’s a racial one. Bills that cloak themselves in the language of “protecting children” carry an older subtext: fear of Black bodies, Black noise, Black joy.

Seen from the outside, Brazil often sells itself as the land of rhythm. Samba, bossa nova, tropicalia: all now canonized, state-funded, UNESCO-stamped. Funk is the next in that lineage. The question is whether it will be celebrated in a museum fifty years from now—or destroyed in police raids today.

Until then, artists like Maia and Prince will keep blasting basslines in defiance.

Because for them, funk isn’t just music. It’s survival, it’s income, it’s identity. And trying to criminalize that?

That’s the real crime.