The first thing to know about Thiagson is that he’s not asking for permission. Classically trained, conservatory-polished, and now a PhD from USP, he walked into the ivory tower with a subwoofer and started diagramming the beat like Euclid in an alleyway. His doctoral work treats funk’s chassis not as chaos but as design—patterns, ratios, shapes—an architecture of groove that explains why bodies move before the mind decides. Then he took that map back to the streets it came from.

Beethoven vs. the Baile

He knows the walls he’s pushing against. As he told Brasil de Fato: 

“In truth, studying Beethoven isn’t really about Beethoven; it’s because we reproduce the colonizer’s culture, which values the white man and disdains our peripheral culture—the very center of social life for Brazilian youth.”

The fight isn’t with symphonies; it’s with the hierarchies that decided whose music counts as “civilization” and whose counts as “noise.”

Panic as Policy

If Brazil’s cultural establishment still flinches at baile funk’s volume, Thiagson has made a career out of asking why the flinch exists. In interviews around National Funk Day, he points out the old trick: blame the music so you don’t have to face the country. When people insist lyrics “cause” crime, he sees a seduction—easy TV logic that hides deeper fears about class, race, and youth autonomy. Funk, he says, is a counter-narrative, a technology of speech, a place where kids test-drive adulthood and agency.

A Book Made for the Streets

That insistence comes from somewhere lived. Raised between classical harmony and street rhythm, Thiagson learned to code-switch long before he put it in print. His breakout book, Tudo o que você sempre quis saber sobre Funk… mas tinha medo de perguntar, reads like a field manual for unlearning: chapters on misogyny panic, moralism, the “kids in funk” debate, and the way institutions keep exporting knowledge upward while blocking it downstream. It’s built for wide circulation, laced with QR codes to audio and video, collapsing the wall between scholarship and scene. (Academia can footnote; Thiagson prefers links.)

Peer Review in Paraisópolis

And while many academics protect their authority with distance, Thiagson does the opposite—he shows up where funk actually breathes. When he launched his book, he didn’t choose a university auditorium or a cultural center in São Paulo’s upscale districts; he chose Paraisópolis, one of the city’s largest favelas, a territory where baile funk isn’t a research object but the weekend oxygen.

By taking the launch there, he flipped the academic script. Instead of submitting his work to a panel of professors in tweed, he treated the crowd itself—MCs, dancers, young kids, mothers, hustlers—as the reviewers. Their nods, their critiques, their laughter in the pauses between tracks: that was the real validation. In a sense, Paraisópolis became his symposium, the baile its keynote.

This move isn’t just symbolic. It answers a bigger question: who is scholarship for? If the knowledge about funk only circulates in PDFs behind university paywalls, then it’s dead on arrival. By holding the event inside the community, Thiagson insists that funk studies must loop back to funk’s makers. He stages a form of circular authorship where theory and practice, scholar and subject, collapse into the same dancefloor.

For media elites who want a sanitized syllabus, he brings the sweat and distortion instead. If academia is supposed to test ideas against reality, then for Thiagson, reality is a sound system in Paraisópolis, the crowd moving as one, judging whether your words actually match the beat.

Censorship with Better Branding

He’s also blunt about policy theatre. When local politicians try “anti-funk” school measures dressed as child protection, he calls the bluff: it’s censorship with better branding, another attempt to police the aesthetics of the poor. The music doesn’t invent violence; it describes a city that already did. That clarity travels well in podcasts and op-eds, where he keeps translating heat into language the mainstream can understand.

Drawing the Beat

What makes his voice distinct isn’t just the politics; it’s the method. Thiagson doesn’t talk about funk like noise or even just “culture” — he dissects it like architecture. In his doctoral research at USP, he mapped funk’s grooves using geometry, showing how syncopation, repetition, and rupture form a kind of blueprint. The beat isn’t random; it has angles, intervals, and tension points that can be drawn on paper as clearly as a floor plan.

He likes to describe rhythm as something you can sketch on a napkin: a sudden drop here, a delayed kick there, a bassline that holds until the last possible second before releasing. Funk’s supposed chaos, once visualized, reveals itself as design— deliberate decisions coded into the music’s DNA. What moralists dismiss as “decadence” or “obscenity” is in fact a rigorously structured sound system of pleasure and release.

This shift in language is radical. By turning the conversation from decency to design, he strips away the panic that has long surrounded funk. When you see the grid, the fear collapses; the music is simply doing what it was engineered to do: compressing everyday reality into four-on-the-floor urgency, flirting with taboo, pulling a crowd into a single synchronized now. That’s not corruption — it’s craft, every bit as precise as a symphony score or a jazz improvisation.

And in that recognition lies the subversion. To map funk is to prove its legitimacy: not as a chaotic outburst from the margins, but as a sophisticated system of knowledge encoded in rhythm. The diagram on the page and the body in the dance are two sides of the same equation. One proves what the other already knew: the science of the beat is written in sweat.

Bodies Don’t Lie

And the pleasure of it is impossible to legislate away. As he told reporters: 

“Society is racist: it loves the music but not the people who make it. Yet no one can resist funk’s sonic seduction, an empirical art rooted in the body. We don’t hear funk only with our ears; we hear it with our bodies, dancing.”

If his thesis draws blueprints of the rhythm, his politics remind us why: funk is resistance that moves through hips before it reaches the head.

The Meme-Literate Professor

Online, he’s patient and meme-literate—short videos dismantling lazy takes, defending artists, and inviting people who “don’t like funk” to say what they’re actually afraid of. The reach matters: culture wars are fought in comment sections long before they reach hearing rooms. The trick is to keep the door open without watering down the argument. He rarely does.

So where does this go? Thiagson’s project hints at a different pipeline: research that circulates horizontally, pedagogy that respects the dancefloor as a lab, criticism that takes pleasure seriously. If funk is Brazil’s unruliest mirror, he’s the person holding it steady—long enough for the country to look, and maybe recognize itself.