Halc DJ’s Brazilian Funk Album Fights A Righteous War Against The Algorithms

Like many great Brazilian funk albums, pressing play on Halc DJ’s Bruxaria Não É Phonk is a little like fitting a jackhammer bit into your ear canal and waiting for the impending sonic onslaught to render you utterly, blissfully destroyed. Surprisingly, Halc makes you wait a bit for it. The album begins with “Phonk É o Caralho,” a tour de force of funkery that, with no less than eight beat switch-ups across just three minutes, takes you on a breakneck journey through the breadth of the DJ/producer’s talents and of the genre’s possibilities. But you have to get a little more than 30 seconds into the opener, when its second beat-switch fades, an appropriately ominous voice belches the word “bruxaria,” and a shrill whistle—these kinds of tinnital chirps are known as “tuim/tuin,” the prevalence of tuim being one of the hallmarks of the bruxaria subgenre—rings steadily and then begins to strobe overtop a ratty, red-lining bass pulse. It’s only then that Halc really drags you into the depths of the underworld where this type of joyously brain-scrambling funk lives and thrives.

Part of what I love about funk is its force and immediacy. This isn’t a genre that hides its charms. Songs usually lunge at you straight away, dig in their claws, and start shaking you violently, often at rhythms that chop and change in an instant. Then, after your body has gotten the hang of dancing at this jouncy pace, the traditionally short tracks come to an end, maybe giving you a second to catch your breath, only for the next one to begin and the process to start all over. This force and immediacy is what makes it so easy to discover if a particular song, artist, or the genre itself is for you or not, even if you don’t have too much familiarity with Brazilian funk as a whole. It only takes but so much throttling before you can tell whether or not you’re into it.

None of that should give the impression that funk is in any sense simple or predictable, though. If a Halc DJ, a D.Silvestre, an MC Ktrine, or whoever else manages to pull you into the funk underworld, and you decide to stick around and explore, you’ll quickly discover how vast and varied the genre really is—from scene to scene, artist to artist, and even from track to track from the same artist. Bruxaria Não É Phonk is a testament to this immensity. Halc’s music is very purposively in funk mandelão’s bruxaria style, drowning in tuim and darkness and noise, with the requisite blaring, shredded bass and the chopped, stutter-starting-and-repeating rap verses; all the demented verve that makes the name “bruxaria” (“witchcraft” in English) so apt is here in abundance. However, Halc and his co-producers—another cool aspect of funk: how often producers get together and work on a track side-by-side—make a point of showcasing and expanding bruxaria’s horizons.

The most striking example of this can be heard in the album’s rhythms. Funk is one of those genres that, especially in its early days, was largely defined by the prevalence of a certain rhythm. Like reggaeton with the beat from Shabba Ranks’ “Dem Bow,” or New Orleans bounce with the one from The Showboys’ “Drag Rap,” Brazilian funk was founded upon the rhythm of DJ Battery Brain’s 1988 track “808 Volt Mix (Beatapella Mix).” In fact, much of what qualified as funk in the ’90s involved DJs simply playing the Volt Mix beat over other songs and thereby funkifying them for club- and partygoers who couldn’t get enough. As the genre developed, producers brought in new rhythms that profoundly shaped the sound’s direction, principally the “doo-doom, cha, cha, doo-doo-cha” beatbox beat that defined the 2000s, and the Afro-Brazilian atabaque drums of the tamborzão beat that got big in the 2010s.

Funk today is still very much steeped in these rhythms. I don’t think you can listen to a single album or even EP in the genre without hearing at least one of the three. Indeed, Bruxaria Não É Phonk uses all three of these foundational rhythms at various points, to great effect. (My personal favorite song on the album, “Tamborzada do Submundo,” features a thundering tamborzão line that brings Brazilian life to a chipmunked sample that the old, pre-psycho Kanye West would’ve killed to come across.) The way the Volt Mix beat ties back to funk’s roots in Miami bass (in many ways funk’s big brother, a relation based in Miami’s status as the nexus point between South America and the U.S., where DJs looking for new records to spin for the largely Afro-Brazilian “funk” parties would wind up and fill their crates), and how tamborzão links to even deeper Afro-Brazilian musical lineages, firmly embeds bruxaria in these traditions, which are thereby preserved, transformed, and furthered.

In addition to the standard funk beats, Halc’s album also throws in lots of rhythms that immediately call to mind other dance music genres. This is a telling choice. Though often socially separated from the broader EDM scene in Brazil—which is largely middle-class, white, and exclusionary—Halc, alongside similarly minded funkeiros like Adame DJ and DJ Ramemes, shows that funk is nevertheless in conversation with the dance traditions it is of course still linked to as an electronic music scene. Nowhere is this intermingling of rhythms and sounds more evident than on “Ritmo Cruel,” which incorporates the beatbox beat, hints of tamborzão, and house-y four-on-the-floor kicks into the typical bruxaria grime, forming an incredibly wide-ranging melange that makes the sonic case for Halc’s DJ tag: Only mandelão advances.

If you are an American funk-initiate like me, the asunder-rending effects of Halc DJ’s album do not require any foreknowledge of terms like tamborzão or tuim to take full possession of your mind and body. Again, this genre’s impact is forceful and immediate, and these songs hit you like a wrecking ball no matter how versed you are in the genre’s history. However, ideas about genre, bruxaria’s place in funk, and Brazilian funk’s place in the global music scene are of central concern to this album.

It’s right there in the title, which translates to Bruxaria Is Not Phonk. The context is crucial. The “phonk” in question has little, though not nothing, to do with its homophonic Brazilian relative. Specifically, Halc is referencing a genre known as “drift phonk,” an unholy (and not in the cool, witchy sense) afterbirth of the vagaries of the internet. Drift phonk is itself an offshoot of phonk, originally coined by SpaceGhostPurrp to describe the neo-Memphis revivalism he made popular in the early 2010s. SGP’s phonk was in direct lineage with the dark, blown-out, bass-drenched stylings of Three 6 Mafia’s ’90s heyday, with modernizing touches of trap and cloud rap (two genres themselves heavily indebted to the Memphis sound). As SGP faded out of relevance, and disciples like Denzel Curry took their sound further into the Soundcloud rap territory, phonk was taken up by neo-neo-revivalists whose often instrumental music harkened back to SGP and Three 6, but also to the chilled out jazzy beats of, say, Digable Planets.

This contemporary phonk (sometimes called rare phonk), exemplified by the likes of Soudiere and DJ Smokey, is inoffensive, even pleasant, but inessential. In that way, it fits into a long tradition of thriving genres that grow stale over time after the black youths who created the sound move on and are replaced by well-meaning but unimaginative whites. Far more objectionable is the phonk subgenre of drift phonk, which, as Kieran Press-Reynolds details over at Pitchfork, is like a parasite that has at this point wholly taken over its host. Drift phonk borrows some of the aesthetic signifiers of phonk—dark vibes, a heavy low-end, snippets of Memphis rap—but sprinkles them into what is overall insipid fare. Drift phonk songs tend to hew pretty closely to the sounds and tempos you’d expect from a bland house track that might soundtrack an unskippable YouTube ad, but combined with some surface-level nods to phonk and other electronic genres popular online (Jersey club, sigilkore, Brazilian funk itself) in an effort to provide an illusion of freshness.

Unsurprisingly, drift phonk has captured the imaginations of some of our most tasteless music listeners: gym bros, mommy’s-basement-type internet dorks, Eastern Europeans. The genre has earned the derisive nickname “edit music,” which reflects its massive popularity on TikTok. On that platform, it is the go-to soundtrack for fancam videos, which compile clips of anything from anime characters to athletes. This makes drift phonk sort of like the more annoying stepchild of all the terrible techno that once was ubiquitous in soccer highlight reels. The grabbiness of its flashy but cheap filigrees, which usually are lifted from other, more propulsive genres, the deceptive verve of ersatz avant-garde, the open conformism, the ironic tone it strikes as being bad but maybe bad on purpose and therefore actually good—it’s not a surprise that drift phonk found a natural home in the fast-paced world of short-form video, where music is just another lever to tweak so that the piece of “content” might do better.

What drift phonk creators lack in talent and creativity, they make up for with determination and a sophisticated understanding of the eminently gameable infrastructure of the internet. There is real money to be made in producing a track that soundtracks a viral TikTok or sneaks its way into a Spotify playlist, and because drift phonk has already proven its ability to surf to the top of these algorithms, there are now legions of imitators looking to make a quick buck. As the Pitchfork article lays out, the “market” of drift phonk is currently flooded with producers trying to capitalize on the genre’s virality, throwing “phonk” sounds atop intentionally same-y sounding electronic beats and the word “phonk” into YouTube titles alongside dubious geographical or ethnic designations, hoping to get swept up into an edit or playlist or autoplay carousel or meme and hit the monetization jackpot. One of the more popular subsubgenres of phonk is Brazilian Phonk, which is largely identical to typical drift phonk but with Brazilian signifiers (exclamations in Portuguese, synth sounds vaguely reminiscent of funk) taking the place of the Memphis ones.

Because of this, phonk has become something of a slop farm, emerging out of and thriving due to the chaotic and literally inhuman swamp of the internet’s incentives. One of the biggest producers of toxic internet incentives is Spotify itself, which, as YouTuber and phonk producer Von Storm explained in a video essay a couple years ago, has helped distort the very conception of the genre via its popular but misleadingly curated phonk playlist, which consists almost exclusively of drift phonk. Because of this, what is commonly thought of as “phonk” has very little to do the sound SpaceGhostPurrp was defining when he came up with the term, or with what is made by the second-wave phonksters who’ve tried to keep the spirit of SGP’s phonk alive. Instead, phonk now usually refers to a bastardized genre produced largely by cynics, whose target audience isn’t actual music fans but more so the backend code that runs TikTok’s For You feed.

The sense you get when switching between funk and phonk is that one genre is truly alive while the other isn’t. The difference is one of embodiment. The distinguishing features that make funk funk are, of course, in part aesthetic, but they often emerge as a direct response to real life. Bruxaria’s tuim on its own sounds really cool and spooky, but it is inspired by the effects of lança perfume, a popular party drug in Brazil that has as one of its side effects a high-pitched ringing in the user’s ears. As Brazilian journalist GG Albuquerque explained in a talk about funk culture, bruxaria producers introduced these shrill whistle sounds into their beats in order to heighten that side effect in all the lança-sniffers at the party, blurring the notion of whether it’s the drug or the music getting them high.

Albuquerque also mentioned in that talk how the loudness and noise of funk, which might come across as intrusive or destabilizing devoid of context, is experienced by favela-dwellers as comfort, since their cramped but tightly knit communities are always abuzz with the sounds of life, the glaring exception being when the police come and everything goes quiet. The frayed, distorted sounds of funk are both consequence and cause of the fact that, at the street bailes (dance parties) where funk culture truly lives, the sound systems are these massive walls of speakers and subwoofers (called paredãoes, literally “big walls”) that are driven into the favela by truck and blast out the songs that rock the parties from sun-down to sun-up—unless, that is, the cops come and bust these often unsanctioned and criminalized parties first. Funk is radically experimental as a rule, experienced primarily communally, and is inextricably entwined with the people, communities, and cultures from which it arises. In those ways, funk is everything phonk is not.

Unfortunately, it’s totally possible that the infinitely deep and fascinating world of Brazilian funk could get subsumed into the mindless kind of “Brazilian phonk” that’s found in mega popular YouTube videos with titles like “TROLLFACE BRAZILIAN PHONK 2024 :skull_and_crossbones_emoji: | BEST BADASS GYM PHONK :skull_emoji:” in the same way that “phonk” is now synonymous with “drift phonk.” And it’s in that struggle that Halc DJ positions himself and his genre with Bruxaria Não É Phonk. (It is quite interesting to me though that funk and phonk of the SGP vein are actually not-so-distant cousins, due to the influence on both of modern trap and the old Miami bass. In fact, there are more than a few moments on Halc’s album you could easily imagine SGP himself having had a hand in.) Evidence of this battle pops up throughout the album. “Anti TikTok” opens with an interviewer asking a DJ I assume is Halc whether he makes music with blowing up on TikTok in mind. Halc scoffs and replies that he’s only thinking about his fans from the favela while producing, at which point the uncharacteristically soft sounds (a dig at phonk?) playing behind the interview give way to some absolutely filthy bruxaria bumping. “Som das Estrelas” is probably the album’s most direct attack on phonk. At two points in the song, a typically hard and shapeshifting beat changes into a flatter sound with a sample that sounds like something out of an early ’90s video game—a clear reference to the kinds of sounds common to phonk. After that bit continues for a while, Halc and co-producer DJ Blakes interrupt and say, essentially, “Bro, this shit is so weak,” after which the song returns with a swarm of tuim and booming tamborzão drums, making stark the difference between phonk and funk.

A neat encapsulation of the whole issue is right there in the title of album’s first track, which plays with the phonetically small but contextually enormous difference between funk and phonk. “Phonk É o Caralho,” or “Phonk Is Shit,” the title reads. With a seemingly small tweak that actually makes all the difference, it could read “Funk É do Caralho,” or “Funk Is the Shit.” The genius of Bruxaria Não É Phonk is in how it makes you feel the difference.