Laiz left her Sau Paulo home at just 14, moving to the States then relocating to Germany in 2018. Ela Partiu was recorded in historic Hildesheim with an extended musical family passing through, identities spanning Cuba, Algeria, Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Australia, South Africa, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Sudan, Peru, USA and Madagascar.

The album is named in honour of one of Laiz’s heroes – Ela Partiu is the name of a classic Tim Maia track, the ‘70s tortured soul-boy from Rio de Janeiro. It also translates to ‘she has gone’, referring to Laiz’s early-life decision to leave her family home, unable to adapt to a life as a Jehovah’s Witness, from a city in the state of Sao Paulo.

This upbringing brought musical boundaries with it, and Laiz didn’t discover hip hop culture until she arrived in Berlin at 14. Wordplay and lyricism spoke to her heart, and she looked back to Brazil and artists such as producer Marcelo D2, who combined samba traditions with poetry.

It’s in this vein that Laiz has selected five key influences for Bonafide – sit back and discover some gems.

Hip hop is globally, an unstoppable force – which in my biased opinion- is the biggest revolutionary movement of the past 5 decades, the real MCs, a legacy from the revolutionaries who shook the world in the 60s to 80s. From Black Panthers to the Latin awakening. 

Bars, they aren’t just like any other lyrics, the audacity and polemics in a well written hip hop song, the references, historical teaching and philosophical tandems hidden behind it awaken something in us that most of our teachers, priests, parents and caregivers failed on giving: blunt, indigestible, hard facts, of the world we encounter ourselves in, and how to manoeuvre it with honesty and self esteem. 

Whereas hip hop started as a North American cultural movement in the Bronx, its roots are deep in Africa, and therefore, all over the world. And especially where I come from, Brazil. The country with the biggest African descendant population outside the continent, where gods, language, rhythms and cosmovision managed to hide itself throughout the history that tries to erase it. 

So here are my Top 5 Hip Hop Albums which were crucial to my education (both lyrically and musically) from Brasil. 

5 – Esú – Baço Exu do Blues

Maybe the best of our generation and many others, not only from Brasil, but from the ones I came across. I remember sitting with my mother and giving her printed lyrics of this album, without any music, for us to study together, so she could better understand what is this so called Hip-Hop I’m putting myself in the line for. 

NIne tracks and none of them falls short of any texts from Guimarães Rosa, or Carlos Drummond de Andrade (great poets from the homeland). It feels like a cleansing of spirit from a soul stuck between oppressed gods and the hailing of a culture who might just be the answer for our nation. 

Message?

Black gods are being assassinated in Brazil, both the ones in flesh, and the ones in spirit, in a fatal immortality. 

4- Emicida – Pra quem já mordeu um cachorro por comida até que a gente chegou longe 

Emicida keeps it in the street. Raising his ethics and morals, that are now being acclaimed worldwide, which he stills carries.

Sun Tzu has The Art of War, Emicida has, “For those who have bitten a dog for food, we’ve come a long way” – and he did. Feeding his strength for change in the misery lived by him and many other Brazilian families in a land where every seed can grow.

This album never left my side, and is always here to remind me, “when the paths get you confused, it’s necessary to come back to the beginning”. This is the first piece that opened up the path for the further construction of new horizons, through music.

Emicida is not only a warrior, he is a visionary. And this album is also here in my top 5 for for the way it was recorded, printed and sold.

The start of an empire, the “Ghost Lab” (Laboratório Fantasma) where he, his mother and brother from the inside of his home, package with craft paper and stamped by hand, the album, he sold in the streets of São Paulo, hand in hand and in a year sold ten thousand copies, winning the title of Golden Record. 

I don’t think I need to say anything else. Hip Hop. A serious business of dreamers in war. 

3 – Criolo – convoque seu Buda

Like a humble man, he keeps on humbling us with lyrics that remind me of those wise men you encounter in the street once in a little while that bring you a sanity of mind. His writing, simple. Not the type of simple that is small. But the type of simple, who all ears on earth can receive with a smile and a nod of head, from children to a 90 year old on his deathbed.

He just makes sense, explaining capitalism and imperialism talking about the baker and that bread you buy every morning.

Criolo is an exemplary Brazilian. Convoque seu Buda unites all his strengths, his sound is immaculate and mature. Reinventing and refining Brasilian Hip-Hop by giving a spotlight to Brazilian jazz, samba, MPB (Música popular brasileira_, reggae and boom bap. With compositions that I really wish to be the norm in our hip hop, but which are far from being common. 

2 – Planet Hemp – A invasão Sagaz  dos Homens Fumaça

This one is huge fun.  A laugh on the face of law. A swing in the face of police and corrupt politicians. Planet Hemp was a huge voice in the struggle for legalization of weed, and against mass incarceration of the black youth in the nineties. After they were put in jail for talking about “Drugs” they came out the gates with “the clever invasion of the smoke men”, a call for cultural revolution for freedom of speech and against what they call “cultural dictatorship”. Their arrest being one of the biggest cases of censorship after the military dictatorship in 1964 in Brazil. Only 12 years after the reinstallment of democracy, the band was suffering with censorship, shows cancelled, CDs being seized from stores. Until not only their art but their bodies were put to jail, on basis of music.  

After arrest, being convicted of very same thing they denounced in their lyrics. They took the bottom to strike down hypocrisy and the myth that we are a free country. The first track just put down the law for which they were arrested for. And they follow getting punkier and punkier just pretty much calling for civil disobedience, and arresting their case that we still live under dictatorship, and under American control. It’s raw, dirty. Even though I am not a fan of punk, this still comes as one of my favourite albums for the attitude and the relevant points about our political system. 

Honestly, national heroes, leaving a mark on world history with an album who is the living proof. That imperialism is alive regardless of what the TV, politicians and our school says. 

1- Instituto – Coleção Nacional 

The debut Album of the collective Instituto. Another revolution, a complete sound journey that ties Hip Hop, Samba, Jazz and reggae together. Maybe one of the biggest and most silent seeds when it come to the introduction of instrumentation to our national Hip Hop. Experimental at its finest. Uniting different rappers and producers from the scene with Jazz musicians in an attempt to redefine Brazilian music in the 2000s. It’s bold. radical. Refreshing even today. And it is my top 1 not for the lyricism nor for its historical influence. But for one man, also the man in charge of the 3 Albums above, Daniel Ganjaman. One of the founders of instituto. In a way he reminds me of young.vishnu and instituto, the new love experience, a Brazilian version of SAULT from the 90s. A collective of musicians, who don’t tour, don’t have a specific formation, but are in ever changing transition in the forefront of what is possible within our most loved genres. 

This was a playground for pushing the boundaries of what was possible. And I just have to thank these musical lovers for trying to think so ahead, I still have to look forward if I want to get what they tried to do in Coleção Nacional. 

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — First, Vitor Oliveira sold the ground floor of the bare-bones brick building he constructed near the top of his sprawling favela in Rio de Janeiro. Then he sold one of two second-floor apartments. Then his car.

It’s all for the music — for trap de cria, a new kind of hip hop that evokes gang life in Rio’s favelas.

Oliveira, 31, plowed the proceeds into constructing a tiny recording studio and editing room in the building’s final apartment. He returns there from his job — driving his motorcycle taxi up and down Rocinha, one of Latin America’s largest slums — to work at churning out 18 tracks and accompanying videos.

Trap de cria (rough translation: “homegrown trap”) is the fresh sound of this and other favelas, and remains largely unknown outside of them. Featuring a lyrical flow over synthesized drums, it is an offshoot of Atlanta-style trap and speaks to the day-to-day struggles of hardscrabble hoods.

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Except most of these rappers aren’t actual gangsters, though their millions of YouTube viewers wouldn’t know it from their videos that show them flaunting what appear to be real guns in working-class neighborhoods dominated by drug traffickers.

Homegrown trap’s bravado at times appears harmless dress-up, and at others aspirational glorification of a life in crime. The artists grew up beside boys who became lookouts, runners and enforcers for gangs. Some are still friendly.

“Our weapon is our voice, our ammunition is our lyrics,” Filipe Toledo, who raps as Lidinho 22, said as he popped a magazine into a plastic airsoft gun. Then he aimed its muzzle at the camera. “Boom.”

Not everyone is a fan. Last year, Rio police launched an investigation into a video by Marcos Borges and Ivens Santos, 22-year-olds rapping under the names MbNaVoz and Dom Melodia. Police are looking into how they obtained SUVs and whether real guns were used. The clip has been viewed 4 million times.

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Brazil’s civil police said that Borges and Santos face accusations of inciting crime and association with drug trafficking, and could be indicted for illegally carrying firearms if it’s confirmed they were real.

“Freedom of expression has a limit, and the limit is when a crime is committed. We understand a crime was committed,” police detective Allan Duarte told television channel SBT. “We cannot let children idolize these people who carry guns and practice crimes.”

Borges looks the menacing part: He has an Uzi tattooed on his neck. But he dismisses official criticism.

“We have to portray what we live,” he said in an interview, as he smoked marijuana. “We can’t sing about a woman walking Copacabana’s sidewalk or skateboarding if we didn’t live that. I go out of my house and see crazy stuff all the time. You got me? That’s how it is in the favela.”

Borges said they organized the shoot the same day as an illegal street race, and participants loaned them cars. He said they used airsoft guns, and doing otherwise would be idiotic.

The Associated Press checked out guns used for music videos while reporting in six favelas over eight days, and all were airsofts, including the rifles Borges and Santos brandished for an April 11 shoot. It also featured wads of fake bills; together, the two make the equivalent of one minimum-wage income from YouTube.

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They even changed the location of a shoot from a barbecue where they had planned to film, because they couldn’t afford to feed the traffickers who gathered there.

Gangs control many favelas that are home to 1.7 million people in Rio’s metro region, according to the 2010 census. Services are limited, as are chances of making it out of the favela.

“No one wants to hear kids are dying, young people are dying, that they didn’t give us opportunities,” said Thaina Denicia, 23, a former stripper who raps as Thai Flow.

Denicia doesn’t feature guns in her videos, nor judge those who do; her father was a trafficker and she grew up with crime inside her home. She wants to resonate in her cluster of favelas, Complexo do Alemao, and provide a window for outsiders who don’t know the first thing about their lives.

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“I talk about the characters crime created, society created, and where we can go and who we can be,” she added.

But popularity risks notoriety. Last year, when a rapper dissed city councilman Gabriel Monteiro, the former military police officer told his 6 million social media followers the “supposed artists” glorify crime and debase decent society. In February, a state lawmaker denounced homegrown trap’s malign influence, sharing a music video of motorcyclists brandishing rifles.

“Is this the culture you want for your children?” he asked on Instagram.

This isn’t the first music born of Rio’s majority Black and biracial communities to stir consternation. A century ago, police arrested samba musicians for as little as playing pandeiro, a hand drum.

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In the 1990s, funk and hip-hop musicians had their turn. Lacking the means to record videos, musicians entertained at massive “funk dances” in the favelas, said Janaina Medeiros, a journalist who authored the book “Rio Funk: Crime or Culture?” As CDs of “prohibited funk” referencing gangs became popular, authorities cracked down on the dances.

“The whole movement was seen as an evil incarnation, like a big virus that was going to contaminate society, glamorize crime and kidnap good girls from their families,” Medeiros said.

Funk was the soundtrack of Vitor Oliveira’s adolescence, and he started making his own music. With homegrown trap, he discovered a genre more open to self-expression, and was hooked.

Not 100 feet from his studio, cocaine and marijuana are sold by young men ambling about with semi-automatics. Oliveira says he ran occasional errands for the gang, but only when desperate for cash.

There’s evidently good will. Before he shot a video on March 6, traffickers removed rings from their fingers and pulled heavy gold chains from their necks for Oliveira’s use.

Under the name MC Piloto, he has recorded 10 tracks and two videos for his 18-song project. Success can sometimes seem a distant dream, but he envisions himself dodging all pitfalls.

“You think (the state) isn’t going to worry seeing a Black man doing well in this life? Damn. It’s going to try to trip me up,” he said. “But I’m prepared to jump off.”

RIO DE JANEIRO — When rapper Gustavo Ribeiro was working on his new album, he lost count of the number of times he had to stop writing or recording because the protests outside his apartment in São Paulo were too loud.

It was the end of 2018 and Brazil was going through its most-fraught presidential elections in decades. Brazilians were polarized over what many viewed as a thankless choice: voting for a candidate from the Workers’ Party, which had lifted millions out of poverty but also overseen the most massive corruption scandal in the country’s history, or electing Jair Bolsonaro, an extreme-right wing politician.

After the results came in, Ribeiro, who goes by Black Alien, was angry Brazilians had chosen Bolsonaro for president, ignoring the bigotry many accuse him of. So he included a song about it, “Jamais Serão” (“There Never Will Be”) in his new album, Hello Hell.

What I really think is that presidents are temporary, baby,” the song’s chorus goes. “Good music is forever and these losers never will be.”

At first, Ribeiro didn’t set out to write about politics, as he frequently did when he started his career in the 1980s. But lately, as rap steps up the ladder into the mainstream of Brazilian music, fight-the-power songs have been sharing more space on radio and streaming airwaves with music about love and sex.

As rappers experience a new wave of popularity in Brazil, they have also become uniquely positioned to give voice to the anger many feel towards a new political establishment led by a president seen as racist, sexist and authoritarian.

“I can’t waste the valuable instrument that is rap [and not] talk to people, to young people mainly, here in Brazil, an obnoxiously stupid country that doesn’t educate people,” Ribeiro tells Billboard. “Half of the people voted for this deadbeat out of ignorance.”

Lyrics aimed at criticizing Bolsonaro and his political platform — or resisting it — are popping up in rap more than in any other type of music.

Meanwhile, right-wing rappers have been writing about the rise of Bolsonaro in a tone of praise, with songs such as “Meu filho vai ser bolsonarista” (“My son will be a bolsonarist“) and “Carta ao Bolsonaro” (“Letter to Bolsonaro“).

“I live in a favela, I’m of African descent and a police officer,” sings PapaMike on “Letter to Bolsonaro,” whose video calls out corrupt business executives and depicts the new president aiming an automatic rifle. “I’m in the middle of chaos, a survivor of the war. And your name is growing in the fight against evil.”

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But pro-Bolsonaro rap is still niche, and doesn’t receive nearly as many views as anti-Bolsonaro tracks.

Artists with stronger fan bases such as Djonga — who has more than 1 million followers on YouTube, the most efficient thermometer for Brazilian music — are using their music to share their thoughts about politics.

“And it looks like prejudice was set loose,” Djonga writes in “Hat-Trick”, which has over 2.9 million views. “At least in the old days these assholes were discrete.”

The rap protest movement is rooted partly in the broader spread of local language hip hop, a streaming-fueled phenomenon taking hold across many countries, including in Brazil, the 10^th-largest music market in the world. Brazil’s subscription audio streams grew by 53% in 2018, to $151.6 million, according to the IFPI.

But in Brazil, politics is also playing a role.

“In this polarized moment, with the extreme-right making a comeback, people are in need of being represented, so they can affirm their ideology,” says Leo Morel, a Latin American music analyst at Midia Research. “People might be looking to rap for a voice that represents them.”

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Rappers have become some of the loudest voices against the Bolsonaro administration, and sharp critics of the left’s failure to defeat him and to connect with people in Brazil’s slums and ghettos.

That much became obvious when rapper Mano Brown took the stage at a leftist rally last October to criticize Brazil’s Workers Party, days before the party lost the elections to Bolsonaro.

“Those who made mistakes are going to have to pay,” Brown said, in what might have been a nudge to the dozens of corruption charges against party members for allegedly participating in a more than $2 billion bribery scandal. “If you don’t understand people anymore, you’re done.”

Brown is a member of Racionais MC’s, Brazil’s most traditional hip-hop group. This year, the group went on a country-wide tour to celebrate its 30th anniversary.

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Other older rappers are also making comebacks. Planet Hemp, a rap-rock group known for starting the careers of rappers Marcelo D2 and BNegão, is releasing its first album since 2001 early next year. It will be full of protest songs, he promises Billboard.

He already has started: “The patriot gently gives his people’s lands and souls to North America,” goes one song, “Blá Blá Blá,” (“Blah Blah Blah”), which he wrote for singer Elza Soares’s new album, Planeta Fome (Hunger Planet).

Songs confronting the status quo are not the only type of politics rappers have been delivering. They also have tried to motivate fans into resisting soul-crushing times.

“People don’t just want that crude, naked report on reality,” explains MV Bill, a rapper based in Rio de Janeiro. “There is also this motivation thing, being proud of who I am.”

In a recent song, called “Rapsistência,” or “Rapsistance,” he urges listeners not to accept a hate-filled agenda: “To fight the unlikely, we build several bridges; those who owe us, who are all talk, we destroy on our way.”

Perhaps the most popular example of a song of resistance and motivation is Emicida’s “AmarElo” (“Yellow”). The last section of the song goes: “Raise you head high; wipe away those tears, ok? (Yes, you); take a deep breath and go back to the ring (go); you will get out of this prison; you will go after this diploma.”

When he released the track in June, it seemed like the whole of Brazil stopped to listen and let the lyrics sink in. Many posted parts of “AmarElo” to social media and the song drew 1 million views on YouTube in its first two days, according to tracking done by Emicida’s Facebook page.

Racism and black pride are perhaps the most frequent themes in the new wave of political rap songs. Baco Exu do Blues’ single Bluesman won a Grand Prix award at the Cannes Film Festival last year for a music video depicting the life of a young black man. The short film challenges preconceptions of race and self-worth.

“They want black people with guns in the air; in a music video in a favela yelling: Cocaine; they want our skin to be the skin of crime,” it goes. “They are fucking scared of the next Obama….”

Though rap is clearly making a comeback in Brazil, some older rappers say they feel frustrated. After Bolsonaro was elected, Ribeiro wondered whether anyone had been listening to his work over the past two decades.

Brown, from Racionais MC’s, has already made it clear in concerts that he won’t write more protest songs in a country that votes for Bolsonaro. “I prefer to be alone with my own demons,” he said on Twitter.

But others, such as Ribeiro, see the current political landscape as a push to keep going. “Looking ahead, I’ll start to talk more about politics,” Ribeiro says. “I think we need it. We need it a lot.”

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This multiyear project brings together scholars, artists and students from Duke, North Carolina Central University (NCCU) and the Federal Rural University in Rio de Janeiro to investigate key forms of activism and cultural organizing that reaches Black and poor youth in urban Brazil. In 2023-2024, the team focused on exploring and inventorying the educational techniques developed by Instituto Enraizados to encourage defense of rights and active citizenship. 

In August of 2023, several members of the team traveled to Rio de Janeiro to meet Black female politicians and participated in a Black Women’s March as well as work closely with local partners at the Instituto Enraizados and the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro. The team produced two films about the visit that have since been shown in classrooms and events.

During the academic year, the team learned the historical and methodological foundations of community organizing oriented around hip hop in contemporary Brazil and collaborated on a range of outputs, including:

1. Public-facing events such as a panel during a week of activities celebrating 50 years of hip hop
2. Two conference presentations
3. The translation of an article by one of the team’s Brazilian collaborators
4. A ten-day visit by Dudu de Morro Agudo, the founder of Enraizados and creator of the RapLab methodology

During the visit, Dudu and team members presented at a conference in Asheville, North Carolina, met with local rappers in Durham and spent two days with Montu Miller on the Hip Hop Scene in Athens, Georgia to visit a high school and an ambitious training center for youth, and participate in a monthly open mike event with 120 participants.

The team also worked closely with Dr. Kisha Daniels from the Program in Education to support Duke students who learned the RapLab methodology and implemented it at a public Durham middle school. Dudu joined the students on two successive Fridays, the second to record their songs. One team member produced a short documentary about the collaboration.

In June and August of 2024, team members will travel to Brazil again to begin the next phase of collaborative work, including widening the research focus to include activism and culture in the Baixada Fluminense that relates to and extends beyond the hip hop pedagogies that were considered in this project.

Timing

Summer 2023 – Spring 2024

Team Outputs

Facilitator guide and video lessons in English and Portuguese for RapLab methodology

Documentation of application of RapLab methodology in university and community settings

Workshops and lesson plans for public schools on RapLab methodology

Documentary films

Hip Hop Pedagogies: Education for Citizenship in Brazil and the United States (Interactive display presented at Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase, April 17, 2024)

Brazil’s hip-hop scene has witnessed several female rappers claiming a space under spotlight just like male rappers. From Anna Suav to Monna Brutal, learn about the up-and-coming artists who are creating the new sound of Brazil.

Felipe Maia

|GRAMMYs/Oct 7, 2024 – 07:02 pm

Hip-hop in Brazil has always been women’s turf. From pioneers like Dina Di to mainstays such as Chris SNJ, Kmila CDD, and Negra Li, female rappers have never put the mic down since first grabbing it in the early 1990s.

Yet, despite the steady growth of Brazilian hip-hop in the last decade, women are often overlooked compared to their male counterparts — some of whom lack the skill but still enjoy the fruits of fame.

This dynamic is common in many countries, such as the U.S. and England. But, like Megan Thee Stallion and Ice Spice, Brazilian rappers are rewriting the game. In recent years, names like Ajuliacosta and Tasha & Tracie have made a mark on the country’s hip-hop scene; their solid releases fueled by sharp rhyming and performances loaded in artistry. These artists run a wide gamut of subgenres, exploring sounds as much as their lyrical horizons. Social issues, racism, sex, love, and anti-LGBTQ+phobia — there’s a lot in their lyrical arsenal.

Read more: A Timeline Of Brazilian Hip-Hop: From The Ruas To The Red Carpet

Read on for a selection of women in Brazil’s diverse hip-hop scene, a world that melds together baile funk and trap, southern beats and grime, traditional chants and fast bars. Continuing the tradition of resistance while reshaping the present and future of Brazilian hip-hop, these artists keep the mics and bars high.

Ajuliacosta

Hailing from Mogi das Cruzes, in the outskirts of São Paulo, Ajuliacosta is amongst the most relevant names of Brazilian hip-hop today. Her laidback flow and sharp pen are a statement against a rap scene used to praising ordinary speed-flow and pointless braggadocio. 

AJC has performed at several festivals since her debut, 2023’s Brutas Amam, Choram e Sentem Raiva. On that record, Julia moves swiftly through her personas: the loving demoiselle, the saddened girlfriend and the merciless OG. All of that is filtered by the perspective of an independent Black woman from a favela whose flow slides on bars and reiterates words to make them stronger. Self-titled a chavosa (stylish) majesty, she sings in “Queen Chavosa”: “The hussle, it’s us. The support, it’s us. The sponsor, it’s us.” 

Anna Suav

Suav is a stylized writing of “suave,” the Brazilian Portuguese word for “smooth.” Indeed, Anna Suav’s voice can be quite soothing, with words that caress the listeners’ ears through her R&B-laced hip-hop. But Anna can also play the warrior, a fierce bar-spitter who proudly shouts out her region, the Amazon rainforest.

On “Dengosa & Brabona” — a Jersey bounce joint released in last June featuring brega funk (a variant of baile funk) MC Rayssa Dias — Anna transforms the rapid beats into a soulful bed for her warm vocals. In “Levante,” alongside fellow Northern rapper Bruna BG, she declares: “From where we come, there will be more.” 

Indeed, over the past decades, artists hailing from the Amazon region have been claiming more space and recognition in the South-centered Brazilian music industry. Female hip-hop artists like Anna Suav, Bruna BG, Nic Dias and Nega Ysah are leading the front. 

Áurea Semiséria

Born and raised in Salvador, Bahia, Áurea is one the most versatile contenders on the rise. Her concise, but purposeful catalog showcases an artist unafraid to bend rap according to her taste. Where spitting rhymes over the modern, percussion-laden strain of samba known as pagodão or going all-out on grime beats, Áurea wastes no bar. “My flag is black, my voice is a shotgun,” she fires in her performance in the YouTube channel Brasil Grime Show.

With the mic in hand, she not only claims a space for her own music but also for Bahia’s hip-hop scene. The state, home to Brazil’s largest Black population, has birthed several prominent rap acts, including Opanijé, Afrogueto, and Vandall.

Bione

Whether acting, writing, performing on theater stages, or improvising in an Instagram video, Bione embodies the versatility and sharpness of rap. A remarkable alumna from Slam das Minas PE — one of Brazil’s most influential poetry slams — Bione is a multifaceted talent who explores hip-hop through various forms. 

Born and raised in Pernambuco, a northeastern state celebrated for its cultural richness from literature to music and carnaval, Bione first arrived on the scene in 2019. On her 2022 debut album, Ego, Bione collaborated with Mãe Beth de Oxum, a pillar of local Black traditions, and fresh voices from brega funk. On the track “Deixa as Garota Brincar,” she boldly declares, “[The male rappers] tried to make me afraid of them, but now they’re afraid of me.”

Duquesa

Duquesa, which translates to “duchess,” is the title young Jeysa Ribeiro chose for herself when she set out to claim her spot among Brazilian rap royalty. She is certainly living up to the name: In just a few years, the rapper from Bahia has risen from an impromptu first performance at a book release event to becoming one of the most recognizable names in Brazilian hip-hop. Her success is underscored by her nomination for Best New International Artist at the BET Awards 2024.

Whether spitting bars over a fast-paced drill beat or gliding smoothly over an R&B groove, Duquesa embraces both the blessing and the responsibility of her growing reputation: “I don’t have time (…) I’m worried about getting rich this year, everybody’s asking me about my next release,” she sings in “Turma da Duq” (“Duq’s Crew”). Her career is guided by the legendary Mano Brown, leader of the iconic Brazilian hip-hop group Racionais MCs, a weighty association she handles with ease — her talent speaks for itself.

Ebony

Showing off an impressive style of grandiloquent bars and melodic, yet corrosive prosody, Ebony is a name that should not be forgotten. She has released two albums in the past three years, Visão Periférica (2021) and Terapia (2023) and has remained a significant presence in the hip-hop conversation. Whether through her clever pen in singles and features with up-and-coming names such as Urias and Carlos do Complexo or her talent for engaging in fiery debates within Brazilian hip-hop, she has stayed relevant.

One such debate she ignited herself in late 2023 with “Espero Que Entendam.” The track is a powerful diss aimed at the top-tier male rappers in Brazil, and produced in collaboration with producer Larinhx, and their male-dominated hegemony: “I told them I have bars/if I start to spit them, they will be shocked,” she rhymes.

MC Luanna

Hailing from São Paulo’s West Side, MC Luanna blends the city’s downtempo, rap-infused baile funk with the rebellious spirit of classic hip-hop. The result is a modern, unique sound — a mix of antihero, rude girl lyrics delivered with a laid-back flow.

In her 2022 album 44, MC Luanna paints a sharp portrait of a young Black woman navigating the challenges of São Paulo. With precise rhymes, she seamlessly weaves together themes of hedonistic love, loyal friendships, and outshining her rivals with her skillful lines.

Monna Brutal

When Monna Brutal raps, it’s time to learn. In her arsenal, you’ll find a feverish pace and sharp wordplay, along with laid-back phrasing and tongue-in-cheek punchlines. 

Born in Guarulhos, on the outskirts of São Paulo, Monna Brutal has been paving a solid path in Brazilian hip-hop. Her four albums (from 2018’s 9/11 to the 2024’s Vista Grossa) showcase an artist confident in her power. Monna tackles fake stars, social issues, and LGBTQIA+ discrimination with the same gnarly bite. In “Hashtag,” she spits a fiery warning: “If you try to beat me up, you’ll be my next track.”

Slipmami

Showing off a Slipknot t-shirt on her TikTok account, flaring neon-colored laces on a music video, and keeping her fancy nails always sharp, Slipmami won’t go unnoticed. And clothing is just a piece of the puzzle she brings to the table. The Rio de Janeiro rapper is a blend that only hip-hop could create: a cross-pollination of anime characters and precise, lascivious lines.

Her 2023 debut album, Malvatrem, is a fierce statement from a girl who knows what she wants — both in bed and in the streets. She rhymes over finger-snapping beats, dirty South jams, baile funk drums, and grim chords. Whether on tight tempos or loose trap vibes, Slipmami spares no bars and no one.

Tasha & Tracie

Brazilians of Nigerian descent, twin siblings Tasha and Tracie have been stirring up  Brazilian street culture for a couple of years. They first emerged into the hip-hop world in the mid-2010s as bloggers who praised Brazilian favela sartorial style as much more than a trend — it was a lifestyle. They were right, and in 2021 they brought their life experiences to music with their debut, Diretoria.

The album sent shockwaves through Brazil’s hip-hop scene, showcasing a duo that could deliver abrasive lines and mellow double entendres, straightforward jabs, and clever wordplay. Since then, the sisters have kept their pen and mic busy via features and collaborations, such as the gritty “Drop da Santa”—a nod to São Paulo favela kids who wear Santander/Ferrari garments exclusively.

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