Economy
An Intro to 'Fluxos,' São Paulo's Latest Funk Music Craze
Teenage casanovas, booming car speakers, and freaky dance moves make these street parties a weekly destination for the city’s music fans.
Funk carioca—a Brazilian version of hard-core street rap—was born in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. It soon spread to the low-income outskirts of São Paulo where it morphed into offshoot styles, with rhymes glorifying drugs, money, and sex. Fans of the genre were behind 2014 flash mob mall invasions that had shoppers at high-end Brazilian stores on edge, and the music is now driving a new trend that has hundreds of thousands of revelers gathering in the streets each weekend for parties called fluxos—Portuguese for “flow.”