“Vida loka original”: engagement and authenticity in the Racionais MC’s of the 2000s and 2010s

Abstract

Based on the musical work of the São Paulo rap group Racionais MC's, especially the albums released in the period in question, the paper seeks to describe how the relationship between political imagination, social inequality, and the music market organizes notions of engagement and authenticity as components of the group's political self-perception of themselves, their artistic work and Brazilian rap. In this text, I observe the manifestations of vida loka – an expression iconically linked to the group and its artwork -, analyzing its appearances and uses in the production of Racionais MC’s, to demonstrate how the expression functions as a) a representative unit, temporally and spatially located, of the social experience of poor young black people in the 1990s and 2000s, which centrally connects race, class and territory; and b) a component of authenticity in Racionais MC's rap that locates the social experience of the members, legitimizes their discourses, fosters personal identification between rappers and the public and symbolically gives their work prestige in the cultural market.