The Singles Jukebox

Straight off the Brazilian Spotify chart…

[Video][Website]
[4.86]

Danilo Bortoli: Context is often useless, but sometimes it is all we have: A while ago, funk ostentação, basically the late Brazilian response to bling-bling, flooded the airwaves and gained mainstream success in the country. The style was so self-absorbed and linked to material goods that it had me wondering how much time it had before the people got tired of it. A year and an unprecedented economic recession later, funk ostentação has been ditched for something more down to earth, realistic and closer to a now-poorer middle class: “proibidão.” Yet sometimes a crisis also means innovation — or, as expected, regression. Amidst a broken economy, music production companies like Kondzilla, specializing in this unique field, have filled YouTube channels with music as effervescent as it is transitory and ephemeral. Long gone are the favelas and bailes, replaced with gentrified clubs. “Bumbum Granada” can be listened to as a result of this process. Lyrically — like anything minimally connected to funk — it is utterly meaningless. Perhaps this is why the track has been so memeified — many times to cruel effects — and reproduced as some sort of anthem and even a joke. Yet, on a sonic level, the song is priceless: the chorus comes off as a mantra, and the delivery is great. Again, this is meaningless (unless, of course, you confer meaning to a track about exploding butts), but there is some kind of joy that cannot be overlooked in here, something that people like Diplo glimpsed years ago and that is now coming back to us in its purest form. In such a broken time as this, you cannot demand too much.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: A Brazilian ode to female asses, with pleasantly stripped-down production. I’d love to hear what someone else could do with the track. Has M.I.A. heard it?
[5]

Adaora Ede: The bouncing hip hop of “Bumbum Granada” is a far cry from much of the Brazilian urban hits I’m accustomed to, from romantic samba songs to sertanejo clubstompers, but I will gladly listen to anything delivered to me by slit-eyebrowed hypebeasts. The lack of basic musicality in this song give the impression that shaking backsides are the sole focus of their musical ventures, but makes me somewhat wary of its danceability. Yet I am fully sure there is a hidden awareness in the MC duo unaudibly murmuring the double hooks of “vai taca, taca, taca, taca, taca, taca” and “bomba, bomba, bomba, bomba aqui”. Is it that our eyes have become so widened in the light of dudebro-ism that we needed two saviors by the name of MCs Zaac and Jerry to deliver us with the minimalist meta-saxobeat jam of a generation?
[8]

Will Rivitz: I genuinely cannot tell whether the two MCs have a stunning lack of self-awareness or are smirkingly so, but neither approach is particularly attractive.
[4]

Will Adams: A Pokémon cave theme handed to a pair of dudes who woke up at 2 p.m.
[4]

Iain Mew: My reaction of “this has a really great beat for a meme!” is a positive sentiment, but I suspect you can already see the issue.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Ban memes.
[3]