March 11, 2005; Rio: Last week I visited a community radio station in the favela Morro das Prazeres, which literally means “hill of the pleasures”; I have no idea how they pick these names. Prazeres, like most favelas in Rio’s south zone, is perched on top of a hill. But this community is on a particularly high hill in the wealthier and artistic Santa Tereza neighborhood. What does this have to do with radio, you ask?

Well, when a radio station is near the top of a community, at the top of a giant hill in the middle of a city, even a tiny community station signal can go a long way. Fábio (who goes by just his first name like many Brazilians), runs the station Radio SAMP. He says half the city can hear their programs because of its altitude.

Fabio of community Radio SAMP on the air. March 2005.Radio SAMP is all music, and all volunteer. Music is a lot easier to manage than journalism or talk programs because one person can easily work as a DJ, playing hours of music without stress or deadlines or any real training beyond how to use a CD player.

The whole staff is made up of only 5 people. The three that I met are all young men in their twenties, spending many hours in the studio because they like to DJ. The studio is really more of a bare cement room with startlingly little equipment in one corner, one microphone, some CDs scattered about, and nothing for soundproofing or acoustics anywhere.

There was more equipment for mixing and DJ’ing, but the police confiscated it because it was used in an event the week before that may or may not have been a “baile funk” (baile funks are community parties that are sometimes sponsored by drug dealers in their efforts to sell more drugs).

The two main types of music on Radio SAMP are Pagode (pa GOH dee) and Funk (FOON key). Both are pervasive in the favelas, extremely popular there, but not nearly as common anywhere else, especially outside the country.

Pagode is a bass-heavy version of samba, good for enthusiastic dancing or in my case uncoordinated wiggling. It gets you up and moving, but doesn’t have the same melodic smoothness as samba. Funk which has absolutely nothing to do with what Americans think of as “funk”, is an angry and vulgar variant on rap. More screaming that is often themed around and sometimes even funded by drug trafficking.

Radio SAMP studio. Fabio working while on the air.The police don’t allow funk shows because they encourage drug use and are run and funded by drug dealers. During Carnaval, a dance group at one of the many neighborhood stages funded by the City was putting on a show, dancing in a variety of styles. When they started a funk dance, the MC cut the sound because funk wasn’t allowed.

The station also plays lots of hip hop, and Brazilian pop. I mentioned to Fábio that his frequency was the same as a favorite jazz station of mine out in Newark, NJ, 88.3FM. He laughed and said if he played jazz the community would throw rocks at the station.

Fábio works as a DJ at parties and sells bread from a nearby bakery to earn a living. He estimates that he spends 5 hours a day and sometimes up to 10 hours in and out of the station. So, maybe five people is too few to run a station for 16 hours a day.

There are some ads on the station: brief announcements that are played once every two hours. At the low price of about US $15 per month per ad, they still don’t make enough money to pay their phone bill. Requests are taken on the DJ’s cell phone (in Brazil, receiving calls on cell phones is free).

It is fascinating to think that the topography that lets Radio SAMP broadcast to half of Rio from the geographic heart of the rich South Zone, is the same topography that packs Rio’s poor in together with Rio’s rich forcing a shared but dual existence like nowhere in the USA. The soaring hills that rise out of the crowded metropolis were left undeveloped because of their steep terrain and thus available for migrant squatters to start communities which, over time, became Rio’s favelas.