Jack McDonald dot Org

I took it easy on the Sunday, partly because I was shattered from wandering around so much the night before, but also because the real parties here kick off around eight or nine in the evening. Still, I left the house in between rain showers to grab some late lunch. The streets of Rio were eerily quiet save for diehard tourists who are wandering around in party gear at four in the afternoon trying to find some sort of party to attend.

In the evening I make the snap decision not to go back to the Sambodromo. I know that it is meant to be the wildest party on earth, but hell, I was in the area last night and there’s a whole city out there. Besides, the money for one night at the Sambodromo is about what I spend on food in a month! Instead I headed down to Ipanema to see what it has to offer in the evening.

The beachfront is rammed. Literally. A crowd of thousands has coalesced on the streets in the middle of the beaches length and as a result, traffic has stopped. In London, street parties and events are carefully planned and managed, with traffic flows re-routed and buses diverted and so on. Due to the spontaneous nature of the parties out here, that’s impossible. As a result there is four lanes of traffic slowly wending it’s way through the street with a crowd running into the tens of thousands getting in their way. Some are impatient, but most drivers are pretty good natured about the whole affair. Groups of dancers act as unofficial traffic cops by dancing in front of cars to slow them to a stop for little purpose other than to piss the driver off or try to get their phone number if they happen to be female. Out of nowhere a guy on a scrambler bike comes slicing and skidding through the crowd shadowing one of the buses. As he is impossible to slow down and quite lethal he parts the crowd like butter; leaving only rubber skid marks where he avoids slower thinking members of the party.

One car owner has decided to join in the party seeing as he’s stuck here. He has flipped open the boot allowing his rather decent in-car sound system to fill the street as he begins to pump a party mix of Baile Funk to the delight of the surrounding people. Baile Funk is a bastardised descendant of booty bass, replete with sexual innuendo, violent lyrics and most importantly: bass lines that would make Anne Widdecombe shake her hips in a suggestive manner. I figure he is playing about 75% greatest hits and 25% personal faves judging from the crowd reaction. The dancing is truly choreographed in a way I haven’t yet seen here. It’s like the penalty of missing a jump turn or hip thrust is total social ostracism or death by firing squad. How else you could get fifty drunk strangers to follow the exact same steps with no group rehearsal is beyond me. The driver slowly seeps through the crowd dragging his followers with him. Humourously he ends up accelerating a good eight or nine metres down the road during one very popular song leaving the crowd bounding after the car as fast as possible while trying to keep their footwork and hip shakes perfect. Some manage this feat with more skill than others! Eventually he hits the turn from the road and gets hazed by yet more drunk partygoers before he’s allowed to leave the street.

I take a break and chill out next to a beachfront bar whose owner has taken the rather sensible option of hiring or allowing a Forró band to play which is attracting a big crowd. The backbone of the band is a bass drum, accordion and triangle. To my untrained ears, forró sounds weirdly bayou-like in timbre. Unlike the rolling Samba bass beat, this music keeps a beat with a syncopated triangle beat which is filled out by the bass drum. On top of this is the lilting accordion which provides a rolling melody that occasionally breaks out into a leading break in between rhythm changes. There’s a couple of guys singing and they are having the time of their lives as a couple of hundred people cluster around them to listen and dance. The crowd is surrounding the tent as best they can, seeing as it it perched on the edge of the beachfront and there is a sharp drop of a metre or so with no barrier in the more perilous positions to view the spectacle. After watching for fifteen minutes I settle down on the beachfront drop a little way away from the melee and listen for half an hour or so.

On the beach there is a large group of twenty or so people playing a game. The aim, if one was discernable, was to run in a circle holding hands, changing direction at the whim of someone shouting. After two or three direction changes everyone froze in all manner of mid-air poses. The first person to move or start laughing loses, has to drink a swig of some alcoholic spirit from a bottle in the centre of the circle, then do an imaginary pole dance of sorts while everyone looks on clapping and cheering. It is rather amusing to watch, and the game itself appears to be something of a self-sustaining entity as groups of people join and leave, maybe the bottle was a holdover from some group who have long left the circle, who knows?

At this point a rather amiable elderly lady who has been dancing on the beach to the music begins chatting to me. She is obviously quite drunk but still managing to speak English quite well, despite my attempts to speak Portuguese. For some strange reason she is out and about with her English tutor and her English tutor’s boyfriend who are both half her age. Then again, it is quite common to have three generations of the same family out partying together in the streets for Carnival, so it is not altogether amiss. She claims there is a big band over at Posto Nove, so I follow them up the street until it becomes clear that in fact there is no band, so I make my excuses and leave, intending to return to the Forró band which I had been enjoying.

Along the way I got waylaid by the appearance of a spontaneous Samba group and ended up chatting to a smallish group of 30-something professionals who are all out for a good time. To say that the ensuing couple of hours was funny would be an understatement, but rather than boring you with a series of in-jokes and so on, I’ll skip it. Needless to say, even the married couple were more out of control than half the youngsters milling around.

After saying goodbye to them and grabbing some chips I headed back to the beach front. By now a full on Samba band was holding court on the beach itself. The vocal section and non-percussionists were located on the edge of the beach surrounded by a huge PA system. Naturally this orchestra had rapidly become the centre of attention, and the beach was rammed for at least half of its width by thousands of onlookers. The camber of the beach itself meant that those looking on from the seaward side of the band had a natural inclination to push themselves forward meant that the whole event got quite rowdy very quickly. On the road behind the band, the music itself attracted a swarm of people who just want to be in earshot. Within a short while this band became the nucleus of the entire Ipanema party.

Musically, it was Samba, yet the big difference here was that they used a few string intruments in a sort of fiddle measure above the rhythm of the drums. It’s good to have a break from the monotony of days of percussion, and this band really did do the trick. The lady who was singing all the leads also had an impressive voice and she managed to cut straight through the wall of sound created by the drums. On top of this, the Samba band was lead by one of the most exuberant conductors I have seen so far. The man stood on a makeshift plinth in the sand and appeared willing to jump out of his skin if it would up the energy of the band a fraction or two. When he initiated tempo changes and drum breaks he didn’t so much wave his hands about as stab the air like Bruce Lee did with his feet. Naturally as it’s well after dark and everyone is rather liquored up, the crowd just goes mental every time he does this. I notice while walking around that the usually rather loose beach has actually been compacted to the consistency of concrete by all the people jumping up and down on it in unison.

Eventually the band winds down, and I decide to head home along the beachfront in a lazy sea view route. Partway down Ipanema beach is the trance tent. You know, where the hippies go. There are a handful of Brazilians and a shedload of people who have come halfway around the world to drop chemicals and experience exactly the same thing they get back home. Given that every block for a fifty mile radius is packed with people dancing to some form of music rooted in Brazil; this little gathering comes across as the ‘Irish Pub’ of Carnival. Well, whatever floats your boat I guess…

Hitting Copacabana, one of the beach bars has taken the rather wise choice of hiring in a big PA for the evening which is spewing more Baile Funk to entertain an isolated crowd that is almost blocking the Botofogo bound lane of traffic. Three lanes of traffic somehow manage to merge into one lane at full speed to avoid the crowd who graciously allow the cars hurtling along at 30mph somewhere to go. I sit on the beach for a while and soak up the vibes til the music morphs into some form of house and thus bores me to tears.

I sit back and reflect upon the evening at a bar just down the beach watching the crowd grow and grow as the night wears on. As I leave, a rather feisty Brazilian guy gets into a ruck with the guy who runs the bar next door (these things are arranged in pairs). The bar owner throws him on the ground, pins him down and then begins belting him in the chest. Almost simultaneously a crowd appears out of nowhere, like someone just flicked a bat signal on or something. Tens of people rush towards the brawling pair and… Do nothing. No whooping, no parting the two, the crowd just bears witness to the events rolling across their toes with glee. The guy pulls his mate off and the bar owner stands up telling him to do one. You could decipher the look in the guy’s eyes from twenty paces: ‘I lost that, but I’ll win against someone.’ So he instantly gets into an argument with a women, another guy and then ends up squaring off against the bar owner who runs the bar I was just sitting at. It is a mis-matched bout, as this fiery whelp is dwarfed by the rotund 30-something bar man. Just to make the odds a tad less even, the barman draws an umbrella extension pole from the plastic table in front of the bar like a sword from a scabbard. He then proceeds to beat the guy over the head five times until he stumbles backwards onto the beach. Fight over, no lasting harm done. The usual shouting and ‘Come on then’ stuff occurs to no catalytic effect for five minutes at which point someone switches off the invisible bat-signal and the crowd dissipates in seconds. I disappear with it and head home.