“How much is the show Worth?”: Racionais MC’s and the dilemmas of contemporary brazilian rap

Abstract

Racionais MC's most recent album, Cores e Valores, disappointed part of the critics and the audience by breaking many of their expectation patterns. The present article intends to understand such paradigm breaks as constitutive of the identity of the group itself, if one takes into consideration that the matrix of their aesthetic force lies in their capacity to synthesize the main contradictions of the hip-hop movement, which has as its base the social and the historical. From there, we are going proceed to a detailed analysis of the album, taking into consideration its main conflicting internal elements, thought of as in relation to some of the decisive contradictions in the Brazilian rap scenario.