In retrospect, it never got too bad. The photographer, a Brazilian I had linked with in NYC, only had guns pulled on him twice—no more than three times. But that was the story I wanted, the whole thing: I wanted to hear what this funk shit sounded like in a ghetto-ass club in a hood hidden in Rio de Janeiro. I wanted to know what happened when the lo-fi, scabrous beats shredded through the sound system, and I wanted to see for myself how people in the place got down to the percolating flow of rapped lyrics that had the unmistakable sound of the street. What did they do, exactly? And I wanted to know why it was called funk. To be sure, the music was funky in a millennial Kingston-Lagos-Addis Ababa-Tijuana-Baltimore-Detroit hot, hellacious urban hell type of funky—funky in a way that the music of those places sounds best coming out of egregiously massive speakers in tiny clubs and shitty beat-up speakers in shitty beat-up cars. That was the Rio funk I heard on a CD burn labeled simply "Your's Truly" that was floating around in NYC last year; the 21 tracks on the disc were crass productions of distorted mics and late '80s style rap flows, Miami bass-style snaky synth horns and raw, racing drum tracks with a few machine gun breaks, tink-tink techno touches and a sampled jaguar roar that made the music shockingly terrible and amazingly addictive. It sounded nothing like the funk of James Brown or George Clinton or even '70s Brazilian funk cats like Max B, Hyldon, or Tim Maia. I wanted the story, but a week later Vaughn emailed again: "Not to sound superficial, but fools who head up into favelas clearly on some gringo shit, looking like they don't belong, usually run into problems."

To be fair, Wesley Pentz is no random hipster on some gringo shit. Hipsters might know him as Diplo (as in "diplodocus"), half of the Philly-based Hollertronix DJ crew of the moment that's been blowing up by mixing (among other things) the Dirty South abject rap of Cash Money Millionaires' "Project Bitch" with the ineffable feyness of Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" at parties from London to LA; the weekend before we met up in Brazil at the end of January he was spinning at a Sundance Film Festival party sponsored by this magazine. I didn't know him personally, but shortly after I found out he was a link in the "Your's Truly" chain I heard he was going to Rio in search of the funk. Once we started swapping emails he told me he had been dutifully practicing his Portuguese and wanted to find the people responsible for the CD, which he said had been given to him by a weirdo pair of Brazilian girls at a music show; as a fresh, genre-smashing music, funk naturally appealed to him. He told me he was "trying to go out there with licensing contracts to get about ten or so artists to be down and fully comfortable to let me take tracks back to the US to do a compilation of the favela (electro) music. And eventually try to integrate it and maybe lacing up a big party in NYC for a release or something with those artists." I decided to follow him.