Rio’s new sound is a brash mix of heavy drumbeats, eclectic samples and raunchy lyrics that have horrified many of the middle-class employers of the cooks and maids but which is slowly making its way into Brazil’s mainstream.

Funk carioca (funk in Portuguese is pronounced “funky” and carioca means from Rio) started in the mid-1980s when those living in the city’s hillside slums, known as favelas, started composing lyrics to perform over mixes of US soul and funk music that was played at clubs and parties by local DJs.

At first, women were more prominent as dancers than as masters of ceremonies (MCs), as funk carioca singers are known. Even as dancers they were earning notoriety, developing a new dance that leaves as little to the imagination as many of the lyrics. Its central move involves women leaning forward, hands on knees, and jerking their behinds repeatedly in quick time to the music, usually to the appreciative whoops of men.

But in recent years women have come front stage and are making a name for themselves by singing lyrics loaded with double entendre that celebrate casual sex and ghetto life.

In a society that places a high premium on its song and dance stars being beautiful, and frequently blonde, it is striking that many women MCs are poor, black and, by their own admission, not pretty.

“Brazil likes to think it is not racist but in many ways it is, and these women come from a background that is usually ignored, singing about sex in an explicit way not seen elsewhere,” said Denise Garcia, who has made a documentary film about women MCs, titled I’m Ugly, But I’m Trendy.

Its title comes from a song by Tati Quebra-Barraco (Tati Home-Wrecker), the queen of the scene. This song describes her response to people saying she is not beautiful. “When I started, people said, ‘Ah! This is who is singing this music. But she is ugly!’ So I said, ‘I am, but I’m in’.” Now 25, she was a cook in a nursery crèche before turning full time to recording and performing. Now she can earn up to £1,000 a night for a show, a fortune in the favelas.

Hundreds of other women MCs earn far less but, even so, can make £75 for a night’s work in one of the many dance halls in Rio’s 600 slums. This is equal to a month’s salary for a maid, one of the few jobs open to women from the favelas.

Funk carioca has horrified middle-class society. Several of the stars have been linked to the violent gang culture of the favelas and seized upon by the media. But its defenders say it is more varied than critics allow. Violence is endemic in the favelas but only a few of the acts celebrate the gang culture. Most only reflect the reality of favela life.

Senhora Garcia sees the sexually explicit lyrics as a form of liberation: “It is not 70s-style feminism but the respect the women MCs have earned among male and female audiences shows a kind of democracy in sexual relations.”

While most middle-class parents remain shocked by what some of their former maids are up to, middle-class children are beginning to pay attention, even though funk carioca groups rarely have videos with which to promote themselves on television’s music channels, and a culture of bootlegging is more common than store sales.

In part, this wider appeal reflects funk carioca beginning to win notice from music aficionados abroad.

“It’s the more forward-thinking sound coming out of Brazil,” said Graham Luckhurst, of Mr Bongo records in Brighton, whose release last year of Slum Dunk Presents Funk Carioca introduced the music to British record-buyers.

In recent years Rio’s stars have performed in London, New York and across Europe, and reports about the enthusiastic response have filtered back to Brazil. “Whenever a Brazilian artist starts to make a mark abroad the upper classes go, ‘Wow!’ and start to give that artist an importance,” said Marcos Boffa, a producer who has taken funk carioca stars on tour overseas. “It is a form of colonialism, a hangover of our colonial past.”

This new acceptance already has some of funk carioca’s pioneers warning others about “funk parachutists” — people who disdained the scene at first but who are now jumping in to take advantage of its spreading fame and acclaim.

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