Buraka Som Sistema Favela-izes Rickshaw Stop

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Kuduro Funk: Buraka Som Sistema

Fresh off their headline-grabbing appearance at the Coachella festival, Buraka Som Sistema passed through San Francisco last night, making one of the hottest nights of the year even hotter. Did I say hot? I mean scorching.

Buraka are the leading international proponents of "kuduro,"--a favela-derived term which translates to something like "hard ass" or "tight derriere"-- and last night's show rocked so hard, it was just about guaranteed to give anyone on the dancefloor buns of steel. This being the Rickshaw Stop, practically the entire audience was on the dancefloor.

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Buraka's two main emcees kept the intensity at fever pitch during their entire show, exhorting the crowd in English, then delivering rapid-fire rhymes in Portuguese. Meanwhile, a timbale player added live percussion accents, while another dude manned a laptop, A DJ scratched on two digital CD decks, and another Buraka member sat down at a drum kit. As if the combination of breakneck tempos, electronic beats, live percussion, and tribal Lisbonian-Angolan flavor wasn't enough, every four songs or so, Buraka unleashed their secret weapon--a scantily-clad dancer with a thick mop of curly hair, who shook and rippled her moneymaker before adding her rhymes to the proceedings. The entire spectacle was somewhat absurd - absurdly entertaining, that is.