Emicida honors and transforms the work of Racionais MC’s in Emicida Racional VL2 – Mesmas Cores & Mesmos Valores, continuing an aesthetic and cultural research initiated with the album and documentary AmarElo: É Tudo Pra Ontem. The work evokes a deeply Brazilian cultural technology of symbolic processing: cultural anthropophagy.
But let’s start from the beginning, as the poet would say.
The Racionais album Cores e Valores, released in 2014, resonated within the scene as the most distinct record in the São Paulo quartet’s career. The tracks introduced references that had rarely appeared in their work before, a more aggressive pace, and heavier beats — elements we would now recognize as aligned with trap. Many of the group’s more orthodox fans did not welcome this shift.
Looking back, it is possible to see a strong connection between this repertoire and a phenomenon that was intensifying in the peripheries and in downtown São Paulo at the time: the MC battles. And who was the central figure of those gatherings, whose career began precisely in that battlefield? Leandro — Emicida himself.
This movement, however, does not unfold in a straight line, but in cycles. Just as Emicida emerges from MC battles, Racionais MC’s themselves also anthropophagize this culture of confrontation, improvisation, and radical street orality, incorporating it into their musical language.
The battles are not merely a point of departure, but a living field of cultural experimentation that feeds the work of Racionais — specifically on the album Cores & Valores — just as, later on, the work of Racionais becomes raw material for Emicida to digest, transform, and return to the world in new forms.
This circular process directly echoes the legacy of the 1922 Modern Art Week, which established in Brazil a cultural logic not of origin, but of continuous flow: devour in order to keep creating. Brazilian music thus takes shape as an infinite anthropophagic system, in which each generation feeds on the previous one to reinvent language, meaning, and the world.
Here, the legacy of the 1922 Modern Art Week becomes evident — the movement that articulated one of the most distinctive features of Brazilian popular culture: to devour, digest, and transform. Anthropophagy is the method that Emicida takes up when he becomes, in Emicida Racional VL2 – Mesmas Cores & Mesmos Valores, a direct heir to this tradition, courageously paying tribute to one of the most important cultural languages in Brazil: Racionais MC’s.
It is at this point that I continue to develop my theory of the Technology of Affects and the need to create technologies that are also connected to the subjective dimensions of human experience. The concept of cosmoteknics, proposed by Yuk Hui, finds an exemplary expression here. Hui reminds us that there is no pure technique, nor innovation detached from cultural context. Each society produces its techniques based on its relationship with nature, social organization, spirituality, and systems of values.
Brazilian popular music, in this sense, is a powerful cosmoteknics — and one that can point toward technological paths not grounded exclusively in efficiency.
Let us look at the track that opens the album, Bom dia né gente. Emicida combines a classical string arrangement with edited audio messages sent by his mother via WhatsApp. In this composition, the artist transforms audio data into affective data, converting everyday messages into devices of emotional memory. What was once functional communication becomes a sensitive archive.
My attempt, in reflecting on this process, is to think about how cosmoteknics such as Brazilian popular music can make a difference in a technological moment as disruptive as the one we are living through today. We are using artificial intelligence tools to create technology faster than we have ever been able to before.
Yet art, culture, relationships, and the street remain fundamental forces of resistance against the total standardization of technology. Human beings must remain open to creativity, respecting cultural differences, feeding on them, recognizing local cosmologies, and training intelligences within these contexts — as true Technologies of Affects.
Technique can advance without impoverishing our world.
In this sense, Brazilian popular music — deeply shaped by the modernist legacy of the 1922 movement — can be understood as one of the most powerful cosmoteknics ever produced in the country. Since the anthropophagy proposed by Oswald de Andrade — devour, digest, and transform external influences — Brazilian musical culture has operated as a situated system of symbolic processing, where technique, ethics, body, territory, and affect are inseparable.
This trajectory confirms, in practice, Yuk Hui’s thesis: there is no neutral or universal technology, only technologies rooted in specific cosmologies.
Brazilian music does not seek efficiency or standardization; it creates meaning, produces subjectivity, and sustains living cultural ecologies, functioning as a relational technology long before the digital era.
Emicida’s work, in direct dialogue with Racionais MC’s, updates this anthropophagic tradition by transforming contemporary data, memories, and languages into shared affect. In AmarElo and Emicida Racional VL2, the artist shows how it is possible to operate technically without breaking with the human: voice messages, samples, historical references, and urban experiences become devices of care, memory, and belonging.
For those creating technology today — especially in a context accelerated by artificial intelligence — this cosmoteknics offers a fundamental lesson: technique can advance without impoverishing the world, as long as it remains connected to the relationships, contexts, and affects that sustain life in common.
by Rods Rodrigues // Membrz.Club General Manager
