In the first clip of his new album “HASOS”, rapper Paco Exo do Blues references Jorge Amado, palm oil and paya de todos os santos. Nearly a decade after he rose to fame with “Sulicídio,” a song that criticized Southeastern dominance of the national rap scene, Bahian continues to put his homeland at the center of his music on his sixth album, released in November.
Since “Sulicídio” and the release of his debut album “Esú” in 2017, the rapper’s career has changed direction. The first work is dominated by energetic and dramatic pieces of music, such as “En Tu Mira,” in which Paco talks about the pressures of fame and suicidal thoughts. But the song that captivated the audience the most was the romantic and sexy song “Te Amo Disgraça”.
The success of the track, which garnered millions of views and award nominations, prompted Paco to focus on emotional and MPB-inclined tracks in his next releases. Some of these songs ended up becoming his biggest hits, such as “Me Desculpa Jay-Z”, from 2018, and “20 Ligações”, from 2022.
“The fact that I channeled that anger doesn’t mean I stopped feeling it,” the rapper says. Bound In a video interview. “It’s always bothered me that I felt a lot of anger, but I couldn’t express it to the world in a pure way, because that’s exactly what they expect from a young black man. So I learned to use my anger in a place where it wasn’t caricatured.”
“Hasus” is a reflection of this process. Of the 18 songs on the album, four are interludes in which rappers and actors act out therapy sessions. According to the artist, the skits are inspired by his own conversations with his therapist. During sessions, phrases appear that set the mood for the next song. “Sometimes, we need to be worse than evil. You romanticize the way you bargain for affection.”
“There was one of these problems with my therapist, but I won’t say which one,” Paco says. “I was diagnosed with depression a long time ago. Therefore, the treatment process has always been a very important milestone for me.”
The creation of “Hasos” was also a therapeutic process for Bacchus. The idea was to talk about “the things that hurt us the most, that are hard to write,” he says. The composition of the album began in 2022, but was interrupted – the EP “Fetiche”, which the rapper released last year and focused on provocative topics, arose from the need to take a break from the painful process of the current album.
In contrast to its central theme, the sonic aesthetic of “Hasos” is sparse. In the 14 tracks that are not interludes, Paco jumps from beat to beat. In “Gladiadores de Areia” he sings based on jazz improvisation. On “Romance Latino” he draws inspiration from American house music. There was also room for forró, in “Sertão Sem Flor,” which interpolates a famous lyric from the Falamansa suite.
“During the album process, I wasn’t in the musical wave too much, I was thinking about the narrative. I was stuck in Jorge Amado, Rubim Alves, and Ariano Soasuna,” says the artist. “When a composer writes, he needs to set up the environment before setting the scene. And with these different musical genres, I wanted to create different environments as well.”
The entries follow the same logic to cover different stylistic bases. They range from already established MPB names, such as Zeca Veloso and Vanessa da Mata, to lesser-known voices such as Sued Nunes and Mirella Costa. There are also pop styles, such as Karol Piazin, Evison, and Hunter Tito.
Tito is a native of Baku and has had a huge success in the rap scene – “M4”, from 2021, in partnership with Matuê. This turns Ciara into perhaps the biggest name in Brazilian hip-hop this decade. Other common names – WIU and Don L – also show how rap has decentralized from the Southeast since the time of “Sulicídio.” For Bacchus, it’s all part of a movement he helped build.
“Today, if you look at the top 10 most-streamed rappers in Brazil, it’s completely different than it was before,” he says. “It’s a very beautiful process. I’ve achieved many dreams that I thought were impossible at the time. I thought: ‘This is what I’m going to do with my life, I want to get there.’ And I did.”