It's all about how you tell a story, you know?
For me, Catete is something from the movies.
Those big houses and so...
I think it looks like a movie set.
A rapper is like a war journalist, a war correspondent.
They see what's happening on the streets and take it to people.
This wit, you know? To be aware of what's happening.
And then you have skating, tagging, and this language...
When rap comes, man, it was perfect.
Neediness gives you a huge creative necessity, you know?
And it makes you get closer to people who have something to share.
There's always been this neighborhood thing, you know?
We always say where we're from.
We like to say "KGL," which is Catete, Glória, and Lapa.
We just say KGL.
Catete is located between Glória
and Largo do Machado, you know?
And, in front of Catete, there is Aterro do Flamengo.
Behind Catete, we have the Tavares slum
and the Santo Amaro slum.
But there's still a lot of influence from Downtown Rio.
Catete is between Rio's South Zone and Downtown.
Glória is part of Downtown, so it is right in the middle.
People call it KGL: Catete, Glória, Lapa.
It is a very cultural and political neighborhood.
During Brazilian Dictatorship period, the Republican headquarters were here.
Geographically, Catete is in the outskirts of the South Zone.
There's the square... Cobblestone streets.
The guys play soccer and everything, you know?
We have barbecues every day. And that's where I was born.
In the square, we used to play with marble balls,
stick-ball.
We used to have this street lifestyle. There was no internet.
We live more like a hood, you know? We're closer to reality.
It is a mix. You have the slums, the streets,
the beach... Everything is so close.
I always say that, things are very close, you know?
I would hang out with the guys that lived there
and the guys who lived in the slums.
So I would say it was a pathway
between the street and the slums.
I was born listening to the music from the Santo Amaro ball, you know?
You can't make music about life
without having lived it, you know?
Filipe Ret is steel I'm brassy like an animal
What else can I do? I was born to do this
In the TTK street, smoking trees
Women coming and going Skank, bikes, and cars
I think it also absorbed a lot about the fact
that it is a commercial neighborhood,
there's a lot of people there, so it is really like a gateway.
It has like... Let's say...
There's a big versatility because of all these elements, you see?
I arrived at Catete in 1985.
I'm from the outskirts, and I'd say: "I want to skateboard."
Where I used to live, the guys said it was for rich kids.
I think Catete synthesizes the urban culture
very well in Rio de Janeiro.
Because it is close to the beach, it's super urban.
Some guys there would feel very alienated.
Tagging was strong there.
Hot girl with wind on her hair Fireworks and gun shots
It was the social media in the old days.
The guys would come here to play soccer, you know?
Everybody was here.
I remember having many people here,
sitting here, you know?
The first time I was recognized as Ret,
that someone said, "Damn, it's Ret!"
Tagging gave me a street identity.
You get an identity, right?
When you're a teenager, you look for an identity.
On the streets, we would basically listen to funk.
And the balls dominated, man.
But the Santo Amaro ball has always happened.
Ever since I was a child, I'd hear the music from the ball.
Nowadays, I live at Glória.
My son hears the music from the ball at night.
It's been 30 years.
Sometimes, we were on the square, and someone would say:
"Hey, Ret, what's that 'proibidão' from that place?"
And I would sing it, because I loved it.
So in this tagging world,
the music, the "corridor ball,"
the "proibidões,"
the slum balls, tagging and everything,
all these things have penetrated in this area
by that time, you know?
Because Catete is like that,
with a strong urban culture,
tagging and everything related to rap there,
I think something was about to pop there.
The rap culture in Catete, at least for me,
when it started, besides the guys that came after us,
was all about skateboarding in front of the Palácio do Catete.
Skateboarding gave life to the Palácio do Catete.
Skateboarding is occupying a space. It doesn't go unnoticed.
So skateboarding at the Palácio do Catete
brought people together, and sometimes they didn't even skate,
but they liked the street culture.
It was where all those cultural elements arrived.
So you would find 3 or 4 people in your neighborhood
that would dress just like you.
Then you know they listen to the same type of music as you,
that they have similar ideas.
Rap is a regional genre.
The rap from Catete is different from the rap from Madureira.
People sing about what they see around them.
And the musicality and everything.
I think Catete has this thing,
it is urban, it has the beach,
the slums. And this street smart aspect.
I think Catete has a heritage of the street smartness from Downtown.
From Lapa, this bohemianism.
There's also something in Catete that helped this generation a lot:
it was close to Lapa.
In Lapa, there was always something happening.
Lapa was close to everyone, but it didn't belong to anyone.
So people made this movement.
Aori, Marechal, Negrone, people from funk...
The MC battles in Brazil started at Lapa,
you know?
There was this bar, almost hidden.
The entrance was like R$ 1.
They'd tag your hand, collect all the money
and give it to the winning MC of the evening.
The guys would go there and apply...
"I'm battling today. Put my name there."
I don't even know how many they were. Like, 15, 16 guys.
In the end, someone would receive 16 reais.
You could pay your ride home
and buy a sandwich.
The battle synthesizes the union promoted by rapping.
You want to win, but you don't hate the other guy.
It's all cool, like a sport.
It's our sport.
It was a good space that anyone could go to and rhyme,
and that's more important than the battle.
When you create a big event,
that goes beyond where you live, it becomes a movement.
Act outside the pan
How do you want to rule the world If you're still trapped in it?
One bite at a time, you eat an elephant And I knock chimeras down
Who reunited everyone though rap was Sain.
I didn't know Ret, but I knew Sain, who...
So Sain started to introduce everyone.
The first person I heard saying "TTK" in his lyrics was Ret.
And it blew my mind.
I was like, "TTK, neighborhood, fuck..."
Some time later, I met him
and I told him, "Are you from Catete?
I have a friend who knows you, that's cool...
It's nice that you are honoring the neighborhood.
Cool. Let's do that."
There were two kinds of ball in Rio.
The "fighting balls," that people would go to fight,
and the slum balls, that are the balls that happened there.
Corridor ball. Someone would say a slum name.
And they'd say one side was better than the other.
And, at the slum ball, they would say they had the best drugs.
And that they had the best ball.
And it was all born there.
I talked about Catete, because my musical experience,
with the street, and also the "charpi"...
It was my first identification as Ret, as a tagger.
And it created this whole identity, you know?
And to say that in the song, that our neighborhood was the best...
That's what rapping is about, praising your neighborhood.
And everyone adopted it, started saying it.
I said it, Sain said it, BK said it.
Nectar Gang, CHS, Bril, Jonas.
Then Pirâmide Perdida, those kids were the bomb.
Then Marcelo D2 said it. It is in his lyrics.
So we have a scene. BK was more political.
Bril was the craziest.
He has his face tattoed,
and he would shout, like...
I was like the glue between them.
There was also Akira, from Flamengo.
He was always at my place, hanging out with us.
So I was the bridge to bring everyone together.
It is very satisfying to see everything I wrote about there.
It was kind of lonely in the 1990s, you know?
And to see what they are doing now is beautiful.
I'm proud as a father.
And I'm not only talking about Sain. I'm talking about Ret, BK, Bril,
all of those guys.
The TTK "Gualin" is a language created in Catete, Rio de Janeiro,
in which the syllables of the words are pronounced out of order,
making it incomprehensible.
The language was created in mid 1960s to avoid the dictatorship censoring.
It is still spoken in the neighborhood with similar purposes.
I used to tag at Rio's North Zone, so, when I got here,
"charpi" was already strong.
The first time I heard "charpi", I was like, "What's that?"
And they said, "It's the TTK 'gualin.'"
And I was like, "What?"
What's up, bro?
Every slang is a way of communicating
so that no one else knows what you're saying.
Let's go there to get that shit.
-What? -The guys dialogue...
The cops. The pigs.
Do you have drugs there?
-Sometimes, you get like... -What?
There will not be pain Always alive
I think it comes from the early beginnings
of the popular riots, you know?
It was spoken in Buenos Aires.
The guys would talk like that to throw the police off.
The street smart guys would speak that and they brought it to Catete.
"Tomui cilfa," "very easy."
"Lhoguba," "pot."
"Vamos lia," "let's go there."
"Não dá, onã.! "No way, man," you know?
I talked to him in Germany in the TTK language,
so the German wouldn't understand
what we were saying.
I had a problem with the TTK "gualin."
So fucking difficult, but when we want to hide shit...
Here in Catete, it's normal, because everybody knows.
You know? That's it, bro. The old ladies know it.
The dogs know it.
Some people do it very well.
Even rapping.
Ret wrote an entire song like that. He's psycho.
Those fuckers are posing, man They're nerds
The only real player here is Ret
It's cool today My family is my life
I have nothing to do with that. The thing is thinking.
When I wrote the lyrics, I had to think about the end rhyme.
You have to organize it to do it.
I wrote it really fast.
It is a matter of method.
It was a slang, a local language,
that became a language for Rio.
And it spread through culture and art.
And it is spoken all over Brazil.
And everyone knows what is the TTK language.
But life goes on, man
In the beat
Mãoli
To the TTK friends
"Tributo ao TTK" was a redemption,
a redemption sound, let's put it that way.
A more classic style. I invited the trumpet and the sax guy.
Very posh, to make it more classic.
I invited Mãoli to create the beat.
I invited BK and Sain.
And we would sing in TTK, without Auto-Tune,
to bring it from the source, from the guys.
For me, music needs a strong social impact.
It needs to affect people, help them.
To me, this is art.
These guys, you know? BK, Sain, Ret...
Everyone that raps around there
know its importance, and, more than ever,
they're learning how to balance it.
And the royalties they were going to receive,
that we would get as artists,
we're directly donating to the boy's social projects,
Jaxwell's and Luquinhas',
that are very important and cool projects, you know?
So we can share some spotlight
with these projects, you know?
NO ONE IS TOO SMALL TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE
Ant that's the role of rap, but through music,
through the lyrics, right?
And there are some people doing it in other ways.
I think this is important to be treasured.
It would be the first time in Brazil
that the artists are giving their streaming revenue
to the neighborhood social projects.
Very thin mustache Hair cut with a ruler
Thrown around Manguinhos DJ ChrisBeats
Catete will always be my place.
I have many friends there.
The people there talk to me from a place of love.
I have many very good memories about Catete.
It will be a part of my life for as long as I live.
Sometimes, I think, "I will move to Barra,
to live away from here," you know? But I think
it is very difficult for me to leave the structure I have here,
the visions I have here,
the inspirations it brings me, you know?
The more I travel, the more I see this is a special place,
because of this cultural plurality.
I'm still in tune with those kids,
so I'm always studying to make my music always current.
Funk was like that, samba was like that,
the "sertanejo" was like that in some regions.
There has to be a lot of people living that every day.
Otherwise, you only listen to what comes from outside.
So we're having this exchange now,
because we are the reference for those kids.
We see these kids who used to listen to us
multiplying, you know?
And that's what I always say, it's so fucking good!
Because you learn something, you get smarter,
because a lot of people do what you do. And that's life.
I go there sometimes to visit my mother.
She still lives at Pedro Américo Street.
I visit my mother, I see the guys, and someone says
there's a kid there who is rapping.
"That kid opened a studio."
You know? The shit blossomed.
Cool. It worked there. There are some kids...
They got the vision.
I see many kids from the slums occupying the streets,
and the street guys learn with them.
I've been skateboarding for years to learn how the streets work,
and now, a few years later, I go back to the slums
to learn again, to catch up
and see how it is to live in the slums.
And I think this connection creates TTK, you know?
And our scene is once again on the front line, you know?
Because there's nowhere to hide, man.
The slums are taking the streets.
And it will be good for the people outside, too,
because they will be updated thanks to us.
I'll go to the end of the world
I still want everything
Faith? Faith.
So you can remember me
LISTEN TO RAP ON AMAZON MUSIC
So you can remember me