Oruam: ラッパーが詩人の視点でフベーラ生活を日本人に提供

Flaunting blood-red hair, the snaking limbs of a contortionist and, occasionally, a face half-covered in clown make-up, Oruam doesn’t aim at discretion. His ID reads Mauro Davi dos Santos Nepomuceno, a family name that carries a burden: it’s shared by the man condemned and described by the Brazilian justice system as one of the most powerful drug lords in the country – Mauro’s dad, Márcio dos Santos Nepomuceno. Mauro – Oruam – is arguably the most attention-stealing hip hop artist in Brazil today, at once a north star to kids and, just like his father, a punchbag for lawmakers.

“There’s a bill project with my name, so I’m really famous. They will remember me forever,” says the 24-year-old rapper, who is curled up in his gamer chair in the depths of a doomscroll. The skinny kid who barely holds eye contact while we talk doesn’t seem to be the person that could ignite fear and hysteria in right-wing politicians across Brazil. The ‘Anti-Oruam’ bill, as it’s been dubbed, proposes banning public financing for concerts with artists who – according to the conservative agenda, at least – promote crime in their music.

A thick plume of smoke puffs from the mansion Oruam has been renting since 2024. Away from the spotlight and the sonics, he’s the proud owner of what he calls “exotic pets”: a monkey, a falcon and a crossbred wildcat valued at more than £13,000. Just beyond the flats, sea waves caress Rio’s orangehued Barra Beach. It’s an autumn afternoon, a football match airs on TV and eyes around Oruam are riveted to the screen. “I can only drop bars in the studio with [so] many people looking at me, let’s say 20 people, otherwise I can’t rap,” the artist reflects. “I am the result of everything I’ve seen, heard and lived.”

Oruam has skyrocketed Brazilian music with his low-slung trap and uptempo baile funk. Away from the excitement of his sound, he’s an expert digital native, as skilled at drumming up internet riots as any streamer you could name. For his birthday in 2024, Oruam ended up on primetime news after asking his nine million social media followers to start a motorcycle parade – hundreds of bikers stormed the streets of Rio. On February 20 this year, he drifted his car in front of police officers and was sent straight to jail. The next day, his first album was released. Liberdade (Freedom) features Oruam and his family on the cover, all dressed in T-shirts printed with a photo of his father. In “Lei Anti O.R.U.A.M”, the rapper sings: “They give us guns / then ask why we are outlaws.”

In conversation, Oruam flits between typical trap-star braggadocio and an odd kind of shyness. “I still feel nervous when I step on a stage, but I set this feeling aside and live it through,” he says. The first time he felt like that was in 2017 at a gathering that marked the release of his father’s book, Verdades e Posições, a memoir written from prison. “I wrote a poem for my dad and he told me to recite it at his book release event – I had to do it,” he recalls. “This was my first time on a stage and when I stepped down people were asking to take photos with me.”

In his book, Márcio Nepomuceno describes his son as “the poet of the family”. Nepomuceno has been incarcerated since 1996; Oruam was born in 2001. In 2010, his mother, Márcia, was imprisoned too. Her sentence lasted less than one year. “I used to cry every day back then,” the rapper says. In the absence of his father (Oruam visits him three times per year), his mother filled the gap in his parenting and built up their bond. “My mom made me as I am today, and she used to tell me: ‘One day, you’ll be a boss too,’” Oruam says. “When I showed her my first poems, she told me I was really good at it, and everyone that read them ended up crying. If you get this kind of reaction, that’s art.”

As a kid, Oruam never dreamed of holding a mic. “I did some rap battles a couple of times in school but I didn’t like it, I was really shy,” he recalls. But living in the mid-2010s favelas and suburbs of Rio, Oruam navigated streets and alleys ruled by baile funk and the first wave of the local trap – subgenres that soundtrack the city today. If music wasn’t his medium, he explains, it was his lifestyle. “I think I was 14 or 15 when I went to my first favela baile and that’s the kind of music I like ever since, proibidão,” he says, mentioning the Brazilian funk sub-genre that narrates the police-and-thieves stories of Rio.

With a knack for clever wordplay and evocative punchlines, and surrounded by a burgeoning MC culture, Oruam started getting studio invites in his DMs in 2021. In October that year, he released his first song along with Jhowzin, Raffé and Chefin, all stars in Rio’s current trap constellation in their own right. (The latter is a friend from school.) “I’ve been through a lot in my life / that’s why I don’t miss a beat,” Oruam sings in “Invejoso” (“Jealous”), a slowpaced trap tune with type-beat vibes and a music video with 196m views on YouTube. “That was my first time recording in a studio for real,” he says. “And I became famous one week later.”

It didn’t take long for him to receive Rio’s rap golden ticket – a call from Mainstreet, the label that has crystallised the city’s trap-through-baile sound over the past few years. Like a storm tearing through a city, Mainstreet moved from underground platform to a staple in Brazilian hip hop, sending artists like MC Poze do Rodo and MC Cabelinho to the top of the charts month after month, week after week. “I was singing in this show in the Cidade de Deus neighbourhood, I was paid 2,000 reals [£260], and there was Orochi,” says Oruam, referring to Mainstreet’s co-founder. “The next day I woke up and they were calling me. My brother [Lucas] told me to sit on that, have a thought, but I was like, ‘No way, let’s sign the deal.’”

Besides Lucas, who went to law school and helps manage his career, Oruam is close with his sister, Débora, a gospel singer with half a million followers on Instagram. The rapper was raised as an evangelical – a growing religion in Brazil, especially among rappers and baile funk artists from low-income neighbourhoods and favelas. (According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, Protestantism is on track to overtake Catholicism as Brazil’s main religion within the next decade.) Not by chance, Oruam’s first single under Mainstreet is titled “Terra Prometida” (“Promised Land”): “Those who trust in the lord / are like the mountains of Zion,” Oruam sings in it. “I’m evangelical and this is a Bible line,” he affirms. “I opened it up one day and there it was.”

Despite his early successes, his dad insisted he study psychology at university. “I wanted to understand my mind,” he offers, smirking. His studies would make fine preparation for the fame he would soon enjoy (in 2024 alone, he performed in front of thousands in arena-sized shows in Lisbon, Portugal and Luanda, Angola). Indeed, ideas about the mechanics of feelings that he had read as an undergrad still echo around in his music. While some of his songs are ordinary love letters or even shallow party-hard stories, a bitter taste of angst and rage is traceable in many of his lyrics, which often drive against the street-level issues that afflict Rio – from everyday racism to police brutality. “You don’t know / what goes through the mind of a kid / who has suffered a lot in his life / but didn’t let himself go,” he sings in “Avançando Muito”. “I like to sing about sadness,” Oruam says. “As artists we need to get to a concept, and sadness is conceptual.”

Typically sporting an all-red look, double puffs and beaded braids (“Regarding hairstyle, I’m a trendsetter, that’s for sure”), Oruam questions what it means to be a fashion-conscious male artist in 2025. “I can’t be an artist and be like everyone else. I need to be original, I need to be remarkable,” he explains. At Oruam concerts, it’s not uncommon to witness children with fire-red tinted hair screaming along to his songs. Many cry, singing lyrics about powering through in the favelas, losing friends to crime and police brutality.

“Justin Bieber,” he says without hesitation, when I ask about a dream collaboration of his – though his most pressing short-term goal is to learn how to speak English and hit the US and UK charts. “I can’t describe this feeling, it’s like I have to be a hero,” he says when I ask about his influence. “I mean…” He pauses. “An anti-hero,” someone hollers in the hazy, cloudy room we’re in. The voice is followed by a group explanation of the concept, as exemplified, they agree, by the all-red Marvel character Deadpool. “Actually, I am an antihero,” Oruam says. “You can write that down, boss.”

Grooming DOUGLAS MENDONÇA, KAUA SALLES, make-up BENTO, models RODRIGO ANDRADE, CRISTIAN SANTOS, LUCAS CELESTINO, PABLO RUAN REIS, KAUA SALLES, BRUNO BARROS, CARLOS EDUARDO TEIXEIRA, KAIQUE ALEXANDRE, LUÍS FELIPE OLIVEIRA, FABRÍCIO DOS SANTOS, ISRAEL MONTEIRO, CARLOS EDUARDO BUENO, set design ALEX MOURÃO, photographic assistants NATHALIA ATAYDE, styling assistants LÍVIA AIKO KAMADA, AMANDA CÂMARA, LAIS SANTOS, set design assistant GABRIEL OLIVEIRA, production DIEGO DOMINGOS, production assistants MILENA ENDO, GABRIEL OLIVEIRA, styling production ELIZA ALVES, ALINE LIVRA, FABIANA PERNAMBUCO, casting MISCHA NOTCUTT at 11CASTING, DANIEL DIAS, street casting RAFAELA PINAH, street casting assistants VITU, MARCELLY PRADO, TELMA YALÊ, special thanks ALLAN WEBER

Flaunting blood-red hair, the snaking limbs of a contortionist and, occasionally, a face half-covered in clown make-up, Oruam doesn’t aim at discretion. His ID reads Mauro Davi dos Santos Nepomuceno, a family name that carries a burden: it’s shared by the man condemned and described by the Brazilian justice system as one of the most powerful drug lords in the country – Mauro’s dad, Márcio dos Santos Nepomuceno. Mauro – Oruam – is arguably the most attention-stealing hip hop artist in Brazil today, at once a north star to kids and, just like his father, a punchbag for lawmakers.

“There’s a bill project with my name, so I’m really famous. They will remember me forever,” says the 24-year-old rapper, who is curled up in his gamer chair in the depths of a doomscroll. The skinny kid who barely holds eye contact while we talk doesn’t seem to be the person that could ignite fear and hysteria in right-wing politicians across Brazil. The ‘Anti-Oruam’ bill, as it’s been dubbed, proposes banning public financing for concerts with artists who – according to the conservative agenda, at least – promote crime in their music.

A thick plume of smoke puffs from the mansion Oruam has been renting since 2024. Away from the spotlight and the sonics, he’s the proud owner of what he calls “exotic pets”: a monkey, a falcon and a crossbred wildcat valued at more than £13,000. Just beyond the flats, sea waves caress Rio’s orangehued Barra Beach. It’s an autumn afternoon, a football match airs on TV and eyes around Oruam are riveted to the screen. “I can only drop bars in the studio with [so] many people looking at me, let’s say 20 people, otherwise I can’t rap,” the artist reflects. “I am the result of everything I’ve seen, heard and lived.”

Oruam has skyrocketed Brazilian music with his low-slung trap and uptempo baile funk. Away from the excitement of his sound, he’s an expert digital native, as skilled at drumming up internet riots as any streamer you could name. For his birthday in 2024, Oruam ended up on primetime news after asking his nine million social media followers to start a motorcycle parade – hundreds of bikers stormed the streets of Rio. On February 20 this year, he drifted his car in front of police officers and was sent straight to jail. The next day, his first album was released. Liberdade (Freedom) features Oruam and his family on the cover, all dressed in T-shirts printed with a photo of his father. In “Lei Anti O.R.U.A.M”, the rapper sings: “They give us guns / then ask why we are outlaws.”

In conversation, Oruam flits between typical trap-star braggadocio and an odd kind of shyness. “I still feel nervous when I step on a stage, but I set this feeling aside and live it through,” he says. The first time he felt like that was in 2017 at a gathering that marked the release of his father’s book, Verdades e Posições, a memoir written from prison. “I wrote a poem for my dad and he told me to recite it at his book release event – I had to do it,” he recalls. “This was my first time on a stage and when I stepped down people were asking to take photos with me.”

In his book, Márcio Nepomuceno describes his son as “the poet of the family”. Nepomuceno has been incarcerated since 1996; Oruam was born in 2001. In 2010, his mother, Márcia, was imprisoned too. Her sentence lasted less than one year. “I used to cry every day back then,” the rapper says. In the absence of his father (Oruam visits him three times per year), his mother filled the gap in his parenting and built up their bond. “My mom made me as I am today, and she used to tell me: ‘One day, you’ll be a boss too,’” Oruam says. “When I showed her my first poems, she told me I was really good at it, and everyone that read them ended up crying. If you get this kind of reaction, that’s art.”

As a kid, Oruam never dreamed of holding a mic. “I did some rap battles a couple of times in school but I didn’t like it, I was really shy,” he recalls. But living in the mid-2010s favelas and suburbs of Rio, Oruam navigated streets and alleys ruled by baile funk and the first wave of the local trap – subgenres that soundtrack the city today. If music wasn’t his medium, he explains, it was his lifestyle. “I think I was 14 or 15 when I went to my first favela baile and that’s the kind of music I like ever since, proibidão,” he says, mentioning the Brazilian funk sub-genre that narrates the police-and-thieves stories of Rio.

With a knack for clever wordplay and evocative punchlines, and surrounded by a burgeoning MC culture, Oruam started getting studio invites in his DMs in 2021. In October that year, he released his first song along with Jhowzin, Raffé and Chefin, all stars in Rio’s current trap constellation in their own right. (The latter is a friend from school.) “I’ve been through a lot in my life / that’s why I don’t miss a beat,” Oruam sings in “Invejoso” (“Jealous”), a slowpaced trap tune with type-beat vibes and a music video with 196m views on YouTube. “That was my first time recording in a studio for real,” he says. “And I became famous one week later.”

It didn’t take long for him to receive Rio’s rap golden ticket – a call from Mainstreet, the label that has crystallised the city’s trap-through-baile sound over the past few years. Like a storm tearing through a city, Mainstreet moved from underground platform to a staple in Brazilian hip hop, sending artists like MC Poze do Rodo and MC Cabelinho to the top of the charts month after month, week after week. “I was singing in this show in the Cidade de Deus neighbourhood, I was paid 2,000 reals [£260], and there was Orochi,” says Oruam, referring to Mainstreet’s co-founder. “The next day I woke up and they were calling me. My brother [Lucas] told me to sit on that, have a thought, but I was like, ‘No way, let’s sign the deal.’”

Besides Lucas, who went to law school and helps manage his career, Oruam is close with his sister, Débora, a gospel singer with half a million followers on Instagram. The rapper was raised as an evangelical – a growing religion in Brazil, especially among rappers and baile funk artists from low-income neighbourhoods and favelas. (According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, Protestantism is on track to overtake Catholicism as Brazil’s main religion within the next decade.) Not by chance, Oruam’s first single under Mainstreet is titled “Terra Prometida” (“Promised Land”): “Those who trust in the lord / are like the mountains of Zion,” Oruam sings in it. “I’m evangelical and this is a Bible line,” he affirms. “I opened it up one day and there it was.”

Despite his early successes, his dad insisted he study psychology at university. “I wanted to understand my mind,” he offers, smirking. His studies would make fine preparation for the fame he would soon enjoy (in 2024 alone, he performed in front of thousands in arena-sized shows in Lisbon, Portugal and Luanda, Angola). Indeed, ideas about the mechanics of feelings that he had read as an undergrad still echo around in his music. While some of his songs are ordinary love letters or even shallow party-hard stories, a bitter taste of angst and rage is traceable in many of his lyrics, which often drive against the street-level issues that afflict Rio – from everyday racism to police brutality. “You don’t know / what goes through the mind of a kid / who has suffered a lot in his life / but didn’t let himself go,” he sings in “Avançando Muito”. “I like to sing about sadness,” Oruam says. “As artists we need to get to a concept, and sadness is conceptual.”

Typically sporting an all-red look, double puffs and beaded braids (“Regarding hairstyle, I’m a trendsetter, that’s for sure”), Oruam questions what it means to be a fashion-conscious male artist in 2025. “I can’t be an artist and be like everyone else. I need to be original, I need to be remarkable,” he explains. At Oruam concerts, it’s not uncommon to witness children with fire-red tinted hair screaming along to his songs. Many cry, singing lyrics about powering through in the favelas, losing friends to crime and police brutality.

“Justin Bieber,” he says without hesitation, when I ask about a dream collaboration of his – though his most pressing short-term goal is to learn how to speak English and hit the US and UK charts. “I can’t describe this feeling, it’s like I have to be a hero,” he says when I ask about his influence. “I mean…” He pauses. “An anti-hero,” someone hollers in the hazy, cloudy room we’re in. The voice is followed by a group explanation of the concept, as exemplified, they agree, by the all-red Marvel character Deadpool. “Actually, I am an antihero,” Oruam says. “You can write that down, boss.”

Grooming DOUGLAS MENDONÇA, KAUA SALLES, make-up BENTO, models RODRIGO ANDRADE, CRISTIAN SANTOS, LUCAS CELESTINO, PABLO RUAN REIS, KAUA SALLES, BRUNO BARROS, CARLOS EDUARDO TEIXEIRA, KAIQUE ALEXANDRE, LUÍS FELIPE OLIVEIRA, FABRÍCIO DOS SANTOS, ISRAEL MONTEIRO, CARLOS EDUARDO BUENO, set design ALEX MOURÃO, photographic assistants NATHALIA ATAYDE, styling assistants LÍVIA AIKO KAMADA, AMANDA CÂMARA, LAIS SANTOS, set design assistant GABRIEL OLIVEIRA, production DIEGO DOMINGOS, production assistants MILENA ENDO, GABRIEL OLIVEIRA, styling production ELIZA ALVES, ALINE LIVRA, FABIANA PERNAMBUCO, casting MISCHA NOTCUTT at 11CASTING, DANIEL DIAS, street casting RAFAELA PINAH, street casting assistants VITU, MARCELLY PRADO, TELMA YALÊ, special thanks ALLAN WEBER