MV Bill

MV Bill, real name Alex Pereira Barbosa, is a Brazilian rap singer and co-author of the best-selling book Falcão - Meninos do Tráfico. The initials "MV" stand for "Mensageiro da Verdade", Portuguese for "Messenger of Truth".

MV Bill is one of the leading and most controversial rappers of Brazilian hip hop in Rio de Janeiro. Rio remains as the center of developing Brazilian politics. MV Bill is an advocate for getting the Brazilian youth out of the drug trade and into some other forms of self uplift, so he began a network of NGOs located in Rio, which strive to teach hip-hop skills, graffiti, and break dancing to children, alongside educational classes such as computer training. Many of his songs contain lyrics discussing the Brazilian youth lost to the trades and confrontations in Rio. MV Bill has also funneled his passion for social justice into a book, Cabeça de Porco, that he co-authored with Celso Athayde and Luis Eduardo Soares, one of Brazil's foremost social anthropologists. The book, published in 2005, revolves around the issue of social injustice and violence in Brazil and discusses what must be done to solve the problem MV Bill appears in an episode of "Black in Latin America".