Bounce

Rap Music and Local Identity in New Orleans

Matt Miller

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781558499362, 9781558499355
• eBook ISBN: 9781613762400
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

Over the course of the twentieth century, African Americans in New Orleans helped define the genres of jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, and funk. In recent decades, younger generations of New Orleanians have created a rich and dynamic local rap scene, which has revolved around a dance-oriented style called "bounce."

Hip-hop has been the latest conduit for a "New Orleans sound" that lies at the heart of many of the city's best-known contributions to earlier popular music genres. Bounce, while globally connected and constantly evolving, reflects an enduring cultural continuity that reaches back and builds on the city's rich musical and cultural traditions.

In this book, the popular music scholar and filmmaker Matt Miller explores the ways in which participants in New Orleans's hip-hop scene have collectively established, contested, and revised a distinctive style of rap that exists at the intersection of deeply rooted vernacular music traditions and the modern, globalized economy of commercial popular music. Like other forms of grassroots expressive culture in the city, New Orleans rap is a site of intense aesthetic and economic competition that reflects the creativity and resilience of the city's poor and working-class African Americans.

1

African American Life and Culture in New Orleans

From Congo Square to Katrina and Beyond

As a European colony, New Orleans was always liminal and problematic. The city’s geographic position, connecting the vast North American interior to the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, held out tantalizing possibilities with regard to the dominance of trade and territory, but its remoteness, semitropical climate, and the related difficulty of social control presented daunting challenges. Slavery and colonization had devastating results for Africans and Native Americans, but members of these groups also exploited the weaknesses of colonial powers and the fluidity of boundaries that was possible under French and Spanish rule, by rebelling and escaping, by attempting to secure their freedom legally through military service or self-purchase, or by forging or acceding to various kinds of relationships (including sexual ones) with whites.

Though structured by the prevailing power relations, contact and exchange within the wider Caribbean sphere informed a process of “cultural creolization,” which the folklorist Nicholas Spitzer describes as “the development of new traditions, aesthetics, and group identities out of combinations of formerly separate peoples and cultures—usually where at least one has been deterritorialized by emigration, enslavement, or exile.”¹ Cultural practices—syncretic, creolized forms based on the dynamic reorganization (according to stylistic sensibilities rooted in West Africa and the Caribbean) of ideas and technologies present in the local environment—were central to African Americans’ ability to create independent psychic and social spaces within the New Orleans context. Musical expression existed in a mutually influential relationship with black efforts in the political and economic realms, communicating autonomy, inviting participation, claiming public space, and ultimately challenging the dominant ideology of white supremacy.

Nevertheless, the political transfer of Louisiana to the United States introduced profound and disruptive changes to the society, culture, and urban geography of New Orleans. With the Louisiana Purchase, New Orleans began its transition from a far-flung outpost of the French and Spanish empires to the United States’ most important southern port and the critical nexus point enabling the spread of African slavery westward into newly acquired territories. In the nineteenth century, New Orleans embodied a paradoxical mixture. Its political and cultural heritage, its economic and geographical identity as a port city, and the presence of large numbers of Irish and Italian immigrants all served to differentiate the city from the rest of the U.S. South. But New Orleans was a central hub of the slave trade, tied in to the sugar and cotton industries as well as to the westward expansion of slavery, and the city’s social and economic life was structured by the “peculiar institution” and the system of racial classification on which it rested. The end of slavery marked the dawn of a new era of white resistance, in which legal means and extralegal terrorism were employed to enforce segregation and the subordinate status of blacks.

Before the Civil War, New Orleans became a hub of the slave system; after abolition, it was a magnet for English-speaking blacks from surrounding rural areas, who brought religious, linguistic, and cultural values that were distinct from the city’s “creole,” urban, Franco-African counterparts. “American” blacks and black Creoles were respectively concentrated above and below Canal Street. Despite their differences, both groups resisted the oppressive efforts of whites, using legal means (such as those that resulted in the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case, which established “separate but equal” as the law of the land) or expressing their anger through violent outbursts, as in the case of the black militant Robert Charles. But even as New Orleans seemed to be coming apart at the seams, a dynamic and compelling new form of music-making (eventually labeled “jazz”) arose from the city’s vernacular spaces in response to the demands of working-class black audiences and habitués of the “sporting life.”

Jazz embodied all the complexity and contradictions of New Orleans during this period. Home to both expressions of refined sophistication and gut-bucket rural blues, the city enabled the fusion of several distinct strains of black musical experience into what was identified early on as one of the most important American contributions to the world of music. The particular conditions that allowed jazz to emerge from New Orleans—the mixture of urban and rural, West African, French, Anglo-American, and West Indian, the celebration of carnival and the related importance of public and participatory musical events rooted in a lively street and saloon culture and its “ratty” preferences—remained vibrant and contributed to important developments in the city’s musical culture and history in the twentieth century.

The blending of rural Protestant African American culture and traditions with those of the city’s black Creoles was a key feature of the “uniquely fertile social climate” that enabled the emergence of jazz.² As this synthesis was coming to fruition in the decades between 1890 and 1910, however, segregation was solidifying its hold in New Orleans and across the South. During this period, black New Orleanians lost the right to vote and were slowly deprived of almost all access to public education. As they relegated blacks to second-class citizenship and inferior “Jim Crow” accommodations and services, whites attempted (with some success) to erase prior divisions of class and status among African Americans. Even after the abandonment of de jure segregation, New Orleans remained a city of stark racial and social divisions, as poor and working-class blacks were increasingly isolated within low-lying areas made up of reclaimed swampland.

Expressive culture, including music, was a crucial dimension of African Americans’ psychic survival under these conditions. The city supported a rich array of grassroots musical practices, which included religious and secular forms and reflected the diversity of backgrounds, social class, and musical taste of the city’s growing African American population. The city’s African American parade and carnival traditions drew on and helped to perpetuate a collective musical sensibility as well as a more general sense of cultural autonomy and enjoyment. These features allowed New Orleans to make essential contributions to the development of several important commercial genres within U.S. popular music, including jazz, R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, soul, and funk. The city’s distance from the centers of music industry power, however, along with its cultural and social distinctiveness, worked against the establishment of any lasting presence of national music companies in the city.

New Orleans–based artists and companies were not only challenged by their geo-cultural marginality, but they also grappled with a variety of local or regional social and political problems. Even after the dismantling of legally sanctioned segregation, blacks in New Orleans faced racism and neglect in the areas of education, employment, housing, and the judicial system. As the analysis in this chapter shows, these wider social forces influenced the local musical and cultural environment in complex and contradictory ways. While New Orleans remained a “cultural wetlands” of music and expressive culture, the experience of many African Americans in the city in the years leading up to Hurricane Katrina was defined by poverty, reduced opportunity, and high levels of violence.³

The evolution of a local rap scene and style is a process that has interacted dynamically with the wider social and cultural forces detailed above, the roots of which extend back to the city’s colonial period. While rap represented, in many ways, a dramatic break with earlier genres of popular music along the lines of instrumentation, composition, production, narrative voice, and imagery, it also embodied strong continuities with prior commercial and vernacular music styles within the African American tradition. This laid the groundwork for an early, enthusiastic, and participatory embrace of rap on the part of young blacks (and a few older folks) in New Orleans.

If these elements added some sense of stability, or at least inevitability, to the processes at work in the local rap music scene, other factors—including technologically enabled suburbanization, the concentration of black poverty in the city, and a declining industrial base—had the opposite effect. While the local economy, civic institutions, and spatial organization of the city’s population had undergone radical shifts in the second half of the twentieth century, one thing had not changed: black New Orleanians were at the bottom of the heap, even as the cultural forms that originated in poor and working-class black neighborhoods were increasingly celebrated and globally disseminated. In important ways, this contradiction structured the ways that participants imagined the possibilities and limitations of the rap era.

As the twentieth century came to a close, New Orleans saw the growth of concentrated black poverty, especially in the city’s numerous public housing complexes. Many of these “projects” suffered from a combination of remote location, inhuman scale, crime, and neglect. Along with decreased educational and economic opportunities, these conditions helped usher in an era of spiraling homicide rates in the city, which, toward the end of the century, gained notoriety as the nation’s “murder capital.” New Orleans’s rap scene emerged within a context of mounting challenges that strained the fabric of family and community life. When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005, the city’s preexisting social and economic problems set the stage for devastating consequences, as New Orleans’s poorest residents bore the brunt of the storm’s effects.

Colonial New Orleans

The contemporary African American culture of New Orleans bears a strong imprint from the city’s colonial past, when lower Louisiana was the site of what the historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall labels “the most Africanized slave culture in the United States.”⁴ White colonists depended on enslaved Africans to grow crops, clear land, and build urban infrastructure, and the early groups of slaves brought to the colony often shared a common cultural and linguistic background.⁵ Colonial Louisiana represents a prime example of the ways in which, for Africans, the oppression and violence of slavery could exist simultaneously with a high degree of cultural cohesion, mutual intelligibility, and mutual aid.

While French authorities sometimes used armed blacks to fight hostile Native Americans, a shared opposition to white dominance and forced labor regimes often spurred resistance, cooperation, and solidarity between the two groups. The 1729 Natchez Rebellion, in which Native Americans and their black allies killed over two hundred French settlers, dampened the enthusiasm of the colonizers. The importation of slaves slowed to a trickle, and the French retreated from their strategy of growth and expansion to one of basic and limited occupation. This isolation of the colony further contributed to the development of a relatively stable Afro-Creole culture, which organized diverse influences according to a West African grammar.

Music was a central dimension of the expression and evolution of this Afro-Creole sensibility. New Orleans, Curtis Jerde writes, “served as the site of some of the earliest and most extensive Afro-American music development of any urban community in the nation.”⁶ This was a complex and multilayered process that occurred at various levels of formal organization. It drew on the world of antebellum African American folk music, which included secular forms such as work songs, field hollers, and street criers, as well as sacred music, including spirituals and “ring-shout” religious services in which collective movement and call-and-response fostered a participatory, communal ethos.

The establishment and perpetuation of a localized African American folk musical culture relied on highly diffused and small-scale practices as well as larger and more organized events. One of the best known of these venues was Congo Square, a large open field at the edge of town (located off of what would become Rampart Street) where slaves and free blacks would congregate on Sundays. Congo Square (known under French rule as Place Congo) was one of several public markets in the city where slaves were allowed to sell their own produce, socialize, and engage in a variety of cultural practices, including music and dance. These markets served as a gathering place for slaves and free blacks from within New Orleans as well as those who had come from more remote areas of the city’s rural hinterland.⁷

One of the most striking features of Congo Square—to both modern researchers and contemporaneous observers—is the regular presence of “neo-African drumming” and dancing performed by blacks (grouped according to their tribal affiliation and including recently arrived Africans and West Indians alongside the native-born) until the mid-1800s, despite such practices having been “effectively outlawed” in other parts of the United States.⁸ With regard to music and dance, Congo Square and similar spaces served as important venues for the perpetuation and transmission of African-derived cultural values and practices. Ben Sandmel provides an inventory:

Polyrhythm: the simultaneous use of several different, yet related rhythms, unified by a dominant rhythm known as the time line; syncopation; improvisation: the spontaneous creation of lyrics and/or instrumental parts; call-and-response: an interactive dialogue between a leader and a group of vocalists and/or instrumentalists; emotional intensity; the use of the human voice as a solo instrument, rather than to simply tell a story with lyrics; and the use of bent, slurred, or deliberately-distorted notes.⁹

Slaves and free people of color maintained familiarity with African-originated instruments, such as the banjo and a vast range of percussion instruments, examples of which were sketched and described by the architect Benjamin Latrobe after a visit to Congo Square in the early nineteenth century. Instruments derived from the European tradition included guitar, harmonica, and fiddle, among others.¹⁰

As a symbol of the continuation of African-derived cultural practices in the United States, Congo Square has accrued a level of significance that may be out of proportion to its actual historical role (to the extent that this can be quantified) within the diverse and multilayered evolution of African American vernacular music in New Orleans. Nevertheless, scholars generally agree on the historical importance of the Sunday gatherings off of Rampart Street and other analogous events, where collective, autonomous practices perpetuated a West African–derived sensibility and contributed to the formation of a distinctive local culture. In Congo Square and places like it, blacks perpetuated expressive cultural forms and styles with clear West African roots, but over time they also absorbed or adapted ideas and technologies from European and other cultures. The cross-cultural contact and exchange in early New Orleans went in multiple directions; Congo Square gave fascinated white observers a window into a world of distinct cultural values and practices.

Louisiana passed to Spanish governance during the last three decades of the eighteenth century, before briefly returning to the French prior to its purchase by the United States. The numbers of Louisiana-born blacks who achieved their freedom under the Spanish were augmented by Caribbean immigrants who arrived before, during, and after the assumption of control by the United States in 1803. They included those fleeing the turmoil of the revolution in Saint-Domingue (later Haiti), which began in the 1790s, as well as Cuban émigrés.¹¹ Cultural affinity and a more liberal policy than in the Anglo-American seaboard states regarding free black immigration made Louisiana a frequent destination for these refugees.

Under French and Spanish political control and cultural influence, the colony had developed a “three-tiered, multiracial social [structure] in which a class of marginal status and frequently mixed origin was inserted between blacks and whites.”¹² In French Louisiana, this took the form of the “creole,” which, Hall writes, “referred to locally born people of at least partial African descent, slave and free, and was used to distinguish America...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1.  African American Life and Culture in New Orleans: From Congo Square to Katrina and Beyond
• 2.  “The City That Is Overlooked”: Rap Beginnings, 1980–1991
• 3.  “Where They At”: Bounce, 1992–1994
• 4.  “Bout It”: New Orleans Breaking Through, 1995–2000
• 5.  “Lights Out”: Stagnation, Decline, and the Resurgence of the Local, 2001–2005
• 6.  Bouncing Back: After Katrina, Toward an Uncertain Future
• Notes
• New Orleans Rap: A Selected Discography
• Index
• About the Author
• Back Cover