[Dixielandjazz] New Orleans Music

[Steve barbone]

It may not be OKOM, but it is what's happening now. This is an interesting
read if only for the next to the last paragraph which should remind us all
of the once corrupting influence of Louis Armstrong. :-) VBG

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


New York Times - April 23, 2006 - By KELEFA SANNEH

New Orleans Hip-Hop Is the Home of Gangsta Gumbo

FOR thousands of people ‹ we'll probably never know exactly how many ‹
Hurricane Katrina was the end. But for listeners across the country, that
not-quite-natural disaster also marked the beginning of a party that hasn't
ended yet. Ever since those awful days last year, the country has been
celebrating the rich musical heritage of New Orleans.

There was a blitz of benefit concerts, including "From the Big Apple to the
Big Easy," a pair of shows held simultaneously at Madison Square Garden and
Radio City Music Hall last September. A New Orleans jam session closed the
show at the Grammy Awards in February. There have been scads of
well-intentioned compilations, including "Our New Orleans: A Benefit Album
for the Gulf Coast" (Nonesuch), "Hurricane Relief: Come Together Now"
(Concord) and "Higher Ground Hurricane Relief Benefit Concert" (Blue Note),
a live album recorded at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Benefit. At the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony last month, a video segment paid
tribute to New Orleans music through the years, from Louis Armstrong to the
Neville Brothers; there was also the inevitable New Orleans jam session.

But one thing all these tributes have in common is that they all ignored the
thrilling ‹ and wildly popular ‹ sound of New Orleans hip-hop, the music
that has been the city's true soundtrack through the last few decades.

Rap music remains by far New Orleans's most popular musical export. Lil
Wayne, Master P, Juvenile, Mannie Fresh, B. G., Mystikal and many other
pioneers have sold millions of albums, and they have helped make their city
an indispensable part of the hip-hop world. Unlike all the other musicians
celebrated at post-Katrina tributes, these ones still show up on the pop
charts, often near the top. (Juvenile's most recent album made its debut at
No. 1, last month.) Yet when tourists and journalists descend upon the city
next weekend, for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, they'll find
only one local rapper on the schedule: Juvenile, who is to appear on the
Congo Square Louisiana Rebirth Stage at 6 p.m. Saturday.

Maybe New Orleans rappers don't mind being left out. No doubt most of them
prefer popularity ‹ and its rewards ‹ to respect. But why should they have
to choose? 

Hip-hop was long considered unfit for polite society. And yet the
extraordinary snubbing of New Orleans hip-hop comes at a time when the genre
is gaining institutional validation. The Smithsonian Institution's National
Museum of American History recently announced plans for a hip-hop exhibit.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum exhibited "Roots, Rhyme and Rage:
The Hip-Hop Story" in 1999. Colleges and universities around the country are
offering conferences and courses devoted to hip-hop history. At the same
time that hip-hop is being written out of the history of New Orleans, it's
being written into the history of America. Could that possibly be a
coincidence? 

The story of New Orleans hip-hop begins in earnest with what is known as
bounce music: festive beats, exuberant chants, simple lyrics that ruled
local nightclubs and breezeway parties in the late 1980's and early 90's.
The future hip-hop star Juvenile got his start in the bounce-music scene.
But like many New Orleans musicians before him, Juvenile found out that
having a citywide hit wasn't quite the same as having a nationwide hit.

By the mid-90's, Southern hip-hop was starting to explode, and so some New
Orleans entrepreneurs figured out ways to go national. Master P, a
world-class hustler and less-than-world-class rapper from the city's rough
Calliope projects, founded a label called No Limit, and used it to
popularize a distinctively New Orleans-ish form of hard-boiled hip-hop. For
a time Master P was one of pop music's most successful moguls. (He made the
cover of Fortune, and he never let anyone forget it.)

Master P's crosstown rivals were the Williams brothers, proprietors of Cash
Money Records, which eventually replaced No Limit as the city's dominant
brand name. Cash Money signed up the hometown hero Juvenile (who was raised
in the Magnolia projects), as well as the city's greatest hip-hop producer,
Mannie Fresh. Working with a great group of rappers including Lil Wayne and
B. G., Fresh perfected an exuberant electronic sound; he did as much as
anyone to pull the musical legacy of New Orleans into the 21st century. You
could hear brass bands in the synthesizers, drum lines in the rattling
beats, Mardi Gras Indians in the sing-song lyrics. (If you're wondering
where to start, try Juvenile's head-spinning 1998 blockbuster, "400
Degreez," which has sold 4.7 million copies.)

Like most musical stories, this one doesn't really have a happy ending ‹ or
any ending at all. Master P's empire dissolved, which explains why you might
recently have seen him on "Dancing With the Stars." Mystikal, one of the
city's best and weirdest rappers, split with No Limit in 2000, and he's
currently serving a jail sentence for sexual battery and tax evasion.
Juvenile, B. G. and Mannie Fresh have all left Cash Money, though Lil Wayne
remains.

The came Katrina. Not all of the city's stars were living in New Orleans
when the storm hit, but all lost houses or cars or ‹ at the very least ‹ a
hometown. Lil Wayne moved his mother to Miami; Mannie Fresh set up shop in
Los Angeles; B. G. is living in Detroit.

But the music never stopped. Juvenile's "Reality Check" (UTP/Atlantic),
released last month, was the fastest-selling CD of his career; for the
defiant first single, "Get Ya Hustle On," he filmed a video in the
devastated Lower Ninth Ward. B. G. recently released a strong new album,
"The Heart of tha Streetz Vol. 2 (I Am What I Am)" (Koch); it was strong
enough, in fact, to earn him a new record contract with Atlantic. In "Move
Around," the album's first single, Mannie Fresh sings (sort of) the cheerful
refrain: "I'm from the ghetto, homey/ I was raised on bread and baloney/ You
can't come around here, 'cause you're phony."

And then there's Lil Wayne, who last fall released "Tha Carter 2" (Cash
Money/Universal), perhaps the finest album of his career (it has sold about
900,000 copies so far). In his slick lyrics and raspy voice, you can hear a
city's swagger and desperation:


All I have in this world is a pistol and a promise
A fistful of dollars
A list full of problems
I'll address 'em like P.O. Boxes
Yeah, I'm from New Orleans, the Creole cockpit
We so out of it 
Zero tolerance 
Gangsta gumbo ‹ I'll serve 'em a pot of it


All right, so this isn't the stuff that feel-good tributes are made of.
Despite the topical video, "Get Ya Hustle On" is a mishmash of political
commentary and drug-dealer rhymes. (The song included the well-known
couplet, "Everybody tryna get that check from FEMA/ So he can go and score
him some co-ca-een-uh.") And much of the music portrays New Orleans as a
place full of violence and decadence: expensive teeth, cheap women,
"choppers" (machine guns) everywhere. If you're trying to celebrate the old,
festive, tourist-friendly New Orleans, maybe these aren't the locals you
want.

Furthermore, much of the post-Katrina effort has focused on "saving" and
"preserving" the city's musical heritage. Clearly top-selling rappers don't
need charity. In fact, many have been quietly helping, through gifts to
fellow residents and hip-hop charities like David Banner's Heal the Hood
Foundation. 

But it's worth remembering that many New Orleans hip-hop pioneers ‹ from DJ
Jimi to the influential group U.N.L.V. ‹ aren't exactly millionaires. And
for that matter, many rappers aren't nearly as rich as they claim. In any
case, glowing recollections aren't the only way to pay tribute to the city.
The story of Katrina is in large part a story of poverty and neglect; it's
no coincidence that many of the rappers come from the same neighborhoods
that still haven't been cleaned up. Surely the lyrics to a Juvenile song
aren't nearly as shocking as those images most of us saw on television.

The language of preservationism sometimes conceals its own biases. If all
the dying traditions are valuable, does that also mean all the valuable
traditions are dying? If a genre doesn't need saving, does that also mean
it's not worth saving? If New Orleans rappers seem less lovable than, say,
Mardi Gras Indians or veteran soul singers, might it be because they're less
needy? Cultural philanthropy is drawn to musical pioneers ‹ especially
African-American ones ‹ who are old, poor and humble. What do you do when
the pioneers are young, rich and cocky instead?

Believe it or not, that question brings us back to the Smithsonian, which
has come to praise hip-hop. Or to bury it. Or both. The genre is over 30
years old by now, and while its early stars now seem unimpeachable (does
anyone have a bad word to say about Grandmaster Flash or Run-DMC?), its
current stars seem more impeachable than ever. From 50 Cent to Young Jeezy
to, well, Juvenile, hip-hop might be even more controversial now than it was
in the 80's; hip-hop culture has been blamed for everything from lousy
schools to sexism to the riots in France. In a weird way, that might help
account for the newfound respectability of the old school. To an older
listener who's aghast at crack rap, the relatively innocent rhymes of
Run-DMC don't seem so bad. If the new generation didn't seem so harmful, its
predecessors might not seem harmless enough for the national archives.

Maybe the New Orleans hip-hop scene ‹ "gangsta gumbo" ‹ just hasn't been
around long enough to make the history books. But that will change, as the
rappers start seeming less like harbingers of an ominous future and more
like relics of a colorful past. New Orleans hip-hop will endure not just
because the music is so thrilling, but also because the rappers vividly
evoke a city that is, for worse and (let's not forget) for better, never
going to be the same.

After all, long before his name was affixed to an airport, Louis Armstrong,
too, seemed manifestly unfit for polite society. Back when he recorded
"Muggles," an ode to marijuana, he was a symbol of the so-called "jazz
intoxication" that was corrupting an earlier generation the way hip-hop is
corrupting this one.

A quarter-century from now, when the social problems that Juvenile and
others so discomfitingly rap about have become one more strand of the city's
official history, they may find themselves honored in just the kinds of
musical tributes and cultural museums that currently shut them out. By then,
their careers will probably have cooled off. They'll be less influential,
less popular, less controversial; not coincidentally, they'll have a less
visceral connection to the youth of New Orleans. And finally, their music ‹
and maybe also their recording studios, their custom jewelry, their
promotional posters ‹ will seem to be worth saving. Perhaps, like so many
other pop-music traditions, "gangsta gumbo" is a dish best preserved cold.