Bounce: Rap Music and Local Identity in New Orleans by Matt Miller (review)

As the field of hip-hop studies has solidified and become a critical entry point for research on race and culture, scholars have tracked the transnational reach of the genre while also highlighting the many regional variations. While books such as Tricia Rose’s Hip Hop Wars have measured the global impact of the commodification and circulation of hip hop, and Murray Forman’s The ’Hood Comes First underscored the ubiquity of “the street” and “the ghetto” in so much hip hop, there are also case studies ranging from South Central Los Angeles (Marcyliena Morgan’s The Real Hiphop) to Tokyo (Ian Condry’s Hip-Hop Japan) that have drawn attention to the local specificity of hip-hop scenes.

In the 1990s, after rap was established in New York City and spread to Los Angeles, Southern cities such as Atlanta, Miami, and New Orleans developed their own regional styles known together as “Southern rap” or “Dirty South.” Matt Miller’s book focuses on one of these nodes of cultural production, New Orleans, where a subgenre called “bounce” became the most recent in a long history of musical forms associated with the city (including jazz, brass band, Mardi Gras Indian, rhythm and blues, and funk). Emerging in the 1990s, bounce featured characteristic rhythms, vocal chants, and lyrical themes that set New Orleans apart and helped to launch the careers of rappers Juvenile, B.G., and Lil Wayne.

Bounce: Rap Music and Local Identity in New Orleans is the first scholarly monograph devoted to hip hop in New Orleans, and the bounce style in particular; it serves as a welcome introduction. Miller also directed a documentary film (Ya Heard Me), and oversees a website with several mix tapes (http://www.mattmillerbounce.blogspot.com) that complement the book, which is itself very accessible to readers unfamiliar with either local hip hop or New Orleans’ musical traditions. Miller’s text is a synthesis of journalistic accounts of the local scene, scholarly writings about black music and New Orleans history, and interviews with the artists and others in the local culture industry. As such, it excels as a resource for those interested in a very particular scene and has no grander aspirations for influencing national debates about hip hop.

After two initial, and perhaps perfunctory, chapters on New Orleans history and hip-hop history, Miller fully devotes himself to his subject, charting the emergence of bounce in the early 1990s and its development through the period of civic uncertainty following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The reader is treated to biographical accounts of major artists and their relationship to bounce, including fascinating portraits of the most successful rappers, Mystikal and Lil Wayne, who both eschewed the bounce style in their quest for international visibility. Emphasized also are the key figures who enabled the musicians’ success, including producer Mannie Fresh, industry impresarios Percy “Master P” Miller of No Limit Records, and the brothers Bryan “Birdman” and Ronald “Slim” Williams of Cash Money Records. Interspersed throughout chapters arranged chronologically, these profiles offer insight into the small scale and relative interconnectedness of cultural production in this midsized market with a large-sized reputation as a musical mecca.

Miller’s greatest contribution is his close listening to those songs that together make up the canon of New Orleans hip hop. Drawing from cultural studies interpretations of musical artifacts as “texts,” Miller finds abundant evidence of bounce’s role in solidifying local identity for black New Orleanians. In the first widespread bounce single from 1990, Gregory D’s “Buck Jump Time (Project Rapp),” paired with “Where You From (Party People),” Miller observes how, in his raps about local housing projects, “Gregory D contextualizes his discussion and celebration of New Orleans ‘hardness’ and neighborhood culture within a national rap industry dominated by the established centers of production” (66). Using the tools of musical analysis, Miller shows how producer Mannie Fresh’s usage of the ubiquitous “Triggerman” beat, a repeated drum pattern that...