Bounce: Rap Music and Local Identity in New Orleans

6. Bouncing Back: After Katrina, Toward an Uncertain Future

160 6Bouncing Back After Katrina, Toward an Uncertain Future Over the twenty-five years leading up to Hurricane Katrina, bleak socioeconomic conditions in New Orleans took their toll on participants in the local music scene, as rappers, producers, DJs, and record label owners were among those affected by violent crime and economic marginalization . Long before Katrina made landfall in September 2005, New Orleans was experiencing a slow-motion social disaster defined by hopelessness and unfulfilled potential, factors that multiplied the destructive power of the storm and its aftermath; as Kelefa Sanneh writes, “The story of Katrina is in large part a story of poverty and neglect.”1 Still, it’s hard to imagine a more disruptive or traumatic event within the realm of contemporary urban life in the United States. Katrina’s devastation disproportionately affected the low-lying neighborhoods to which the city’s black poor and working class had been relegated . With the projects evacuated after the storm, city planners and politicians took advantage of the unique circumstances around the disaster and moved forward with the already-planned demolition of most of the city’s remaining public housing units. At the same time, the loss of housing stock in storm-ravaged neighborhoods pushed rental prices upward, making it all the more difficult for poor and working-class residents to return to the city. In combination with the bungled response in the direct aftermath of the storm, the morally bankrupt neoliberal ideology that predominated before, during, and after Katrina left tens of thousands of the city’s poorest residents permanently stranded, providing them with the equivalent of a one-way bus ticket out of New Orleans. The Katrina disaster intensified a racially inflected process of population decline in the city that was already under way before the storm. The 2010 census revealed that New Orleans had lost 118,000 black residents in the preceding decade, compared with a decline of 24,000 white residents.2 Bouncing Back: After Katrina, Toward an Uncertain Future 161 Katrina may have been a defining event in the lives of those associated with the rap scene, but its effects were diverse, complex, and long-lasting . The disaster irrevocably changed their perspective on the place they grew up in and increased their awareness of both negative and positive aspects of their lives before the storm. The resilience, creativity, and collective cultural practices that helped to make life bearable in the pre-Katrina years also helped them cope with displacement and the challenge of reestablishing themselves in New Orleans or elsewhere. Exiled and returning rappers used the storm and its implications as subject matter for songs; some channeled their efforts into protest and political activism. For young black New Orleanians generally, bounce and local rap connoted a home place and familiar cultural and spatial environment, serving as resources that helped them find meaning in life despite Katrina’s heavy toll. In the years after the storm, local rap served many of the same functions for inner -city New Orleanians as it had previously: as an expression of cultural identity, a tool for making the surrounding environment and one’s experience within it more pleasurable and humane, and a set of open-ended economic possibilities. There were several important developments in the world of New Orleans rap in the six years after Katrina. The so-called sissy rappers continued to occupy a prominent place in the local scene, drawing the attention of music journalists and fans inside and outside of the city. Press coverage of New Orleans rap was more frequent and positive than in the years before the storm, reflecting an increased sense of urgency with regard to the documentation and promotion of distinctive local culture. In contrast to the sissy rappers, lauded by those seeking an “alternative” to commercial, heteronormative rap music, one New Orleans–based artist, Dwayne “Lil Wayne” Carter, rose to become one of the most popular and profitable commodities within the industry at a national and global level. As with Mystikal, Lil Wayne’s relationship to New Orleans is not central to his self-presentation, and his music contains few aesthetic or thematic ties to bounce or local culture. If the persistence of “that beat” in New Orleans clubs and parties speaks to the ways in which the city’s rap draws from long-standing and deeply rooted traditions and cultural history, Lil Wayne’s work represents the possibilities for a...