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1 Introduction In late July 2005 I was in New Orleans, working on the documentary film project Ya Heard Me? I walked in the sweltering midday heat through the French Quarter to Odyssey Records on Canal Street, where I paid $9.98 for a self-produced CD by DJ Chicken (Kenneth Williams Jr.). The compilation featured popular songs by mainstream R&B and rap artists (along with a couple of oldies) “remixxed with Dat Beat.” As rapper Marvin “Dolemite” Skinner put it, “When people say that beat, they’re talking about bounce music. That’s what the new generation call it, that beat.”1 “That beat” is the New Orleans beat, a particular mid-tempo rhythmic feel created by a propulsive, syncopated bass drum pattern in combination with layered, continuous percussive elements such as handclaps or simple melodic lines and often featuring particular sounds sampled from other recordings. Even after the devastating hurricane that struck the city a few weeks after my visit, “dat beat” remained a touchstone of local musical identity and a beacon calling the city’s dispersed population back. The persistence of “that beat” poses questions about the role of the local in rap and other highly mediated forms of cultural production. Where does it come from, and what does it do for people? Cultural critics like Bakari Kitwana—who wrote in 2002 that “Black youth in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Champaign, Illinois . . . share similar dress styles, colloquialisms , and body language with urban kids from Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City”—argue that the “commercialization of rap music” is simply another avenue through which the corporate-controlled media promotes its own homogenizing and commodifying agenda.2 But this representation of mass conformity and homogeneous, national-level African American popular culture does not explain the persistence of “that beat” in New Orleans. Alongside efforts to conform to rap’s aesthetic mainstream and capitalize on its potential for mass appeal, a stubbornly and self-consciously local approach runs throughout the history of rap in the city. This 2 Introduction suggests that, in New Orleans and elsewhere, the local context—including its ethno-cultural, economic, historical, and even climatic dimensions— still exercises a considerable amount of influence on the experiences of the people who inhabit a particular locale and the cultural products that they create. DJ Chicken’s CD was only one in an ongoing series of interventions in the chain of consumption linking New Orleans audiences and the mainstream of the national music industry and market. “That beat,” whether behind a local rapper or mixed in with mainstream radio hits, connects with the experiences of local audiences in the context of everyday life in the city in ways that nationally popular music usually does not. While some aspects of the New Orleans rap scene resemble their national counterparts, bounce, the participatory, dance-oriented “project music” that has been an enduring local staple since it emerged in the early 1990s, expresses a musical and lyrical perspective that is highly localized and, in many ways, continuous with earlier eras of New Orleans’s musical history and culture.3 In a city where a collective musical sensibility has been fostered through active, embodied participation in parades, parties, and nightclubs, perhaps it should come as no surprise that local musical identity can be reduced to a near-ubiquitous “beat”—after all, the city’s “golden age of R&B” in the 1950s was itself defined by a driving beat that contributed important rhythmic elements to rock ’n’ roll and funk.4 As Ned Sublette writes, “New Orleans hip-hop . . .[is] the youngest part of the New Orleans music family, but it’s family,” the latest manifestation of a “New Orleans sound” that lies at the heart of many of the city’s best-known contributions to earlier popular music genres.5 It is globally connected and constantly evolving and yet remains the site of an enduring cultural continuity that seems to exist on an almost unconscious level. It is neither accidental nor intentional that female rapper Cheeky Blakk’s moniker echoes the name of Cheeky Black, a 1920s New Orleans pimp mentioned in Louis Armstrong’s 1954 memoir.6 Other anecdotal evidence suggests a similar level of continuity with earlier eras of popular music in New Orleans and with the local African American vernacular in general , such as the prevalence of descriptive nicknames (based on size or skin color) like “Baby,” “Slim,” “Lil,” “Big,” “Red,” and “Black” in the world of New Orleans rap...

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