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44 2“The City That Is Overlooked” Rap Beginnings, 1980–1991 The development of rap in New Orleans was strongly influenced by the genre’s wider national context, including an early focus in New York and the subsequent development (in the late 1980s and early ’90s) of a parallel scene in and around Los Angeles. Artists and companies from these two places (eventually labeled the “East Coast” and the “West Coast”) held a near-monopoly on the production of marketable rap music, setting the standards for the genre at a wider, national level. In New Orleans, the story begins with the foundational efforts of DJs and audiences in venues such as block parties and nightclubs, where local preferences were incubated and aspiring rappers and DJs made their first forays into public performance , participating in the contentious process of defining a local “sound” and narrative voice within rap. During the years 1980–1991, rap evolved from a marginal, subcultural phenomenon into a central feature of the national and global popular music landscape. In its most basic form, this process as it unfolded in New Orleans was similar to that taking place elsewhere—the music was shaped by the collective support of audiences, as well as the efforts of legions of aspiring producers, rappers, and DJs who, as in the English town of Milton Keynes studied by Ruth Finnegan, “engaged in and fought over and created and maintained” the local rap music scene, and “whose work both reveals them as creative and active human beings and serves to uphold the cultural traditions” of New Orleans generally.1 Commercial ventures such as radio stations, record stores, and record labels also made essential contributions to the development of rap in the city as an ongoing cultural practice and economic enterprise. The enthusiastic appreciation of rap music on the part of black listeners in New Orleans developed prior to the desire to refashion the form to “The City That Is Overlooked”: Rap Beginnings, 1980–1991 45 suit local musical and thematic values; the specific questions of whether and how the genre would be adapted to the local cultural and social context were largely open and vaguely conceptualized. In the mid-1980s there was no such thing as a local New Orleans rap music sound, and little understanding existed at this time of rap’s potential to accommodate and intersect with local preferences and identities. Club DJs like DJ Carriere, Leo “Slick Leo” Coakley and Charles “Captain Charles” Leach entertained local audiences with music from rap’s center of creativity and production, the greater New York City area.2 The development of a local and particular rap sensibility began with these nightclub and block party DJs, who gauged audience response in order to identify particularly resonant or energizing songs or parts of songs. Local audiences’ tastes and preferences often overlapped with those in other places, but not always; it was the DJ’s challenge to identify and then exploit the exceptions. Similarly, recordings and performances that were strongly derivative of rap from other places formed the context within which a local rap sensibility began to take shape. Throughout the 1980s, New Orleans –based artists, producers, and record labels were largely concerned with replicating the styles and themes that defined rap coming from the centers of industry concentration; in the process, they also helped to build a shared repertoire of locally resonant stylistic and thematic preferences. Within these early rap recordings and performances, participants in the local scene developed and refined key elements and concepts that would become established features of the distinctive style of New Orleans rap music that came of age in the 1990s. Some of these elements (such as the prevalence of lyrics in a call-and-response format) are organizing principles with overlapping influence within rap, African American music generally, and New Orleans’s black music in particular. Often, the distinctiveness of rap in New Orleans does not rely on the introduction of completely novel elements, but rather on changes in emphasis among features that are already present in the wider context of rap. The National Rap Music Scene The practical or functional dimensions of New York’s early dominance were intertwined with the city’s notable symbolic role in the proliferation of rap music listening and practice in New Orleans and in other cities across the country. As the genre expanded and matured in the 1980s, however , a progressively wider array of musical and...

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