SXSWORLD

Is the Big Easy's Bounce Scene Ready for a National Breakout? By Thomas Fawcett celebrity appearances as the crowd milled about, when, as if from an alter- nate universe, a tall black man glided on stage decked in a silver body suit and vinyl trench coat. With eyes hidden behind a homemade mask made of cigarettes and the scent of Nag Champa wafting from the burning stick of incense dangling from his lips, Vockah Redu and his ambiguously gendered crew busted a ludicrously paced dance routine looking like Sun Ra's Arkestra backed by machine gun beats and powered by a pocket full of pep pills. Welcome to the world of New Orleans bounce. A fter the last official showcases had ended, hundreds of bleary-eyed hipsters lined up outside of an East Austin club trying to scrape one last musical experience out of SXSW at a wee hours after-party. Rumors swirled about "People are public about their queerness in this town in a way they aren't in other cities"... Bounce is project music, a frenetic call-and-response clamor that has been booming out of New Orleans' wards since the early '90s. The music's distinct, repetitive sound stems from its limited sample pool. Nearly all bounce music is built around the Triggerman beat from the Showboys' 1986 hip-hop rarity "Drag Rap" and the Brown Beat from Derek B's 1987 "Rock the Beat." When not shouting out NOLA housing projects, many of which did not survive by Katrina, bounce MCs get graphic. The title of Big Freedia's uninhibited dance anthem "Azz Everywhere" is self-explana- tory. "It's a high-energy party music," explains the emerging bounce ambassador. "It's very much a music that you can dance to and enjoy yourself and feel the beat." That was a lesson learned Vockah Redu 42 by a new wave of sweaty devotees as the once hyper- local southern rap subgenre busted out with an offi- cial SXSW showcase at Submerged on Saturday night. The club, located across the street from the Austin Convention Center, was packed through the night with a number of openly queer bounce MCs, self-proclaimed "sissy rap- pers," leading the charge. It was transvestite rapper Katey Red who originally kicked down the closet door, commandeering the mic at a bounce party a dozen years ago rapping SXSW ORLD / M AY -J UNE 2010 gay prostitutes in the Big Easy: "I'm a punk under pressure/When you finish, leave your money on the dresser." Red's 1999 album Melpomene Block Party, released on pioneering New Orleans bounce label Take 'Fo records, paved the way for her then-back- ground dancer Big Freedia and a wave of sissy bounce rappers. Gay rap scenes exist in cities like New York and San Francisco, but they are insular, operating largely outside of the wider hip-hop community. To understand how a posse of queer rappers could rock clubs and block par- "Punk Under Pressure," a tune that would later become an anthem of Katey Red ties alongside their macho counterparts is to know New Orleans. It is a city where masking and gender-bending is the norm, where African Americans dress in elaborate native American costumes during Mardi Gras and even crash the festival in blackface as the outrageously cos- tumed Zulu krewe. Katey and company are by no means the Crescent City's first queer black performers. Mistress of ceremonies Patsy Vidalia hosted shows in drag at the landmark Dew Drop Inn during the 1940s, '50s and '60s, and cross-dressing R&B star Bobby Marchan held down Club Tijuana in the '50s and recorded on a slew of labels including Stax through the '70s. "People are public about their queerness in this town in a way they aren't in other cities," asserts Alix Chapman, who is conducting research on the racial, gender and sexual politics within bounce. Chapman's first encounter with the music in New Orleans was seeing Big Freedia rock a park jam after the massive second line parade of Super Sunday. "I had never seen this type of sexual and gender fluidity in the context of a larger black community," he says. "In a lot of ways, this contradicts larger ideas about homophobia in the black community." Still, while New Orleans allows a laissez-faire lifestyle, it has not always been easy for the reigning queens of local hip-hop. "When we first started it was a little bit rough," Big Freedia recalls. "As the years passed, people started getting used to it because we wasn't going nowhere. We were there to stay, and once Katey broke the ice as the first drag queen doing bounce music, it changed New Orleans for real. We started coming in so many numbers that there was nothing they could do. We had people hating on us and talking about us but it's the music that got through. They couldn't stop the music." n BRONSON DORSEY BRONSON DORSEY

• Cover