Photo by MuzikAnimal
There’s no single word that can sum up a complicated city like New Orleans. Even less, its horrifying, solemn, and troubled saga with Hurricane Katrina, the 10th anniversary of which was marked this past weekend.
"Recovery" was thrown around by national media outlets in the month leading up to the anniversary date: inadequate at best seeing as New Orleans is still down 22% from its pre-Katrina population, despite a big Census uptick earlier this year, the city’s first since 1960. So-called "recovery" has not been uniform. Poll numbers reflect dissatisfaction and disappointment from locals, the demographics of which have shifted by the thousands. Education, housing, wages, transportation, and so on have lagged behind for poor and black residents. "Resilient" and "resilience" were common tags heard locally during the weekend’s commemoration. On his Thursday visit to the area, President Barack Obama used it. Some locals, notably Louisiana Justice Institute President Tracie Washington among them, have resisted the "resilience" narrative.
"There’s no change… It’s what ‘they’ wanted: move who we don’t want out and bring what we want in," Lil Wayne said on "His and Hers" last week. "It wasn’t the who it’s what they want in—money. ‘We,’ as in me and my people, we scare that money away. That’s what they figure. So wash them out...You tear down the projects to make condos, who you helpin’?" he asked.
For artists who lived in the city before Katrina and returned—like DJ, events producer, drummer, and Bywater resident Rusty Lazer—rising rents plus potentially changing noise ordinances and permitting laws, reflective of a fundamentally changing city, are making it harder to earn a living. Rusty, né Jay Pennington, played New Orleans bounce to audiences worldwide, becoming Big Freedia’s manager until 2012 and introduced a variety of queer bounce artists to receptive white audiences in the art and fashion worlds, often far outside of New Orleans.
"If I didn’t rent this room up here," Rusty points to his upstairs in the large house he’s slowly rehabilitated in the decade since the storm, "I literally couldn’t survive [as a DJ]. I went from making about $1200 a month as a DJ here—doing only small bars, not big ol’ nightclubs, neighborhood bars... I can eat and pay my bills on that. I’m a frugal dude. But after the regulations, Mimi’s [in the Marigny, one flashpoint of controversy over New Orleans’ newly reassessed noise ordinances] could only go ’til 2 a.m., now no more music at all. Siberia can’t go past 2… my [income] went down to $300 a month."
Artists, people of color, and the poor—often one in the same through New Orleans history—are the residents who defined New Orleans’ music and culture, going as far back as the 19th century, when slaves had Sundays off, their mass gatherings limited to Congo Square in what is now Armstrong Park and the Tremé, termed for generations as "back of town." There enslaved Africans mingled with whites, Creoles, Spanish, natives, and free people of color to play and bear witness to the first notes of American music: blues and jazz, European melodic traditions intermingling with African rhythms, native chants, Creole fusion and patronage, and more.
For the anniversary weekend, some of the city’s biggest stars played concerts benefiting charities and raising nationwide awareness: Wayne’s Lil’ Weezyana Fest raised funds for his Tha Carter Fund, administered by the Greater New Orleans Foundation. The city’s local daily, the Times-Picayune, summed it up as, "Lil Wayne: This Is Your Life."
The New Orleans bonafides of maybe the city’s biggest music star to date were on display, bringing out special guests for mini-sets and live collaborations, including bounce music luminaries like DJ Jubilee, Fifth Ward Weebie, and Big Freedia, the Cash Money crew (Mannie Fresh; Juvenile and Turk for three-quarters of a Hot Boys reunion), Young Money Records artists (Curren$y, Cory Gunz), and stalwarts Master P and Mia X. Drake, by far the night’s biggest guest, didn’t show until the end.
"Without this man I would be nothing today," Wayne’s one-time protege reminded the crowd after they crushed "HYFR (Hell Ya Fucking Right)". Weezy paid it forward to the city he loves. "I ain’t shit without you, New Orleans!" he yelled during the finale, before a show of fireworks over the Superdome: a symbol of triumph and tragedy for the city over the last decade.
The former No Limit rapper, née Mia Young, was one of the most outspoken artists at the weekend’s annual Katrina march. Mia and local rapper Sess 4-5 organized the first of these marches in 2006. This year’s was billed as the "biggest second line ever." Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus, helped lead this year, calling it "a rally and a march but it’s not a show. This is real to us."
Speeches and performances highlighted a spectrum of issues, including a renewed effort for the State of Louisiana to make August 29—the day several levees in the city broke—a state holiday commemorating the almost 2,000 lives Katrina claimed, most in Louisiana. Perhaps the one closest to Mia X’s heart is the long-term mental health consequences of children—ones as young as middle-school age—traumatized by the horrors of the storm.
"They're [likely] to be diagnosed with six or seven different things," Young said. "If you think about any child anywhere laying in the water with dead people and animals and they’re hearing screaming, crying and suffering for five straight days… They still can’t wrap their head around where the water came from. There are so many things they can’t wrap their heads around."
Lil Wayne addressed just this on his 2006 mixtape Dedication 2 with his essential entry into the annals of American protest music with "Georgia… Bush" in the lyric, "The children have been scarred/ No one’s here to care ’bout ’em." Like Mia X, he couldn’t forget about what she called "Katrina babies," some she described as grasped tightly in family members’ arms just above the flood waters in the days following the storm.
So at Lil’ Weezyana, Wayne put on for his city in a big way. He had to, proving himself once again the King of New Orleans. But right now he’s a king in self-exile. He and his family no longer live in the city. Over the last 10 years, Weezy has suggested you’re more likely to find him in Miami or Houston—likely the largest concentration of New Orleans diaspora out-of-state, residents that still haven’t returned—their properties in various states of disrepair.
Solange Knowles’ performance at a benefit for Make It Right this past weekend was a lot less complicated (fewer moving parts, no huge surprises) but no less sincere. "I cannot express in words what this city has meant to me and my family," Solange said, referring to her megastar sister Beyoncé and fashion-designer mother Tina. "I just want to thank you guys for having us, loving us, accepting us." Solange, her son, and husband, music video director Alan Ferguson, moved to New Orleans a few years ago. She is a celebrity exception to a rising new rule in New Orleans: with transplants moving into the city—some of them unfamiliar with and/or passive-aggressively hostile to the particulars of the city’s street culture—new residents and tradition will conflict.
"It’s not noise to us!" Mia X laments. "[People moving here] make all these complaints they can't sleep. What the hell you came to New Orleans for? The second line is the way we send our dead off, it’s the way we celebrate birthdays," she added. "Deal with it or get the hell on 'cause this is what we do!"
Rev. Yearwood, a Louisiana native, looks at New Orleans’ current culture shock with a wide-angle lens and sense of history. He fears the city’s singular culture—the primordial soup of American roots music—might get marginalized, driven out of the city center entirely. Most recently living in Washington D.C. and Prince Georges County, Md., he compared the cultural flight—artists like Lil Wayne who couldn’t or didn’t come back—to the history of Go-Go in his new stomping grounds.
"It’s not in the city as much," Rev. Yearwood said. "You have to go and find it. When [Godfather of Go-Go] Chuck Brown died [in 2012], there are no Chuck Browns coming behind Chuck Brown… It’s shrinking."
"It’s a critical part," he said, and it could apply to D.C., New Orleans, or any major cultural capital. "To lose that, [so as] to be more tourist-friendly—you’re losing something that you don’t even know you’re losing." Rev. Yearwood says this hasn’t happened in New Orleans just yet—he urges caution. There was certainly no lack of awareness or participation regarding Katrina and traditional New Orleans culture last weekend. The march/second line he helped lead was one of 90-plus Katrina-related events listed just in last week’s Gambit.
Queen bounce diva Big Freedia is a lifelong New Orleanian and after Katrina, alongside Katey Red and Sissy Nobby, became a bounce icon. As Freedia has found worldwide fame, becoming New Orleans’ biggest post-Katrina star, her sound has shifted slightly. These days she collaborates with out-of-town EDM producers (she still has her eye out for a place in Los Angeles, she says) in addition to venerable local bounce producer Blaq N Mild. Still, the tradition—the second line, the Mardi Gras Indian chants, and the church—plays into all she does.
"There was so much raw emotion and grief that were all holding on to, the shows [right after Katrina in Houston and on FEMA Fridays in New Orleans] were filled with unbridled energy," Freedia writes in her new memoir God Save the Queen Diva! "They started to become something more than simply a release from life’s daily stresses. They were our salvation."
Electronic music in New Orleans—largely existing on the margins of the city’s roots music-focused scene pre-Katrina, with the likes of Disco Donnie, Quintron and Miss Pussycat, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor (who moved away before Katrina hit, returning for a dramatic 2005 Voodoo Fest performance), and current NIN band member Josh Eustis’ Telefon Tel Aviv—mostly took the form of rap and bounce. Its presence in New Orleans came into full focus after the storm with Winter Circle Productions, the company behind BUKU Music + Art Project, the city’s celebrated new festival. Its first year featured EDM superstar DJ/producers Avicii and Skrillex as headliners. In addition to EDM, its lineups feature rap, funk, synth pop, jamtronica, and more. Last month, Winter Circle and BUKU were acquired by live entertainment presenter AEG Worldwide, which built a Gulf Coast Office around it.
"[BUKU coming into existence] was reactionary and complimentary," co-founder Reeves Price said. "We saw a lot of young people come in and BUKU was our response to that. [We wanted to] keep building this momentum. We’re not diluting anything [from the tradition]. If anything, I think we’re reinforcing it… By bringing contemporary artists here, they get inspired by the tradition and it helps to build upon that tradition. It’s a logical evolution."
Price came to New Orleans as an undergrad at Tulane before Katrina, and returned to the city after the storm. He founded Winter Circle in 2009 with Dante DiPasquale. As a way of giving back, they founded Upbeat Academy in 2013, teaching music production and business skills—a sort of digital-music answer to more-established New Orleans charities like Tipitina’s Foundation.
It’s hard to cite a more definitive music-related nonprofit effort of New Orleans’ music scene than Preservation Hall. Or maybe a more definitive venue for American music anywhere: it’s one of the oldest continuously operating clubs in America. Founded in 1961, its mission to "protect, preserve, and perpetuate the musical traditions and heritage of New Orleans" dovetailed with the Civil Rights movement. It was inherent: its touring house band, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, was integrated, unflinchingly. It was one of few venues in a Jim Crow-segregated New Orleans to integrate all colors—musicians and audiences alike, openly. In most of early '60s America, much less the South, it was unheard of. The band’s late tuba player Allan and ticket taker/bouncer Sandra Jaffe, husband and wife, shepherded the hall toward what it is today.
Ben Jaffe is their son. He grew up at Pres Hall and is now the creative director, playing his father’s tuba and his own weapon of choice, double bass, in the band. He likes to say he "went into the family business." It’s one of the most important things about New Orleans: working musicians passing down their names to scions, performing intergenerationally (the Marsalises, Bouttés, Batistes, etc). While holding down tradition, Jaffe has made a concerted effort to expand the hall’s repertoire and collaborations with its band to include more modern artists: Arcade Fire, the Gaslamp Killer, Mos Def, Ani DiFranco, My Morning Jacket, and more over the last 10 years. Most recently, Jaffe took in the Foo Fighters for New Orleans’ entry in the HBO series "Sonic Highways".
"Is this a 10-year storm? Is this a 100-year storm? Is it a five-year storm?" Ben mused rhetorically about Katrina and its indefinitely reverberating aftereffects. There were polaroids he snapped spread out in front of him—pictures of his daughter, his travels with the band (Jaffe loves taking pictures of donut shops)—he opened a photo book by renowned photographer Lee Friedlander, looking at photos of his late father and family friends, many of whom had passed away. Jaffe said he lost people in the storm. He said he didn’t want questions about Katrina. This past weekend, it was the topic no one wanted to talk about yet all anyone could think about. He was doing a lot of thinking this weekend.
"It makes anniversaries important," he continued, maudlin. "A lot of us approach it with this idea of it having to be a celebration. And this anniversary is not so much a celebration to me, so much as it is an acknowledgment."
There’s no single genre or sound that can sum up or properly represent a complicated music scene’s like New Orleans. Just like there’s no single word that can sum up a complicated city like New Orleans—or its recovery. It’s all in the gumbo, the gestalt. New Orleans is the most genre-agnostic city in America, where everything happens so much.
Special thanks to Alison Fensterstock of the New Orleans Times-Picayune/NOLA.com for reporting assistance.