New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap
Lyle Ashton Harris for The New York Times‘PUNKS UNDER PRESSURE’ Big Freedia and Katey Red in the Third Ward of New Orleans.
By JONATHAN DEE
Published: July 19, 2010
If “gay rapper” is an oxymoron where you come from, how to get your head around the notion of a gay rapper performing in a sports bar? What in most cities might seem plausible only as some sort of Sacha Baron Cohen-style provocation is just another weeknight in the cultural Galapagos that is New Orleans. Sometime after midnight on the sweltering Thursday before Memorial Day, the giant plasma-screen TVs at the Sports Vue bar (which “proudly airs all major Pay Per View events from the world of Boxing and Ultimate Fighting”) were all switched off, and the bar’s backroom turned into a low-lit, low-ceilinged dance club, where more than 300 people awaited a return engagement by Big Freedia, who by day runs an interior-decoration business and who is, to fans of the New Orleans variant of hip-hop music known as “bounce,” a superstar.
The Mix: Tracks by Big Freedia, Katey Red and Sissy Nobby
Lyle Ashton Harris for The New York Times
BOUNCE THAT Big Freedia shares the stage at Club Caesar's with a few audience members.
Lyle Ashton Harris for The New York Times
GIRLS' NIGHT OUT At a Big Freedia show, the women rule the dance floor. The men stand back.
Lyle Ashton Harris for The New York Times
Katey Red (left) and Big Freedia, fixtures of the New Orleans scene.
At 1 a.m., though, Freedia (pronounced “FREE-da”) was still a mile or so away, fulfilling a paid celebrity-hosting gig at Club Fabulous. The fabulousness of Club Fabulous, on this night at least, seemed a function mainly of its Mardi Gras-themed décor, conceived and executed by Freedia herself. Otherwise the crowd was sparse, largely straight and listless. Freedia looked weary as she leaned back against the bar with her dyed, diagonally cut bangs over one eye, holding a cordless microphone. (Freedia, who is about 6 foot 2 and very powerful-looking and dresses in a fashionable but recognizably masculine style, is genetically a man; but neither she nor anyone who knows her uses masculine pronouns to refer to her.) When “Rock Around the Clock,” one of her signature songs, came on the sound system, a few women walked over to Freedia and stood with their backs to her, but the atmosphere wasn’t quite electric enough for them to really start dancing, and the men just continued playing pool. After a while, Freedia’s D.J. and de facto manager, who goes by the name Rusty Lazer — a whippetlike 39-year-old white man with a salt-and-pepper beard — let Freedia know that it was time to move on to the next show.
The two of them had just returned from three nights at three different venues in New York, with a stop for another show in Philadelphia on their way home. These days Freedia performs five or six nights a week, often more than once a night — and increasingly, not just in New Orleans.
“Girl, I’m tired,” Lazer said as he drove them to the Sports Vue in his minivan, which was full of boxes of hand-screened Big Freedia T-shirts he sells at $10 a pop.
“Really?” Freedia said laconically. “I’m just starting to get my energy back.”
At the first sight of the commotion outside the Sports Vue, everyone’s energy level picked up. Lazer pulled the minivan into a long maze of cars parked haphazardly all up and down the grass median on Elysian Fields Avenue. Outside the metal detectors at the entrance, cops were pretending to listen to the grievances of two women who had just been thrown out of the bar. “Every night,” Lazer said fondly. While patrons were being patted down by bouncers inside the door, he and Freedia disappeared into the crowd; a few minutes later, the music stopped, and a loud, excited voice yelled into a mic a brief introduction — so brief the longest part of it was the polysyllabic participle between the words “Big” and “Freedia.”
And then something remarkable happened. The crowd — just about evenly divided between men and women — instantly segregated itself: the men were propelled as if by a centrifuge toward the room’s perimeters, and the dance floor, a platform raised just a step off the ground, was taken over entirely by women surrounding Freedia. The women did not dance with, or for, one another — they danced for Freedia, and they did so in the most sexualized way imaginable, usually with their backs to her, bent over sharply at the waist, and bouncing their hips up and down as fast as humanly possible, if not slightly faster. Others assumed more of a push-up position, with their hands on the floor, in a signature dance whose name is sometimes helpfully shortened to “p-popping.”
Freedia did “Rock Around the Clock,” which begins with a sample from the Bill Haley classic but departs pretty drastically from there, as well as her longtime club hit, “Azz Everywhere,” a title as perfectly high-concept in its way as “Snakes on a Plane.” Softspoken in person, Freedia has an onstage voice as deep and exhortatory as Chuck D’s. Her older songs sometimes had choruses that were actually sung (“I got that gin in my system/Somebody gonna be my victim”), but in her recent work, the beat is too fast to permit much more than short, repetitive chanting. Not that it mattered much in the context of the less-than-state-of-the-art sound system at the Sports Vue, where an occasional obscenity was pretty much as audible as any of the lyrics got.
A Big Freedia set generally lasts only four or five songs (which is why she can book two or three of them a night), but the energy brought to, and generated by, those songs is astounding. So, 20 cathartic minutes later, it was all over. Freedia left the stage, the men gravitated back toward the women and the sexual balance at the Sports Vue was restored. “Well,” Lazer said with a grin as he gave me a lift back to my hotel in his minivan, “I’ve lived in New Orleans a long time, and I know a lot of people, but you’ve just seen something that about 95 percent of my white friends will probably never see.”
Bounce itself has been around for about 20 years. Like most hip-hop varietals, it’s rap delivered over a sampled dance beat, but it has a few characteristics that give it a distinctively regional sound: it’s strictly party music, its beat is relentlessly fast and its rap quotient tends much less toward introspection or pure braggadocio than toward a call-and-response relationship with its audience, a dynamic borrowed in equal measure from Mardi Gras Indian chants and from the dawn of hip-hop itself. Many, if not most, bounce records announce their allegiance by sampling from one of just two sources: either Derek B.’s “Rock the Beat” or an infectious hook known as the “Triggaman,” from a 1986 Showboys record called “Drag Rap.” (That’s “drag” not as in cross-dressing but as in the theme to the old TV show “Dragnet.”) Just as the earliest New York rap records featured compulsory shout-outs to the boroughs, lots of bounce songs will demand (especially when performed live) audience acknowledgment of the city’s various neighborhoods and housing projects (“Shake it for the Fourth Ward/Work it for the Fifth Ward”), even those that have been razed. Otherwise the lyrics are mostly about sex and are so habitually obscene that they have helped keep bounce from spreading too far beyond its New Orleans borders. The success of bounce-tinged New Orleans artists like Lil Wayne and Juvenile notwithstanding, at least one New Orleans record-company executive speculates that major labels consider unadulterated bounce too hard to distribute, because it can’t be played on most radio stations or even sold in many venues.
The overwhelming majority of bounce artists are, of course, straight. But 12 years ago, a young drag queen who goes by the name Katey Red shocked the audience by taking the mic at an influential underground club near the Melpomene housing project where she grew up, and in that star-is-born moment, a subgenre of bounce took root. It is a sad understatement to say that homosexuality and hip-hop make for an unlikely fusion: hip-hop culture is one of the most unrepentantly homophobic cultures in America, surpassing even its own attitudes toward women in bigotry and smirking advocacy of violence. But New Orleans’s tolerance of unlikely fusions is legendary, and today Katey Red, along with a handful of other artists — Big Freedia (who grew up four blocks from Katey and started out as one of her background vocalists), Sissy Nobby, Chev off the Ave, Vockah Redu (who was captain of the dance team at Booker T. Washington High School) — are not just accepted mainstays of the bounce scene but its most prominent representatives outside New Orleans. Katey recently received a New Orleans consecration of sorts when she appeared as herself, unidentified, in an episode of the HBO series “Treme,” with her song “So Much Drama” playing in the background.
Some part of this subgenre’s popularity is surely due to the catchily discordant name by which it has become known: sissy bounce. The term is problematic, because the artists themselves do not care for it at all — not because they object to the word “sissy” but because they consider it disrespectful to bounce music. Even when their lyrics are at their frankest (“I’m a punk under pressure/When we finish, put my money on the dresser”), they rush to point out, correctly, that they’re just drawing from the life at hand in the same way virtually every rapper does. They have no desire to be typed within, or set apart from, bounce culture; and indeed, within New Orleans itself, they mostly are not — even as their bookings elsewhere in the country are founded increasingly on the novelty of their sexual identities.
The term “sissy bounce” is one for which a young New Orleans music writer named Alison Fensterstock takes very reluctant credit. Fensterstock is a native New Yorker who moved to New Orleans for what was supposed to be a semester in college 15 years ago, and now lives in the Ninth Ward with her husband, who D.J.’s regularly for Katey and other bounce artists. She has done as much for the promotion of bounce culture as anyone, not only by writing about it extensively for New Orleans-based publications (in one of which she offhandedly coined the fateful name) but also by spending two years assembling a museum exhibition, a comprehensive oral and photographic history of bounce and New Orleans hip-hop called “Where They At?” which has traveled all over the country. Indeed, the sissy-bounce artists themselves seem to adore her; when I met her in New Orleans, she mentioned that Katey was excited about giving her a makeover.
When it comes to locating sissy bounce’s roots, Fensterstock said, you should look deep rather than wide; that is, rather than try to place it within the current spectrum of American hip-hop, it makes much more sense to understand it as an outgrowth of New Orleans musical culture itself, which has a long tradition of gay and cross-dressing performers not just as a fringe element but as part of the musical mainstream. (Though the definitional lines aren’t as bright as they used to be, among the sissy-bounce rappers, Katey Red is the only one who performs in women’s clothing.) Bobby Marchan, a female impersonator who was a singer for Huey (Piano) Smith and later became an influential promoter, and Patsy Vidalia (born Irving Ale), the cross-dressing hostess of the Dew Drop Inn, were among the most popular entertainers and social figures in New Orleans for decades.
“As far back as the ’40s and ’50s, it was a really popular thing,” Fensterstock said. “Gay performers have been celebrated forever in New Orleans black culture. Not to mention that in New Orleans there’s the tradition of masking, mummers, carnival, all the weird identity inversion. There’s just something in the culture that’s a lot more lax about gender identity and fanciness. I don’t want to say that the black community in New Orleans is much more accepting of the average, run-of-the-mill gay Joe. But they’re definitely much more accepting of gay people who get up and perform their gayness on a stage.”
Outside New Orleans, though, booking the artists, or selling their records, remains a particular challenge. “They’re the hottest things in the club, but they just haven’t been able to get national exposure,” says Melvin Foley, who manages several sissy-bounce artists. “They have clean versions of their songs for radio, but we can’t get the radio to put them into rotation. I took Sissy Nobby and Big Freedia to New York to meet with Universal, but we couldn’t get a label deal. Their main concern was, ‘How would we market this?’ You market it like you market any other artist.”
Or not. For while it may be true that openly gay rappers will never gain much traction with rap’s mostly male demographic, men aren’t the natural market for the music anyway. As attendance at even a few shows will tell you, the eager and underserved audience for sissy bounce is clearly, overwhelmingly, women. “There’s like a safe-space thing happening,” Fensterstock says. “When Freedia or Nobby’s singing superaggressive, sexual lyrics about bad boyfriends or whatever, there’s something about being able to be the ‘I’ in the sentence. That’s not to say that women can’t like the more misogynistic music too. I like it — some of it’s good music. But it’s tough to sing along about bitches and hos when you’re a girl. When you identify with Freedia, you’re the agent of all this aggressive sexuality instead of its object.”
Though it seems insensitive to point it out, a signal event in spreading bounce’s purview was the forced dispersal of Freedia, Katey, Nobby and untold dozens of bounce artists in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They were exiled from their New Orleans homes for many months, to Baton Rouge, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas and elsewhere; in their restlessness and homesickness, they started staging bounce shows for the locals wherever they happened to be.
Freedia found places to perform in Texas, but she jumped at the first opportunity to get back home. As she remembered: “The first club that reopened in New Orleans was Caesar’s, and they called me immediately and said let’s do a regular night with you here. So we started FEMA Fridays. It was the only club open in the city, and a lot of people had a lot of money from Katrina, the checks and stuff, so the joy inside that club — I don’t think that’ll ever come back.”
“Freedia was one of the first artists to come back after the storm and start working,” Fensterstock said, “and she worked really, really hard. Like six shows a week. If you lived here, it became impossible not to know who she was.”
Which led, unsurprisingly, to a bit of resentment within the bounce community, one that persists to this day. “A lot of the older, straight male rappers have been vocal about having problems with the whole sissy-bounce thing,” Fensterstock said, “but it’s more complicated than just homophobia. These guys have been performing and putting out records for 10 or 20 years. But Freedia’s getting so much publicity now that a lot of people who maybe have never heard of bounce before, or who haven’t thought about it since the ’90s, just think it’s all gay.”
Inaccurate (or paranoid) as that perception may be, the fact is that the notion of unabashedly gay hip-hop is like catnip to some alternative-music scenes around the country. Which puts the artists themselves in something of a bind: while sissy-bounce bookings offer them a rare chance to raise their national profiles, the last thing any of them wants is to put homosexuality at the forefront of what they do. At home, they perform in every sort of venue, before every sort of crowd: at sports bars, at Jazz Fest, at a recent museum benefit called “Sippin’ in Seersucker.” On record too, they fuse freely with other genres. Freedia, Nobby and Katey are all guest vocalists on the latest record from Galactic, a respected (and white) New Orleans funk outfit. And that is the music’s volatile essence: inside New Orleans, the genius of sissy bounce is how perfectly mainstream it is; in the world beyond, the genius of sissy bounce is how incredibly alternative it is.
Vockah Redu — who lives in Houston now, having gone there six years ago to study performing arts in college — probably chafes at the “sissy bounce” label more than anyone. “My daughter’s gonna be reading that soon,” he told me with a tight laugh. “But I’ll be able to explain it to her. It’s just stardom, and I feel like it’ll die down eventually. Right now the media’s buying it, so ‘sissy bounce’ it is.”
Two nights after the Sports Vue show, Vockah and Katey Red traveled to Austin, Tex., to perform at a garagelike space there called the Beauty Bar. This was something of a return engagement: a couple of months earlier there was a bounce showcase at what is probably the mecca of American alternative music, the South by Southwest Festival, and Katey and Vockah made such an impression — despite being just two of the seven bounce artists on the bill, the rest of whom were non-sissies — that they were invited back as part of a subsequent festival called Chaos in Tejas, mostly a collection of hardcore bands whose connection to bounce music per se would normally seem tenuous if not hostile.
Vockah came onstage at the Beauty Bar looking like a latter-day George Clinton, with an Indian wig, a long brown lab coat, purple tights and a gold top hat. Those clothes, and most of the rest of what he was wearing, were shed by the third or fourth song. Vockah has the looks and the bearing (and the dancing ability) of a star; indeed, he really needs a bigger stage than a venue like the Beauty Bar provides. He puts on a very theatrical show, featuring tightly choreographed dancing (in unison with his backup vocalists/dancers, known as the Cru), scripted patter (“Thank you,” he told the audience more than once, “for being a reflection of my gift”) and medleys and reprises rather than a straight set list. Compelling as he was, at times he seemed to lose the audience a bit; they were looking to be related to more directly. “I am not here representing New Orleans, I am not here representing bounce music, I am not here representing gay people,” he said near the end of the show. “I am an artist.” Clearly he is constructing a persona, and it is the type of persona that would go down better in front of a crowd of 20,000 than it did among the 200 heavily tattooed, overwhelmingly white alt-kids who were there for the fickle buzz provided by the authenticity of the new, of the ephemerally romanticized fringe that defines alternative music in the first place.
Katey Red, on the other hand, needs no persona: just the sight of her is a whole narrative unto itself. Fensterstock had told me a story about Katey’s irritation with the reviews of her South by Southwest show, all of which seemed to lead with the fact that she is six feet two inches tall, as if that were somehow the most remarkable thing about her. True, it is probably only the seventh- or eighth-most remarkable thing about her; still, when she came onstage wearing sky-high heels and a Mohawk wig purchased for the occasion, it was literally impossible to see the top of her behind the stage lights affixed to the ceiling, and that says a lot about the way she dominates even a cruddy little venue like the Beauty Bar.
Nothing if not old-school, she led the crowd (and her two backup singers) through a series of shout-outs to the projects and neighborhoods of New Orleans, even though very few in the audience would have any reason to know their names or to distinguish one from the other; she led them in a chant that made “Katrina” and “FEMA” into rhyming objects of the same obscene verb. She did all her best-known songs, including “Punk Under Pressure” (“I’m a ho/You know I’m a ho”) and “Stupid” (“You are so stupid/For calling us guys/Please don’t knock it till you give it a try”). She prowled the stage with the sort of constrained grace Tina Turner used to display while wearing pretty much the same shoes. Once or twice she invited audience members onstage to dance in the classic, hypersexual bounce style, and they did so — men and women — with what might be described as labored un-self-consciousness.
A few hours before the show, Katey, barefoot in a simple blue dress, made macaroni and cheese and chicken nuggets for three teenagers, two of them her children, in the kitchenette of her Austin motel room. The children were mostly silent; Katey’s demeanor, with showtime looming, was growing more combative, and they seemed to know that the smartest course was to try to make themselves invisible.
Katey now lives and identifies full time as a woman; her life and art are pretty much one, so it does not seem unusual that she doesn’t perform all that often these days. “One reason,” she said, “they ain’t paying like I want to get paid. Another reason: they changed bounce music. They made the beat faster. It’s all chop and cut, chop and cut. It’s not rapping. I don’t like that. I like to write. I like to sit down and write a song — this line goes with this line, this line goes with that line.”
There were two cheerleader batons in the motel room, though it was unclear to whom they belonged, and occasionally Katey would pick them up and twirl them.
“Ain’t no such thing as ‘sissy bounce,’ ” she said. “It’s bounce music. It’s just sissies that are doing it. I was gone for two years after Katrina — a month in Chattanooga and then 23 months in Dallas. I performed there. They loved me there. They didn’t know the songs, people in New Orleans know the songs, but it don’t matter, people in Dallas still like to shake they ass. Everybody like to shake they ass.” What’s the audience like at shows outside of New Orleans? “Pretty integrated,” Katey said. “Mostly girls, mostly a bunch of nasty hos with they shorts up they ass, trying to shake like a dog. What you laughing at?” she said to her son.
“You said, ‘People in Dallas like to shake they ass, too,’ ” her son said.
“Go get your food,” Katey said. “I made it, I ain’t going to bring it to you.” This exchange escalated, as such exchanges between parents and children will do, until it reached the point where a few hard but playful blows were exchanged.
“Would you hit your mama like that?” Katey appealed to me.
I shook my head no.
“Exactly,” she said.
The first of Freedia’s three successive New York gigs in May began with a preshow bounce dance class, which should give you some idea of how far from home Freedia and Lazer were. But “every night it got better,” Freedia said. “They was all on the Internet, posting up the pictures, like ‘If you missed last night, OMG, you missed a party.’ Each night it built, and the last night” — at a traveling dusk-to-dawn festival known as Hoodstock, held on this occasion in a raw space in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn — “it was just unbelievable. Five hundred people in there. Everybody was dripping wet. The walls was dripping wet.”
Any doubt that that space, like any space in which Freedia performs, quickly belonged to the women in the crowd may be dispelled by a story Lazer laughingly told about a blog post he’d seen the day after their Hoodstock set. It consisted of two photos taken at the show, and their captions: in the first, a group of women were horizontally p-popping in what amounted to a flesh pile. “To the men,” the caption beneath it read, “we don’t need you.” The second photo depicted a woman at the same show sitting on the floor while a man prone in front of her performed a sexual act that might traditionally be described as submissive. “But we like having you around,” the caption beneath that one read.
What strikes Lazer most about the dynamic at these shows, though, is not how unexpected it is but how familiar. Long before he started D.J.-ing, he was a drummer in a series of rock bands; he is old enough to have come of age in the latter days of punk. And when he started playing shows with Freedia almost two years ago — when he started witnessing, over and over again, a same-sex group taking over the dance floor in order to perform an ecstatic act of physical aggression that is both exceptionally demanding and socially unacceptable in other contexts, at the behest of music that’s ritualized and played at seemingly impossible tempos — it all began to remind him of something.
“It’s as if punk had been reinvented for women,” he said, smiling. “I remember going to punk shows when I was 13, slam-dancing, stage-diving. It was a kind of reckless abandon, something you really couldn’t stop yourself from doing. If the girls weren’t just outright afraid of being in there, there was somebody literally shoving them out of the way. Now it’s exactly what was happening when I was young, but in reverse: the girls literally push the dudes right out of the middle. It’s just pure empowerment, physical aggression that’s not spiteful or vicious. I think it’s no accident that the slang term for a gay kid in New Orleans is ‘punk.’ It’s pretty rewarding.”
There have been, it should be said, several prominent, strongly voiced bounce rappers who are women. For whatever reason, though, the connection between them and an audience of straight women has never seemed as quick or as instinctive. The fact that the uninhibited ring of rump-shaking and p-popping is centered on a Freedia or a Katey doesn’t desexualize it — not by a long shot — but it does seem to take the sense of threat out of it.
“I think the girls like the gay rappers a lot because they feel safer,” Lazer said. “You can get up in the front, you can dance for Freedia, you can work it for Freedia, but at the same time, if anybody comes up on you and gives you a hard time, Freedia’s gonna be the first one —”
“To defend the girl,” Freedia agreed. We were sitting in her modest second-floor apartment in the Sixth Ward, glad to get out of the sun after a photo shoot she did for a British fashion magazine. “I just had that situation on Tuesday, at Caesar’s. I had like 20 girls in this big old circle around me, shaking it real hard. And the boys started closing them in like in a cage. I’m like, ‘Hold up, D.J., stop the music.’ I said, ‘Fellas, back it up, give me 50 feet, I need my girls to work it out where I can see them and where I have control over them.’ So all the fellas back up, but then one guy tries to put his hands on a girl. I stopped the music again, and I said, ‘Dude, I don’t need you touching on my girls because you gonna make all the boys think it’s O.K.’ ”
Lazer, by this point in the story, was nearly folded in half with laughter.
“If they feel like they can step out on that limb,” Freedia said, “I’m gonna step back on that limb with them. If you want to mess with me, I’m gonna mess back with you, but keep in mind that I have the mic in my hand and I’m gonna have the power over you at that moment.”
“And you’re huge,” said the relatively diminutive Lazer.
“And I’m a man,” said Freedia.
