This is not an all-encompassing list of the murdered – apologies to Soulja Slim (who’s rightfully received numerous tributes and encomiums), VL Mike, Lil Derrick and Twelve A’Klok – but a primer on some artists whose music and lives are illustrative of New Orleans rap history. For others, their most reported-upon moments were their final ones, an indignity that ultimately prizes their gross, premature death over their infinitely complex humanity. For some of the dead, a combination of appalling policing, limited local press and a lack of internet served to obscure the facts of their demise. But some weren’t given the chance – New Orleans rappers have been murdered with astonishing frequency. Most of the city’s rappers, producers and DJs have survived the ongoing neglect. Bounce, gangster rap, R&B and G-funk commingled, and rap from New Orleans can be as immediately identifiable as the call-and-response of Mardi Gras Indians or the brassy dirge of funerary jazz. “Mobo Joe” Paynes, Charles “Big Boy” Temple and the Williams brothers, Bryan (“Baby”) and Ronald (“Slim”), hustled garish cassettes and CDs by artists whose monikers were never spelled the same way twice. While the rap business and music media focused on Los Angeles and New York, a cottage industry of seminal labels – Cash Money, Mobo, Big Boy (and later, No Limit) – emerged from the blight. It’s small wonder that rap, which communicates the anxieties and bravado of put-upon communities, would thrive in these conditions. It cratered in 1994, when 421 citizens (almost 86 out of 100,000) would be killed and nine NOPD officers were charged with accepting over $100,000 in bribes from undercover FBI operatives. In the following decade, with a startlingly corrupt police force patrolling the city’s humid, cracked streets, the murder rate spiraled out of control. The first New Orleans rap group, New York International (featuring a young Mannie Fresh and future No Limit Soldier Mia X), debuted in 1984. As residents of some of the Crescent City’s most precarious, crumbling neighborhoods, they had almost no choice but to internalize and document the chaos. They also saw their city surrender to cyclical violence that throttled the overworked, underfunded, sometimes malfeasant and frequently inert authorities. Artists who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s saw New Orleans rap evolve from New York-imitant to something wholly its own, a synthesis of the city’s muddled, colonial roots. As long as rap has existed in New Orleans, rappers have both borne witness to and been victimized by violence and institutional injustice.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |