Bounce, Matt Miller.

In late July 2005, I was in New Orleans, working on the documentary film project Ya Heard Me? I walked in the sweltering midday heat through the French Quarter to Odyssey Records on Canal Street, where I paid 9.98$ for a self-produced CD by DJ Chicken (Kenneth Williams Jr.). The compilation featured popular songs by mainstream R&B and rap artists (along with a couple of oldies) “remixxed with Dat Beat.” As rapper Marvin “Dolemite” Skinner put it, “When people say that beat, they’re talking about bounce music. That’swhat the new generation call it, that beat”. “That beat” is the New Orleans beat, a particular mid-tempo rhythmic feel created by a propulsive, syncopated bass drum pattern in combination with layered, continuous percussive elements such as handclaps or simple melodic lines and often featuring particular sounds sampled from other recordings. Even after the devastating hurricane that struck the city a few weeks after my visit, “dat beat” remained a touchstone of local musical identity and a beacon calling the city’s dispersed population back.

The persistence of “that beat” poses questions about the role of the local in rap and other highly mediated forms of cultural production. Where does it come from, and what does it do for people? Cultural critics like Bakari Kitwana, who wrote in 2002 that “Black youth in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Champaign, Illinois…. share similar dress styles, colloquialisms, and body language with urban kids from Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City” argue that the “commercialization of rap music” is simply another avenue through which the corporate-controlled media promotes its own homogenizing and commodifying agenda. But this representation of mass conformity and homogeneous, national-level African American popular culture does not explain the persistence of “that beat” in New Orleans. Alongside efforts to conform to rap’s aesthetic mainstream and capitalize on its potential for mass appeal, a stubbornly, and self-consciously local approach runs throughout the history of rap in the city.

This suggests that, in New Orleans and elsewhere, the local context- including its ethno-cultural, economic, historical, and even climatic dimensions- still exercises a considerable amount of influence on the experiences of the people who inhabit a particular locale and the cultural products that they create.