Sissy Bounce Rap from New Orleans | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 19:02:32 Sissy Bounce Rap from New Orleans by Alison Fensterstock https://norient.com/index.php/stories/sissybounce Page 1 of 12 Sissy Bounce Rap from New Orleans | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 19:02:32 Katey Red, Sissy Nobby, Big Freedie: These successful Sissy Rappers turn New Orleans around. Gay rappers carry the torch for bounce, but not all local rappers are comfortable with that. Club Caesar's LLC is advertised on the radio as «under the G.N.O. bridge», and it literally is. To get there from the East Bank, it's necessary to overshoot it by almost a mile by taking the Gen. De Gaulle exit, and then loop back around through the Fischer housing project. Behind Caesar's is the Mississippi River, and across Monroe Street from the club is a stately mortuary. At 10 p.m. on a recent Tuesday night, the vehicles parked on the block were an idiosyncratic collage: a pair of NOPD units, the Q93-FM mobile broadcast van and a fleet of immaculate white hearses. Inside, the bar is low-ceilinged and spare, with wood paneling, linoleum floors and a few scattered bridge tables, similar to an old VFW Hall or Elks Club. Flo Rida's springtime hit «Low» pumps from the speakers as people start to trickle in. It's a weeknight, but the fans are dressed to impress — girls in shiny stilettos and guys in crisp, fresh oversized polos with a scattering of bling — ready to pop and wobble to Big Freedia and Sissy Nobby, the bounce rappers who hold down the mic at Caesar's every Tuesday and Friday night. It's popular among New Orleans DJs to remix R&B radio hits with the manic, skittering rhythm that characterizes bounce, and the later it gets, the harder and faster the beat pounds underneath warbling ballads and lazy hip-hop cuts from Usher and Lil Wayne. Just before 1 a.m., Big Freedia comes in — a tall, rangy-bodied former high- school cheerleader with a cute Rihanna-style cropped hairdo, dressed down in jeans and a T-shirt and swinging a casual, trendy, red handbag on her wrist. She has a self-possessed, almost regal vibe in counterpoint to Nobby, who's short, curvy and cute, a ball of baby fat and energy. Together, they're two of the most popular and prolific (and busy — the pair performs at least four nights each week) acts in local bounce today. They're also both biologically male, gay, and as out-and-proud as they can be. In the lexicon of bounce, they're punks, or more often, sissies. As hip-hop evolved throughout the 1980s, the music coming out of New Orleans largely sounded like what was happening in the rest of the country: a singsongy, Sugarhill Gang-style vocal rhythm over fat, methodical beats and soul and funk samples. That all changed drastically around 1991 and 1992, when «Where Dey At» — which is generally accepted as the first bounce song — was recorded in two versions, by MC T. Tucker with DJ Irv and shortly after by DJ Jimi. The new sound was stripped-down and raw, intended to drive a dance floor with its speedy, infectious «triggerman» beat and repetitive lyrics that were more call-and-response than narrative. A sample of the 1986 song «Drag Rap» from a New York duo called the Showboys became a hallmark, as https://norient.com/index.php/stories/sissybounce Page 2 of 12 Sissy Bounce Rap from New Orleans | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 19:02:32 did lyrics that called out (and demanded responses about) your ward, your school or your project, which gave the sound its uniquely participatory groove. Like the triggerman beat and the «Drag Rap» sample, catchphrases and lyrics also migrated from song to song in a sort of mutual homage. (Dozens of bounce songs use the DJ Jimi-coined chant, «Do it baby, stick it», or DJ Jubilee's «Trick, stop talkin' that s**t/ And buy [your name here] his outfit.») More often than not, the lyrics were also really, really dirty, describing sex acts and preferences in lewd and gleeful anatomical detail. Bounce ruled New Orleans' club and block-party scene for years, though the only national bounce hit of the 1990s was Juvenile's «Back That Azz Up», which hit No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the last year of the decade. Locally, bounce spawned dozens of artists and club hits, including the duo Partners-n-Crime, whose songs «Heron Baby» and «Thank You Miss Lilly» (a paean to their local weed dealer) stood up alongside more vanilla club bangers like its classic «Pump the Party». The saucy Cheeky Blakk got the bounce lyrics «Suck dat p***y for a pork chop» onto a Rebirth Brass Band album (2001's Hot Venom). Juvenile wrote bounce lyrics for DJ Jimi before breaking out as a solo artist. And the Tupac Shakur of New Orleans, the late Soulja Slim, recorded bounce tracks as Magnolia Slim before veering into more gangsta territory. After almost 10 years of block-party sovereignty, a new chapter in bounce opened in 1999, when the local Take Fo' label — home to artists like Choppa and DJ Jubilee — issued Melpomene Block Party, the first full-length release from Katey Red, a gay, transvestite MC from Uptown's Guste Apartments, otherwise known as the Melpomene projects. Katey is 6-foot-2, slender and graceful — and at 29, about to celebrate a decade as New Orleans' original sissy rapper. «Oct. 21, 1998, that was the first time I got on the mic», she remembers. It was at a block party in the Melpomene, and her friends egged her on mercilessly until she got onstage. Katey would walk around the courtyards of the Melpomene and the halls of her school, rapping, and early versions of her songs were already well known. «And when I got up there, everyone knew what to say back», she remembers. Her fan base was instant and enthusiastic. Katey and Freedia befriended each other early on, and Freedia got her start singing and dancing as a member of Katey's backup group, Dem Hoes. Soon, with Katey's encouragement, she became a solo artist in her own right. Through the door opened by Katey sashayed a flood of sissy rappers in the early 2000s, including Freedia and later Nobby, plus artists like Vockah Redu, Chev off the Ave., Sissy Jay, Sissy Gold and the group SWA: Sissies With Attitude. Some, like Katey and Vockah Redu, performed in wigs and dresses; others were less visually outré, but still identified as «sissies». As the originator and most prominent sissy rapper, Katey earned a wealth of https://norient.com/index.php/stories/sissybounce Page 3 of 12 Sissy Bounce Rap from New Orleans | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 19:02:32 publicity, including a 2000 New York Times article. (With this raised profile came intra-scene spats — some, Katey says, arranged as publicity stunts and some genuine — that resulted in hilarious tracks like Vockah Redu's «F*** Katey Red», which teases the rapper for having big feet and shopping at Rainbow.) She followed Melpomene Block Party, with its neighborhood-based call-and- response anthem «Loco New Orleans», with 2000's Y2Katey: The Millennium Sissy, also on Take Fo'. Also in 2000, Vockah Redu put out Can't Be Stopped, https://norient.com/index.php/stories/sissybounce Page 4 of 12 Sissy Bounce Rap from New Orleans | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 19:02:32 and 2002 saw the release of Chev's Straight Off the Ave. and the two-CD compilation by DJ Black-N-Mild, Battle of the Sissies Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. The next year, Freedia dropped her debut, Queen Diva, with the exuberant local hit single «Gin In My System». The sissy rappers also recorded several collaborations with artists who did not self-identify as gay, including 10th Ward Buck, Gotty Boi Chris and the well-respected female rapper Ms. Tee. Their take on bounce used the same frenetic beat style that defined the 1990s, but favored lighter, cheerier samples than the ominous, ubiquitous «Drag Rap». One of Katey's favorite samples is the unmistakable opening of the Jackson 5's «ABC». In the bounce tradition, sissy lyrics are also graphically sexual — Freedia often calls herself, cheerfully, «Big Freedia, the d*** eater» — and their shows, like straight shows, often feature a lineup of girls bending over and shaking their butts in the air onstage. (The rapper Mr. Meana commented, in a sentiment echoed by several straight male rappers, «We got to hear that music in the club, because that's what makes the females do all types of dances.») In Ya Heard Me, the first bounce documentary film, the rapper Devious D. complained that sissy shows would invariably be compromised by gay male dancers performing alongside the rappers. There would be four hot girls, he said, «and one big booty man just ruining it». (In an interview, Matt Miller, an Emory University doctoral candidate who is writing his dissertation on Southern rap, said, «I'm thinking, ‹Come on. Your sexual preference is being catered to by a ratio of four to one.›») Bounce shows in general — as the rappers report, and as personal experience has shown — attract cute young girls dressed to the nines by the hundred, and sissy bounce audiences look to be 60 to 70 percent women. Where the girls go to dance with their butts in the air, of course, the boys will follow.