You know the song Lemon right? It's amazing. I mean Rihanna raps on it like a badass.
You can catch me, Ri, in the new La Ferrar'
and the music video is incredible Rihanna shaves dancer Metta Towley's head,
right before she goes on to dance under saturated neon lights for the rest of
the video. And the more I listen to it the more there was something about its
sound that just felt super familiar and the fact that I couldn't pinpoint why
was driving me crazy. And then one day it just clicked.
Lemon sounds a lot like a
New Orleans Bounce song.
Bouncin' around, bouncin' around, bouncin'.
Now if you don't know what New Orleans bounces then you're in
for a treat, because I have the perfect person to help explain it. It's something
that moves in your bones, moves in your body, and it moves in your soul.
That's Big Freedia, the unofficial but let's just say official, ambassador of
New Orleans bounce.
In New Orleans we take any song, it can be from a Beyoncé song,
to a Rihanna song, to a Drake song. It can be Patti LaBelle. It could be a
church song. They will take it and put a bounce beat on it honey.
To understand bounce music you have to go back to the late 1980s and early 90s. It was the
Golden Age of hip hop and rap's biggest hits were coming from the east and west
coast. In New Orleans though, a rap scene was just starting to form and while
artists were trying to find their voice and identity, they were also competing
with the likes of Snoop Dogg and Run DMC on the local radio stations. So they had
to come up with ways to get the city's attention.
You know the baseline in the background baby. New Orleans. Rapper Gregory D and producer
Mannie Fresh figured out that winning strategy with Buck Jump Time.
Listen to the rhymes back-to-back that I wrote for the project rap.
This rap is wild, a number one hit. When you ever heard a rapper bust like this?
Uptown, Third Ward, that Calliope Melpomene, Magnolia, the home of dope.
St. Thomas, Lafitte, the Iberville's hard And that Seventh Ward St. Bernard.
All those chants are shout outs to different housing projects in the city. And in 1989 and it made
Buck Jump Time an instant local hit.
You got to represent the people. That's the
people who're going to talk about these songs, that's the people who're going to play the
songs, that's the people who're going to shake their ass, that's the people who're going to feed
the music where it needs to be fed.
Buck Jump Time is a progenitor to bounce, but
they quickly solidified emotional appeals to the people of New Orleans as
one of the earliest conventions of the genre.
It's not only the lyrics that were
so catchy, but it's the beat. The beat that got everybody on their feet.
That's the "Trigger Man" beat.
And you might have heard it before in songs like
BALL by T.I.,
Or Trigger Man by Lil' Wayne.
You know where I hear it? Lemon.
Trigger Man definitely has a
strong point in the sound of Bounce music.
You know, when you hear dun dun dun dun.
You know, "the rhymes you're about to hear are true."
It's just like, it's so magical to the culture
of New Orleans. The funny thing is the Trigger Man beat wasn't created in New Orleans,
it was created by the rap duo The Show Boys in Queens, New York and it
was originally called Drag Rap, because they sampled sounds from the
detective show Dragnet.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the story you're about to see is true the
names have been changed to protect the innocent.
The song was made around 1986.
It barely got any radio airplay in New York, and soon after The Show Boys
disbanded. But somehow this record ended up in New Orleans and the city loved it.
In the words of Lil Wayne: "In 1990 you play it, people will go bananas. You play the
song right now 2011, in New Orleans people will go bananas. We took that song
and we fell in love with it man.
Lil Wayne, what type of food do you like?
Okay - back to the story. People in New Orleans
loved the Trigger Man beat on its own, but when M.C.T. Tucker used it on his 1992
track "Where dey at", there was no going back.
Bounce was born.
When M.C.T. Tucker chanted f*** David Duke over the Trigger Man beat, he
knew he had the city behind him, but he also introduced one more thin: hyper
repetitive dance instructions.
Shake that ass like a saltshaker.
You know, it's all about stuff that's commanding your audience on what to do. Either
lyrically, or dance-wise you know, like dribble
dribble dribble dribble like a basketball
There's this billboard magazine feature from 1994 about Bounce, that explains
just how popular it was in New Orleans. It says locally-produced Bounce
cassettes routinely sell 200 to 300 units a week, roughly 10 times the sales
of national rap albums. The problem? Well, Bounce was difficult to sell outside of
New Orleans, because they just didn't match the sound or the lyrical style of
mainstream hip hop. And yet, Bounce persisted in the city and eventually the
Trigger Man beat was mixed up with the brown beat, an 808 heavy syncopated
rhythm that, depending on who you ask was either lifted from UK rapper Derek P's
Rock The Beat,
or from this Bay Area DJ. Hi I'm Cameron Paul.
You know, something about Bounce?
It never gets old. A lot of us have classics that they know
when they hear that, the whole club just gonna go damn crazy. You can put a DJ
Jubilee song on and the party's just gonna get started.
Big Freedia's classic? Everybody know me for Gin In My System for sure.
It's definitely about participation with New Orleans. The Mardi Gras Indians, the
Second Line Sundays, the Bounce music where if I would say I got that gin in
my system, my audience will say somebody gonna be my victim. And that's your
hook. I got that gin in my system somebody gonna be my victim.
For the most
part the Big Bounce classics stayed in New Orleans, but a few trickled into the
mainstream. Like in 1998 New Orleans' own Juvenile released Back That Azz Up
featuring Lil Wayne. It peaked at 19 on the Billboard charts.
Just like any of the music around the world, it has to have his home base first.
Once Katrina hit, the music spread all around the world, wherever we were
displaced at. And people was like what is that sound? What type of music is that?
And we was like baby that's New Orleans Bounce.
Sometimes that exposure fosters
positive collaborations with bigger artists. Diplo worked with New Orleans
Nicky DA B on Express Yourself and Big Freedia on Drop.
And other times is just
blatant appropriation.
It's just important for them to say whether they
get the idea, and having the courage to say I got this from the culture of
Bounce music. A lot of times people come to New Orleans and they see it and they
love it so much, they just gotta take a little piece back home with them baby.
But there is a gray area in songs like Lemon.
When I listen to Lemon, I hear a
very clear remix of the Trigger Man beat.
I hear a heavily syncopated Brown . beat style rhythm.
I hear dead giveaway lyrics,
And some subtle nods to the genre.
Based on this though, is it Bounce or is it just Bounce-inspired?
Well I definitely
think that it's Bounce inspired. It's definitely not a Bounce song. A lot of
artists sometimes, can instruct producers to a certain degree on how to create the
sound. When its the official stamp of a Bounce song, you are a Bounce artist, you
grew up in New Orleans, and you went into one of our gritty little studios that
was sweating hot and you made that song.