{"id":2058,"date":"2010-08-06T19:34:50","date_gmt":"2010-08-07T00:34:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/?p=2058"},"modified":"2010-08-06T19:35:40","modified_gmt":"2010-08-07T00:35:40","slug":"whose-line-is-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/2010\/08\/06\/whose-line-is-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Whose line is it?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last few weeks I’ve spoken to a number of reporters about reporting outside of their neighborhoods or experience.\u00a0 One common theme that I’ve heard is the importance of using people’s own language to describe places and institutions in their communities.\u00a0 Patrick Barry, a senior scribe working with LISC\/Chicago, said journalists documenting community development projects had to rethink their use of language when reporting on the low-to-middle-income communities that were the focus of the organization’s New Communities Program<\/a>.\u00a0 Even if a reporter’s impression of a neighborhood was that it was a “bombed out ghetto,” Barry said, they needed to be aware that neighborhood residents didn’t use that language to describe their neighborhood and didn’t necessarily think of their community with such an exclusively negative framing.\u00a0 “We have learned a lot from neighborhood people about how to talk about places,” Barry said.<\/p>\n

The New York Times Magazine recently ran a story<\/a> about New Orleans rappers\u00a0Big Freedia<\/a> and Katey Red<\/a>. \u00a0The print version of the story about Freedia ran under the clever headline like “Neither Straight Nor Out of Compton” (I can’t find my copy of the magazine to confirm the exact title). \u00a0 However, the web version uses the (apparently) search-engine-optimized title “Sissy Bounce, New Orleans’ Gender-Bending Rap” in the title of the web page (the text that shows at the top of one’s browser window) and “New Orleans’ Gender-Bending Rap” on the page itself. \u00a0These different versions of the title reflect, perhaps, reflect the contentious use of the term “sissy bounce” to describe the music of Big Freedia and other gay, transgender, lesbian or bisexual rappers who perform New Orleans’ signature hip-hop style of “bounce.”<\/p>\n

Jonathan Dee, the story’s author describes bounce like this:<\/p>\n

Bounce itself has been around for about 20 years. Like most hip-hop varietals, it\u2019s rap delivered over a sampled dance beat, but it has a few characteristics that give it a distinctively regional sound: it\u2019s 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.\u2019s \u201cRock the Beat\u201d or an infectious hook known as the \u201cTriggaman,\u201d from a 1986 Showboys record called \u201cDrag Rap.\u201d (That\u2019s \u201cdrag\u201d not as in cross-dressing but as in the theme to the old TV show \u201cDragnet.\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Katey Red is quick to point out that LGBT artists in New Orleans are part of the larger bounce music culture, not a separate genre. \u00a0\u201cAin\u2019t no such thing as \u2018sissy bounce,\u2019 \u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s bounce music. It\u2019s just sissies that are doing it.” \u00a0In this video interview<\/a> from Fader Magazine, Freedia expresses a similar sentiment:<\/p>\n

Bounce music generally is just bounce music in New Orleans and you may have a gay rapper that does bounce music and you have straight rappers as well. \u00a0So I just really want to clarify that bounce music is not sissy bounce it’s bounce generally and you have some sissies that represent bounce music, you know, like myself, Sissy Nobby, Katey Red . \u00a0You know, there’s a few more. \u00a0It’s not called sissy bounce at home, it’s called bounce music.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n