Alison Fensterstock and Aubrey Edwards’ Where They At archive is now available online. It’s a pretty impressive archive of New Orleans bounce and rap music featuring photos, ephemera and excerpts of interviews with the likes of DJ Jimi, Mia X, Mannie Fresh and more (hopefully the full text will be available in some form in the future?) I haven’t gotten too too deep into the site yet, but I did notice this interesting point brought up by one time Young Money and Psychoward DJ Raj Smoov:
Even still now, I don’t think hip-hop and rap are too widely accepted as… I think it’s still looked down upon. Even within the city, jazz music and brass band music – and there is a lot of culture – New Orleans has its own hip-hop. It has its own history of it, but people don’t really look or pay too much attention to that because it’s not, I guess, traditional. Right now jazz is what everybody knows New Orleans for being for. But back in the day when jazz first started, it was looked down upon by its predecessors. We’re kind of going through that same cycle now. I think there eventually will be a point where all the people that grew up on hip-hop that are my age, once they start getting in positions of power – they are handing out the grants and they are doing the stories and memorials and they have the power to do different things – you’ll see a lot more happening with hip hop because that is our music. That will be the traditional music at some point.
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