Born out of New Orleans club culture, bounce music isn't just best
experienced in person — it's almost impossible to understand in the
abstract. But Big Freedia (pronounced "free-duh"), one of the style's
biggest stars, says the music does have a few defining features.
Bounce
is based in hip-hop. It favors punchy tempos, heavy bass and
call-and-response vocals. Many of the songs are structured around a
handful of samples, most notably a snippet from "Drag Rap," a 1986 track by the New York rap group The Showboys.
"We
use those beats in a lot of our music," Freedia says. "We know how to
flip it a million and one ways — and the producers, they know what to do
with it to make the crowd jump."
That's another thing: Bounce
is party music, hypersexual and made to be danced to. (The more your
butt is moving, the better). Freedia says that's why the lyrics are
usually kept simple: "You've gotta leave room for the bass and the boom
and the knock," she says, "and for people to be able to just free
themselves and express themselves through dance."
Big Freedia
is the stage name of Freddie Ross, a New Orleans native who, in the late
1990s, helped usher in a wave of openly queer bounce performers. Today,
she's one of the few bounce artists with national exposure, and her
profile is about to get bigger: a documentary about her life, a dance
instruction DVD and her first proper full-length album are all in the
pipeline. To hear her conversation with NPR's Robert Smith, click the
audio link on this page.
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