Original at Kos.
Nik Cohn, the reporter who brought us, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” which later metamorphosed into the seminal film, Saturday Night Fever, has now turned his attention to Southern hip-hop music coming out of New Orleans in a new book called, Triksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap.
And yeah, they did push back the book’s release date for a public hungry for information about New Orleans and for the Christmas shopping rush. Says Will Hermes, the NYT reviewer:
“Triksta” is partly a travelogue. Written by an outsider who fell hard for New Orleans, it’s also, like “The Heart of the World,” a eulogy for a place that no longer exists – here, a congenial melting pot (where “black and white neighbors gossiped over the fence”) turned “putrid” with poverty and racial hatred. To its credit, “Triksta” is less about nostalgia for the past than engagement with the city’s present (or what it had been until August), and how the rap-game players he meets there – to use hip-hop parlance – roll.
Cohn becomes a hip-hop A&R producer, and this gives him some freedom to experience not necessarily the success stories, but what the reviewer calls the also-rans: those who achieved a modicum of success and respect on the street, but not on MTV or BET. Pretty much, Cohn’s onto himself and his motives as with this observation: “I was not a record exec,” he touchingly confesses at one point, “just a half-assed fantasist playing out my senile hungers.”
Or going to the ghetto to change his luck, so to speak.
Cohn introduces us to:
Soulja Slim, a local hero shot in the face outside his mother’s house (yet received the equivalent of a traditional jazz-now-hip-hop funeral complete with second-line) – along with the sorta- and never-rans: Earl Mackie, who runs a struggling rap label along with a roofing business; a second-grade teacher, Junie Bezel, a k a the Magnolia Pepper Girl; and Choppa, a middle-class rhyme hopeful whose real name is Derwin.
And then, unfortunately, we have the middle-aged reality check about the limitations of anyone assuming the black pose, whether dated hipster or mobile whigga:
“When I, like many others in my generation, had pursued black style in the 60’s,” he comments after observing a group of white hip-hoppers in a Cleveland mall, “it was intended, however naïvely, as a tribute. This was barefaced theft.” Aside from matters of the pot calling the kettle blackface, this smacks of a familiar generational condescension.
And that black style was either homemade in the suburbs, or if they were lucky like Elvis, they went straight into the black community and bought from the same clothing stores that tricked out the black beboppers and rock-and-roll performers of his day.
Hermes also writes this interesting cautionary to Cohn’s successful hustle:
One thing nags, however – perhaps a built-in problem of this sort of new-journalism-meets-memoir storytelling. Throughout Cohn’s music-biz escapades, there’s little acknowledgment of what, after all, must have been the veteran author’s central intent: to write a book about them. Even when he ponies up his advance for recording equipment, it’s clearly an investment in his narrative as much as in the rapper Che Muse’s music. Yet without this conceit, Cohn would never have gotten as rich a book, and the careers of his rap hopefuls would probably be no further along, and possibly less, than they are when he finally decides to “get back to my other life.” Cohn is of course lucky to have that option, and lucky – considering some of the hard cases he meets – that he didn’t wind up stomped like Hunter S. Thompson at the close of “Hell’s Angels.”
Uhuh. For ripping off their lives to a fare-thee-well.
That is what tourism, racial or otherwise, becomes. It’s a chance to sample the relics, the women, the architecture/food/atmosphere of a place for a certain length of time and then let it go. It’s better to be willfully ignorant or uncaring (or not) whether it’s real or has historic credence. Someone, like Cohn, can act as guide and interpreter to these wonders only imagined or dreamt of, particularly if they are too dangerous. And because you don’t really belong to or live in or contribute to that community, tourism, in a sense, washes you clean of responsibility for what has occurred before and long past your time is up in the place and its people.
