Strike Up the Band

Talk about rap in New Orleans. When people think of the city, they don’t think of hip-hop, but it’s really big and there’s some interesting and exciting stuff going on.

I go to second lines where you hear rap and hip hop elements in there. Some of the brass bands- the Hot Eight and Soul Rebel [Brass Band]—do that and I think they do it really well. It’s another oral tradition music that’s been made local. There’s a type of hip hop here that’s called “bounce” and it’s got a New Orleans beat to it. It’s a huge part of the music scene here and it reaches a national audience, yet oddly enough it’s somewhat unidentified with New Orleans and it’s not included in a serious way in the Jazz Fest and it’s just not included in a lot of public things that represent New Orleans as New Orleans.

Why is that?

Maybe because it is new. But it’s strong. Cash Money [Records] came out of here. My larger feeling is that—whether it’s in the music scene or its the Creole plasterers and ironworkers and bricklayers, or it’s the great chefs—New Orleans’ biggest ace in the hole is creativity. The only thing that will fully bring the place back to something that feels not terribly different from what it was. Creativity is what we have. People didn’t live here in the old days or move here because they thought it had great infrastructure, because it doesn’t. We’ve got an almost Third World level of infrastructure with lots of neighborhood life and lots of family life that’s tied to the arts and creativity. That’s a different model from how mainstream America operates. That’s why I think it’s so hard for governments and foundations and even the private sector to easily deal with this place.

How is food relevant to this discussion?

Music moves all over the world—on the Internet, on CDs and performance. Food doesn’t travel quite as easily. I think we’re struggling with food because small businesses are struggling. If your place was damaged by floodwaters, it’s a struggle to put back the kind of investment and the insurance you need to get a kitchen up and running. Like music, it’s a symbol of a return of the life that people care about and love here. We have to focus on rebuilding the culinary scene here.