Pop stars may twerk in music videos and at award shows, but they rarely acknowledge the progenitor of the famous gyration: New Orleans (and, more specifically, bounce music).
Bounce music has not enjoyed the same international recognition as other local lyrical exports such as jazz, nor even the same recognition as trends this style of music has spawned, such as twerking. In the radio documentary “Shake It Fo ya Hood,” Brooklyn-based radio show Afropop Worldwide tries to connect the dots of what the world sees of bounce music and the world behind those songs and dance moves. Afropop Worldwide is hosted by Georges Collinet and is an internationally broadcasted radio show focused on Africa and African Diaspora music.
The documentary, produced by the Peabody Award-winning public radio show, sinks it teeth into the 30-year tradition of bounce and the untraditional turns its has taken over the course of that history. It interviews people from Glenda Roberts of All Good In The Hood and Mannie Fresh to Big Freedia and a professor of Comparative Women’s Studies at Spelman College.
“I’ve always been striving for something bigger. In the early stages of bounce, we couldn’t leave out of New Orleans with that. We would go over to Baton Rouge or some place like that and they would not get it. So I was trying to figure out how we could make them understand it. I got New Orleans but I wanted more than New Orleans. I was really striving from day one because I thought the whole planet was going to like this,” says Mannie Fresh on taking Cash Money out of New Orleans.
“We dive into how electro 808s mutated into a distinctive form of DJ driven dance music, how technology pushed bounce from live mixing to light-speed vocal edits, how queer artists first entered, and then transformed the scene, and the new generation of female artists that some see as the future of the music,” Afropop Worldwide co-producer Sam Becker said.
Check out the full radio documentary above, and learn more about the history of New Orleans rap in this piece written by OffBeat’s digital editor, Amanda Mester, for UGHH.com. Also, make sure to snag tickets to Partners-N-Crime and DJ Jubilee’s 25th anniversary celebration with very special guest stars, The Showboys.
