Revenge of the Words

An American flag hangs on a house in New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward. The spray-paint markings are used by rescue workers to indicate that the residence has been checked for bodies (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images).

At this time last year, 80 per cent of New Orleans — The City That Care Forgot — sank beneath the floods of the mighty Hurricane Katrina. Ten thousand people, unable or unwilling to obey their mayor’s mandatory evacuation order, had gathered downtown at the Louisiana Superdome to ride out the storm. That number would go up — way up, to about 30,000 — before it came down. In the days, weeks and months that followed Katrina, the various governments’ responses to the disaster evidenced bureaucratic failures of epic proportions.

Katrina claimed at least 1,836 lives, although a final death toll may never be settled. Unknown numbers of people died waiting for help (water, food, medicine and transportation) that was too slow in coming. During the seven days it took to evacuate the Superdome, round-the-clock news broadcasts from New Orleans showed the hurricane’s survivors to be mostly poor, mostly black — and united in outrage at President George W. Bush’s federal government.

Race became a hot topic of discussion immediately after the storm. There have been innumerable suggestions (and an offsetting horde of denials) that the effort and effectiveness of the government response would have been very different if most of New Orleans’s stranded masses had been white instead of black. In some circles, the disaster has become known as “Black America’s 9/11.”

Since Katrina’s devastation, many well-heeled celebrities (including Oprah Winfrey, John Travolta and Ellen DeGeneres) have made noble contributions to the relief and recovery effort. It figures that musicians (Harry Connick, Jr., U2’s The Edge and others) have been vocal members of the star ranks: New Orleans is, after all, a longtime hotbed of blues and jazz. But in a world apart from the tourist thrills of the French Quarter, in and around sprawling, dilapidated housing developments like New Orleans’s C. J. Peete Projects (generally known as the Magnolia Projects), those genres have been supplanted. The new, true sound of the city’s younger generations is a gritty, greedy kind of hip hop led by the likes of Lil’ Wayne and the Cash Money Millionaires, Juvenile and Master P.

For at least the past decade, hardcore rappers have become like royalty among New Orleans’s underemployed classes. In 2003, when local icon Soulja Slim was gunned down on his mother’s front lawn, he was given a funeral worthy of a king. Thousands of mourners joined a procession across the city’s Washington Avenue, with a brass band performing his hit songs (I’ll Pay Fa It, You Don’t Wanna Go 2 War) along the way. Pallbearers removed Slim’s casket from a horse-drawn carriage and lifted it high overhead, dancing among the crowd as they neared his grave.

After Katrina, many hip-hop stars from New Orleans and elsewhere in the U.S. dipped into their pocketbooks to help people recover from the hurricane’s wrath. Some MCs, though, have not been content simply to make a donation and move on. They saw kindred spirits swimming in the storm’s fetid waters, and have used the power of their pens to demand accountability for the disaster’s aftermath in ways that other celebrities have not. American hip hop, more than any other music, has called its government to task.

New Orleans rapper and label boss Master P attends a New York City press conference for a September 2005 Hurricane Katrina benefit (Peter Kramer/Getty Images).

One of the first MCs to react to Katrina was Percy (Master P) Miller: native son of New Orleans’s B. W. Cooper (Calliope) Projects and founder of No Limit Records. He’s also the Sean (Diddy) Combs of the Deep South: a third-rate rapper with A-plus business sense. From the mid-to-late ‘90s, P and his No Limit soldiers sold more than 85 million gangsta-rap records with nary a sniff at mainstream crossover. By the end of the century, he had amassed a personal fortune worth close to $60 million US.

P’s roots run deep in New Orleans. His parents and “countless relatives,” he said, were living in the city when Katrina tore past it. The storm destroyed “all of their homes” — P’s included — along its way. It took the rapper several days to locate his father, father-in-law and sister-in-law in the aftermath. With parts of his city still under water, Master P announced the founding of Team Rescue, a non-profit hurricane relief venture formed by himself, his wife, Sonya, and rapper son, Romeo. The organization would go on to provide apartments for evacuees and personal hygiene supplies for housing shelters.

Katrina thrashed communities whose residents are accustomed to long delays from public officials. Part of P’s impetus for launching Team Rescue was to skip past the formal structures that can slow relief efforts. He wanted to — and did — hit the streets quicker and faster than many government-run agencies.

“My family has set out to save and rebuild our neighbourhoods and help our inner-city brothers and sisters who have lost everything in this disaster,” P said at the time. “I’m from New Orleans, this is something that I have to do. Everybody else is not going to understand where we at and by me being in a better position, I feel this is my duty to make sure that I give to my people.”

He wasn’t alone. On Sept. 9, 2005, a coalition of broadcast networks co-produced a telethon to aid hurricane recovery efforts along the Gulf Coast. The concert raised $30 million US for the Salvation Army and American Red Cross. During one of its pledge drives, rapper-producer Kanye West — one of the biggest names in hip hop — jumped off script to speak his mind. “I’ve tried to turn away from the TV because it’s too hard to watch. I’ve even been shopping even before giving a donation, so now I’m calling my business manager right now to see what is the biggest amount I can give, and just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people down there,” West said, leading up to the slam heard ‘round the world: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

Actor Mike Myers, standing beside West, reacted with a Category 4 double take. The comment, though, was stunning for the lack of controversy it caused. Aside from the warblings of a few pundits, Kanye experienced no repercussions for his candour. In the past year, he has seen his sophomore album certified three times platinum, collected three Grammy Awards and maintained his endorsement deals with major corporations including Pepsi. This fails to surprise. West was only preaching to his choir. In mid-October, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll confirmed their agreement: it suggested that only two per cent of black voters thought Bush was doing a good job as president.

Reports of the poll coincided with the release of Brooklyn rapper Mos Def’s Dollar Day in New Orleans (Katrina Klap). The song appeared on the internet as a readymade anthem for Bush’s Katrina critics. Its lyrics deliver a scathing indictment of the White House’s handling of the flood: West’s sentiments writ large.

Listen homie, it’s dollar day in New Orleans
It’s where there water everywhere and people dead in the stree-ee-eets
And Mr. President he ‘bout that cash
He got a policy for handlin’ the n----- and trash
And if you poor, you black
I laugh a laugh, they won’t give when you ask
You betta off on crack, dead or in jail, or with a gun in I-ra-ha-aq ...

Jackson, Miss. MC-producer David Banner (Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images).

The drowning of New Orleans dominated news coverage after Katrina, relegating the rest of the Gulf Coast to subplot status.

“There are cities in south Mississippi like Pass Christian, Long Beach, Biloxi and Gulfport that are gone,” gangsta rapper-producer David Banner (born Levell Crump in Jackson, Miss.) told Ozone magazine in September. “And these are just regular, ordinary folks. White, black, Hispanic, rich, poor. These are places where our grandmothers and grandfathers stay. There’s history in these towns.”

Banner was on tour in Memphis when Katrina tore through his home state. He watched his government’s response to the storm with growing disgust. When he could stomach no more, he loaded his tour bus with water and supplies and sent his driver south to Mississippi.

“I told him to go [ahead] and buy whatever they needed and I’d pay him back. He filled the tour bus up twice with water, food and supplies before the American government did,” the MC told Ozone. “If I can dispatch help from my troops while out of town, then why couldn’t Bush?”

Banner, though, was only beginning. He performed on BET’s Sept. 9 mega-benefit for Katrina. Better still, he founded a relief organization called Heal the Hood, and set out to do for Mississippi what Master P had done for New Orleans. To fundraise, he travelled to Atlanta to organize and perform at a Sept. 17 benefit concert, also called Heal the Hood, that featured a dream team of Southern hip-hop stars. (T.I., Young Jeezy and OutKast‘s Big Boi were among the show’s 17 performers.) Next he went to New York City to stage another Heal the Hood with a different lineup. Not bad for a so-called bad guy whose highest-charting single so far, Play, sounds closer to pornography than pop.

Banner released his latest album, Certified, on Sept. 20. (It was already recorded before Katrina formed.) He has had nothing new on shelves since, although you can bet his next project, whenever it comes, will have strong words for the disaster.

In the meantime, the rap lords of New Orleans have begun to carry their people’s cries. This spring, the chart-topping Juvenile — whose home in nearby Slidell, La., was destroyed by Katrina — released a new album called Reality Check. On one of its singles, Get Ya Hustle On, he offered the grim suggestion that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s desertion of the city has pushed its locals towards dealing drugs to care for themselves. (If Juve’s message seems muddled, substitute “crackpipe” for “Pyrex” — a heat-resistant kind of glass that’s often used for ovenware — and all will become clear.) A toxic sarcasm boils its chorus: “We take the Pyrex and then we rock with it, roll with it,” repeated over and over again.

New Orleans's Lil' Wayne, president of Cash Money Records and the self-proclaimed "best rapper alive" (Scott Gries/Getty Images).

As spring begat summer, Dwayne (Lil’ Wayne) Carter — the self-proclaimed “best rapper alive” — stepped forward to give the disaster backlash its peak musical moment thus far. Carter, born in New Orleans’s 17th Ward, is the more rare sort of MC, in that he possesses both the voice and charisma to breathe a song to life in two bars. His Katrina lament, Georgia ... Bush, borrows a hook from Ray Charles’s Georgia to impress its point. In Wayne’s world, when assigning blame for the government’s fumblings, every finger points in one direction.

... Look at the bull---- we been through
Had the n----- sittin’ on top they roofs
Hurricane Katrina, we shoulda called it Hurricane (Georgia) Bush
Then they tellin’ y’all lies on the news
The white people smilin’ like everythin’ cool
But I know people that died in that pool
I know people that died in them school
Now what is the survivor to do? ...

It will take more than words to answer that question. With Katrina at her first anniversary, there are myriad reports of shortfalls in the Bush administration’s plan for Gulf Coast restoration. New Orleans’s Magnolia and Calliope Projects (and several other public housing developments) have been targeted for demolition, having been judged too flood-damaged to repair. Wide swaths of the city — almost everything beyond the tourist zones — remain a wasteland. Unemployment is severe because there are too few places open for work.

Worst of all, a majority of the city’s pre-Katrina population is now living elsewhere in the United States. No one can say for certain how many of them will return, or when. The potential long-term effects on the city and its culture are shocking to consider.

It can be argued that Lil’ Wayne, Juvenile and think-alike MCs are simply repeating Kanye’s path — i.e., preaching to his same choir. But sometimes there is real power in energizing the already devoted after a hard turn of fate. Because sometimes, it falls to the faithful to rebuild the church all by themselves.

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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