Music, Style & Culture

NOLA: Girls Gone Wild

So here we are. Swaying, letting Girls wash their zombie Beach Boy blues right over us.

Girls, whose headline here is followed by (from San Francisco), must have found room for their jumpy, bespectacled, hysterical fans somewhere in the back of their tour bus, because I have never seen these people before.

I should explain.

New Orleans is one of those cities, like some of our favourite fast food franchises, that strives for a unified vision: a few gleaming cliches by which to draw tourists like flies in to its buzzing electric centre. 'Trow a trumpet on dat sign, and mebbe a few crawdad f'good measure', for example.



But bands like Girls, and the people who pay to see them, are beginning to buck that trend. In the four odd years since Hurricane Katrina stripped away the signs of what most people knew to be New Orleans, and in the broad wake left by that two-thousand dead disaster, a new breed has appeared on the bayou. The Louisiana heat has a long history of sticking folk together; from the first Creoles to the more recent Who Dat Football Nation. The Mississippi delta's deep red political hue belies a long history of immigration and acceptance. Cue hipsters.

Like the Civil War carpetbaggers of old, we came seeking riches. But our riches were to be the wealth of the soul, and, failing that, of the cool. Because the only thing cooler than the underground is the underwater, and that spells New Orleans.



So here I am, looking around at the glossy, flash-washed faces of a crowd getting down here at velvety, baroque One-Eyed Jacks, just off the corner of Toulouse and Chartres Streets. And what separates this herd of beautiful, young and musically hip scenesteurs is this: holy shit there are a lot of them.

The first flow of socially conscious and financially unbound activists has hastened, morphed and now New Orleans finds itself an important tributary in the great wash to the sea known as Youth Culture. In a country where a degree has never been worth less, is it any wonder the talented and alt-minded have packed up their haversacks in search of the next Brooklyn-on-a-Hill? But like our libertine forbears, what they found did little to live up to canonical expectations. Instead here we have a new gumbo: a blend of the fickle coastal cultures with deeply-rooted local traditions of beauty and merrymaking. The result? A nubile young hipster, careful with his or her politics and possessing an unusual quantity of rhythm.

Despite the four and a half years since Katrina, and the leagues of progress that have bounded in that time, many things here - most things here - still carry the unmistakeable mark of the storm. Even this concert does. There's no mistaking the hidden importance of an event like this and the crowd it draws. There, spread out before you is the gene pool. These are the brave colonists, the first, those to who the endless litany of bar names each mean something special, like an old shirt, who recognise one another by their dress and their speech, who will talk about the time that Girls played right before they blew up, and how it had been to be there.



That's what's so infectious about this crowd. There's a sense among each and every one of us; among the teachers and musicians, the baristas and cashiers; that New Orleans, Girls, our city, our Saints, our friends and ourselves are on the verge of something wonderful and unprecedented. That the New World is just where we left it, and this might be our only opportunity to get in on a gold rush while it's still good.

So here we are. Swaying, letting Girls wash their zombie Beach Boy blues right over us; re-telling again and again that lovely story of youths lost, to the shrieking delight of the groupies.

There will be regular dispatches from the Crescent City as our intrepid reporter delves deeper into the swamps of Louisiana.