Music, Style & Culture

NOLA: La Nouvelle Vague à La Nouvelle-Orléans

La Nouvelle Vague, like La Nouvelle-Orleans, is an unlikely (yet highly successful) combination of cultures.

“La Nouvelle Vague à La Nouvelle-Orléans!”

I’m glad the band said it first; it saves me the trouble of doing the same here. But it is something worth getting excited about. La Nouvelle Vague, like La Nouvelle-Orleans, is an unlikely (yet highly successful) combination of cultures.



For those of you who don’t know, Nouvelle Vague, in addition to being a period of French film making, song writing and philosophising, is a musical project captained by Olivier Libaux and Marc Collin. The idea (in short) is to cover a panoply of punk and post-punk standards in the loungey cadence of Brazilian bossa nova. The result, bad boy lyrics coming from the sexy sound holes of Latin bombshells, accounts for their subsequent studio successes.

But in person Helena Noguerra and Karina Zeviani pay ample tribute to their forebears, serving up thrash-inducing renditions the likes of Too Drunk to Fuck and Dancing With Myself. There is a feeling of intimacy throughout the whole show, and of openness. You see it’s Mardi Gras Season, and everyone, ten days deep now, feels pretty loose. Even the lead singer, who in a true testament to her statesmanship, obliged us by a showing of her breasts in exchange for remuneration in bright plastic beads.

Stepping outside afterward the ground is crunchy with the glittery things. The Bacchus parade had passed by and we never even knew it. We caught up to them though, and saw the last few floats slug torturously by, their occupants torpid in their cold and drink. As they tossed their gifts to the city, I managed to grab a few beads and a foam football shaped like a cluster of grapes, while my editor took the better part of a bright red boa. The city had a rare, laconic feeling then, with most people on the street already heading home.



And it was Valentine’s Day. As we neared the French Quarter the crowd began to thicken, and the city once more resumed its churlish, loud-mouthed merry making. I can say this about New Orleans; its Latin charm comes at a price. Like Rome of old, she is ceaselessly under assault by the barbarians of the North. Whole pantheons of the gods of American middle management come here, multiple times a year, and especially during Mardi Gras, to strip off their suits and cry midnight defiance of their 8 AM Morning Meet and Greets.

The city itself is utterly dependent on this source of revenue. As a result porkfaced shenanigans go largely unpunished, but are only ever really permitted within the confines of the Quarter. Their excesses pay for our streetlights and repave our roads, so it’s hard not to smile a little at such self-indulgence; and the vast amounts of treasure people pay to decorate our streets in barf.

Just as quickly as they came, the crowds receded, slackening their grip on the sidewalks. We were out of the French Quarter and pushing for Bywater; just over the train tracks, on the other side of the wharf, second star to the left. Through the chic gay neighbourhood and the brief blocks of warehouses until a part of the city something like the one the Munchkins of Oz might have constructed, free of tyranny, tripping balls.

It’s here that I and many others have made their home. The whole place has the feel of a Western boomtown – ramshackle, a bit clandestine, and never too permanent. This neighbourhood was spared the flooding that paralysed other parts of New Orleans, like the 7th Ward, where houses still huddle in mute witness to fact that people did, in fact, once live here. But many homes in Bywater still stand abandoned, boarded up or left to rot, tempting looters and squatters alike. Without people (and their money), without businesses (and the those who run them), the experiment of rebuilding New Orleans will fail.

The government-backed casinos will move in, and the resorts after them. The hotels will bulldoze, clean up, and remake; and in 15 or 20 years, or whenever somebody thinks to come looking for New Orleans, they’ll find it: parking cars for the tourists, or cooking Creole catfish in a plastic bag.
There is a land-grab underway on a scale not seen since the days of the telegraph, with many moneyed interests casting wide nets over whole neighborhoods. When people say Defend New Orleans…



…they mean it. And as I walk home at night, past the derelict churches, the stockyards and the dive bars, something militant and proud flutters in my breast. Some whiff of past patriotism, or maybe the ghost of the Lincoln Brigade.

I want to stay, to stake a claim, and perhaps understand what I so glibly dismissed from New York: a love of the land beneath your feet, and the people who choose to tread it.

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