Music, Style & Culture

NOLA: Welcome To New Orleans! Birthplace Of American Music!

The sign seems a pretty bad joke.

Welcome to New Orleans! Birthplace of American Music!



The sign seems a pretty bad joke, standing mock sentinel against the cityscape of this ruined town. Even less funny since passing through Tennessee and Mississippi, both of whom claim the same bald-faced lie as truth on their borders. And yet, each of those states has a right to their claims. Tennessee, for better or worse, gave us Nashville, Elvis, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis. And Mississippi is where Robert Johnson stood at a lonesome crossroads and sold his soul to the devil for those fast, feeling fingers of his, and in the process just about invented blues music.

But New Orleans? New Orleans is the last stop for hobos and junkies, a blighted blip on the map, the arsehole of the Mississippi river and a dumping ground for political flunkies and crude oil. And yet. New Orleans has given the world (forget about the United States I'm talking about the world here) some of the finest examples of human music ever to draw breath and exhale it in goosebumps across the globe.

Man, don't even get me started. You got Louis Armstrong and Fats Domino and all the rest of the sad forgotten greats on whose bones are built the empires of New York and Los Angeles. You've got the miserly offspring of slave-song coming creeping up through ragtime, jazz and blues, so unwanted by the very people first came up with the stuff, that poor old music had to go and live in Europe for awhile just to get its story straight and a little money jingle-jangling its back pocket before it could even think about coming back to see its parents again.

You got rockabilly, bebop and all the damn jitterbugs in the world with cousins, uncles and mistresses down here. You got the Jimmy Page Expeditionary Force (later renamed Led Zeppelin) coming down here with nothing and leaving with a blank check big enough to outstrip the damn Beatles in concert revenues.



So when I pass that sign and into New Orleans, into a city that looks and smells like the belly of a beast, there's a certain satisfaction in arriving here, at last at last, in that storied birthplace of American music indeed.

But the times have changed. The Armstrongs and the Johnsons and even the Pages have come and gone, and in their wake are left the bratty, spoiled musicians we might as well call their children. That's right. Your favorite genre and mine: indie-rock.

If there was ever a type of music more insecure, more hung up on itself and more prone to quarter-life crises, I have yet to hear it. But all of these characteristics, so niggling and annoying in our real life friends, bloom into the electro-bop-pop-funk-arific tunes that sear briefly across the top of the charts, only to outdate themselves within their next release.

And all this in what may be the only city in America to value tradition over revenue? Sounds impossible. And yet. Strolling down the streets of the old Bywater neighborhood, taking a careful sip of scalding hot coffee in a local cafe and narrowing your eyes to cut out the gorgeous wooden architecture and pock-marked porous roads, and focusing on those all-too-familiar Converses and skinny jeans, you just might think you were in Williamsburg. You might, but you're not.



You're here, in New Orleans, in a city that is being reborn, for better or worse, in the image of East and West coast hipsters. Plummeting property values, an enthusiastic hurricane season and an eclectic art scene have turned what was once the New York of the South into, well, the New New York of the South. Recording studios and thrift stores dot the landscape. Soy milk chai lattes cost more than the Po Boy sandwich from the deli across the street and happy little New Yorker wannabes like yours truly stroll about with their keys tinkling a joyful music, hung from carabiners at their hips.

But we're all here for the same reason. To blend our aesthetic with the time-tested and true tastes of New Orleans, and in bona fide American tradition, come up with something better, stronger and catchier, so we can sell it and find nice apartments in New York.

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