If Nik Cohn is correct, then New Orleans’ recovery from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina will not be heralded by the sound of Dixieland jazz blaring once more from tourist-crammed bars on Bourbon Street, but instead by the resumption of a living musical tradition: cars rocking to a bass-heavy thud, rappers drawling rhymes, women at summer block parties, “twitching so fast”, as Cohn puts it in his new book Triksta, “they seem plugged into a socket, a blur of flying booty”.
Triksta documents the true music of New Orleans, the one that visitors to the city rarely encounter: hip-hop. It is also an absorbing memoir about Cohn’s improbable attempts to transform himself into a rap impresario.
White, 60 next year, with an avuncular mien, a Northern Irish upbringing and a taste for fedoras: it is hard to picture him hanging out with gangsta rappers in the US’s most dangerous city (its murder rate last year was eight times higher than New York’s). “Other men of my age chase after young girls or try to squeeze into very regrettable leather trousers. I chase after beats,” he explains, smiling.
Cohn fell in love with New Orleans as a child, after reading a book about the jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton, which also sparked a lifelong infatuation with black American culture. The city of his fantasies did not disappoint. “The first time I went there, in 1972,” he remembers, “there was this extraordinary, sensuous, relaxed atmosphere. There’s a song about going to the place where the weather suits your clothes. Well, the weather in New Orleans suited my clothes.”
In 1972 he was 26 and a celebrated music journalist and novelist, author of one of the best books about rock and roll, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom. Since then he has grown disenchanted with rock, but New Orleans still has its claws in him. “The fact that it is below sea-level affects the air, the light, everything about it. You feel as though you’re floating in a tank,” he says.
Unlike New York (where Cohn lives), Los Angeles or Atlanta, New Orleans is not famous for hip-hop. Before Katrina, however, it had a thriving local scene, centred around a rap subgenre called “bounce”, which, Cohn explains, has a “thin, whippy beat” and a background in traditional Louisianan music such as brass bands and Mardi Gras call-and-response routines. “There’s bounce, which is sex songs, and then gangsta bounce, which is sex with violence mixed in,” he explains cheerfully.
In the 1970s, the cultural climate was very different. “Back then New Orleans was incredibly musical, but without boundaries,” he says. There were great pianists such as Professor Longhair and James Booker (“a one-eyed, gay, alcoholic junkie whose range went from jazz classics to really deep funk via Ray Charles and old Spanish songs”) alongside R&B and soul veterans such as Clarence “Frogman” Henry and Irma Thomas. “If you went down Bourbon Street you could hear these kinds of people, and the crowd would be mixed.”
But the city’s determination to transform itself into a sanitised tourist town in the 1980s led to segregation. “Happy hordes of white tourists would go to Jazzfest and listen to older Louisianan music and think: ‘This is wonderful, New Orleans is so musical’. But the ordinary black person wouldn’t go to Jazzfest, in fact despised it. So you got ghetto music, which never really existed in New Orleans before.”
At the same time poverty and drugs turned it into a more violent, fissured place. “The idea of the housing projects as armed camps, where people have tribal loyalty to their project or ward, became dominant in the 1990s,” Cohn says. So how did he manage to enter this world, with his incongruously white skin, advanced years and British accent?
“It’s not like I arrived and they said: ‘Hey, Mr Impresario, come on in.’ They looked at me and the best I got was: ‘Harmless lunatic, not worth shooting’.” Over five years he ransacked his address book for music industry contacts and brokered a few deals, developed a degree of credibility and became “Triksta”, New Orleans’ most anomalous rap producer. Wisely, however, the transformation did not extend to his grooming. “I was totally un-bling,” he says firmly. “And in terms of vocabulary, I never pretended to be anything other than what I am.”
Evidently a sufferer of nostalgie de la boue, he is drawn to street subcultures such as bounce by their wildness and energy. This affinity with outsiders and rebels dates back to his Northern Irish childhood in another segregated city, Derry. “When I was a small boy you were told not to go to the Catholic side of town but if you did, what you saw was a rawness and human warmth that you didn’t get on the Presbyterian side,” he says.
Cohn’s tendency to romanticise is balanced by insight and self-awareness. Hip-hop, with its braggadocio and self-mythology yet simultaneous commitment to gritty authenticity, “keeping it real”, is the perfect match for him. “If you don’t fake it, you can’t sell and the only way to fake it is to say: ‘I’m real’,” he says of the double-bind many rappers find themselves in.
There is an irony here: in 1976 Cohn wrote an article about working-class disco-goers in New York that inspired the film Saturday Night Fever. He later admitted that it was not reportage, but a mix of fact and fiction. Now he looks back at that type of fast-and-loose music journalism with horror. “I’ve become rather born-again about that, rather pompous. In a book like this, if one word was embellished the whole thing would collapse.”
Perhaps there is something of his younger self in his warm description of the rappers he worked with. “What I found very helpful about them was that most of them are nerds by the standards of the people they’re around,” he says. “They’re not drug dealers. They write poetry. They’re extremely sensitive and are usually much smarter than their rock and roll equivalents. There’s none of that slack-jawed thing I find when I talk to young rock bands.”
Katrina has scattered them across the south in a refugee diaspora. “Politically there are a lot of people in New Orleans who regard this as excellent news,” Cohn says. “It has cleared out the criminals and the uncontrollable elements.”
“The idea now is, they can tidy up the music and just play dead music – get rid of this awkwardly alive, amazingly vital culture,” he warns. “But life is never that neat. My guys and their families and hundreds of thousands like them are powerless, except in this weird New Orleans way of being dead but not lying down. The rats are creeping back even though the ship is sunk.”
‘Triksta’ is published by Harvill Secker on November 17
