When Hurricane Katrina hit and the levees broke, more than 200,000 New Orleans residents were displaced by the floodwaters, according to a Census Bureau report in 2006. The city’s most marginalized natives — working class, black New Orleanians — were the most impacted. They were forced to relocate to Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, and other locales around the country, and they carried their culture with them.



“When we were displaced from Katrina, our music was displaced as well.” Big Freedia, who has become the most high profile artist to emerge from the scene, told me over the phone. After the storm, she consistently performed at bounce nights in Houston, where a large community of New Orleans natives craved the familiarity of their hometown sound. “People would be like, “Can you send me a song? Can you ship me a CD? Can you email it to me?” she said. “And they would pass it around to the DJs in different cities and states. So the music grew outside of New Orleans.”



As some residents began returning home, the bounce scene started to rebuild and the music became a unifying piece of the city’s cultural memory. With the rest of the country’s eyes on New Orleans, Freedia and other gay and trans rappers lumped into the category of “sissy bounce” — a term the artists firmly rejected — became subjects of fascination for national media outlets. Freedia was able to parlay this attention into national fame, taking her energetic live show out of the context of New Orleans and bringing it to awed, and sometimes outright confused, listeners around the country. Twerking, which Cheeky Blakk coined in her 1995 single, briefly became the center of a debate about appropriation after Miley Cyrus’s performance at the 2013 VMAs. But in New Orleans, bounce music has never been a passing fad.

It’s a sticky spring night and Domonique just made 23 years old. To celebrate the occasion, she’s rented out Darryl’s Prime Time bus along with a large group friends and relatives. The cushioned benches are full of strong looks: the birthday girl wears a pink feathered tiara, while others sport bodysuits, patterned dresses, and brightly colored sneakers. Before cutting on the music, Darryl plays his list of rules, recorded for him by New Orleans radio fixture DJ Chicken, which he’s been using for the past seven years. Chicken’s voice comes on the bus’s system over the “Brown Beat” to remind the passengers that “the bus don’t run off gas, it runs off ass,” and to announce that there will be “no sitting down.”



The machine gun-like tongue roll that opens Shardaysa’s 2016 track “Gimme My Gots” gets everyone up from off the benches and into the open center. While he drives, Darryl adjusts the music on an iPad mounted at his side. For the young crowd, he runs through other recent local hits like GameOva Reedy’s “Freestyle,” alongside DJ Jubilee’s ‘90s classic “Get Ready, Ready,” as the young women use the benches and poles inside the bus to hold up their gyrating bodies. When we stop underneath the I-10 overpass, the gas fumes of the bus are muffled by the commanding smell of fried food from a nearby store. Some disembark and continue to dance, placing their hands against the side of the bus and bending over to shake to the beat. Others stand to the side, gassing up the dancers and recording videos on their phones. While we’re parked under the highway, two other party busses pull up and park to form a half circle, their sound systems echoing under the concrete beams of the interstate.

