If “gay rapper” is an oxymoron where you come from, how do you get your head around the notion of a gay rapper performing in a sports bar?
Big Freedia, who by day runs an interior-decoration business, and to fans of the New Orleans variant of hip-hop music known as “bounce,” is a superstar. Bounce? What is Bounce?
Bounce itself has been around for about 20 years. Like most hip-hop varietals, it’s rap delivered over a sampled dance beat, but it has a few characteristics that give it a distinctively regional sound: it’s strictly party music, its beat is relentlessly fast and its rap quotient tends much less toward introspection or pure braggadocio than toward a call-and-response relationship with its audience, a dynamic borrowed in equal measure from Mardi Gras Indian chants and from the dawn of hip-hop itself.
