Ticksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap
Cohn, the author of 1968’s Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (often cited as the first book of rock criticism), has been obsessed with New Orleans since childhood: he writes vividly and enchantingly about the city and its music, from his early fascination with Jelly Roll Morton to his first visit there in 1972, while on the road with the Who. Though he later moved to New York, he continued to rent a house in New Orleans for several months each year, describing the city as “the lover I could never be free of.” And he knows New Orleans’s hip-hop scene, which centers on bounce, a club-centric, bump-and-grind style. Cohn puts on his musicologist’s hat to explain that bounce is “patterned on the call-and-response of Mardi Gras Indian chants,” but another way to put it is that it’s hip-hop with the formal rigidity of a square dance, with the MC commanding the crowd–bend over and touch the floor, now turn around, now throw your hands up.
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Triksta is constructed in part from pieces Cohn wrote for Granta, the Guardian Weekend magazine, and British GQ, and its seams occasionally show–the chronology is scrambled, and the stories of many characters are confined to a single chapter. But the book has a compelling theme in Cohn’s relationship to New Orleans as well as his constant grappling with race, particularly race in pop music from the earliest days of rock ‘n’ roll to the present. He worries that his obsession with black musicians has “some taint of idealization, the flip side of condescension,” and that sort of candor keeps Triksta from becoming a work of unintentional comedy.
