Lil Wayne, ringleading Friday night.
Diwang Valdez for NPR
More than 20 years into
Lil Wayne's
career, the froggy-voiced, diminutive rapper is hardly ever described
as an elder statesman. But as he bounded through a nearly three-hour set
at Friday's Lil Weezyana Fest, a performance held fittingly at
Champions Square, the outdoor plaza next to the Mercedes Benz Superdome
built to commemorate the Saints Super Bowl-winning 2009 team, the
dreadlocked artist merely skimmed his biggest pop victories, like
"Lollipop" and "Love Me," songs that have made him a bankable headliner
worldwide. He hadn't performed in his hometown for close to six years
and the eponymous showcase, marking the ten year anniversary of
Hurricane Katrina, had been billed as a homecoming, an official reunion
of the Hot Boys, the group with which he received his first success.
We'd
have to wait to get to all that, though. The star didn't hit the stage
until almost two and a half hours after the crowd packed in,
anticipation wilting in the 80 degree heat. As I navigated back and
forth between the general admissions scrum pressed elbow to elbow dozens
of yards from the stage and the VIPs in the bleachers staged to their
right, I could see that single verses off the iTunes bestsellers were
going to be fine selfie background noise for the business bigwigs with
wristbands and the post-K transplants lit by glow necklaces. The
lifelong New Orleanians sporting Free B.G. shirts and freshly unboxed
sneakers, however, were as listless as Wayne himself.
Lil Wayne and Juvenile onstage Friday night.
Diwang Valdez for NPR
It wasn't until the Top 40 warmup ended that the he and the people
came to life. The biggest reactions came next, when the rapper ad
libbed alongside (and sometimes background danced for) a long list of
New Orleans bounce rappers in a set that reached its peak the further it
dug into the past. As the now 33-year-old star trotted out the city's
rap OGs, formerly disgruntled record labelmates and one-time
competitors, the crowd shouted familiar lyrics in warm unison with their
performers, notably reunited without the intrusion of Bryan "Baby"
Williams, the founder of Cash Money Records, Wayne's svengali and the
executive who signed and then alienated many of the night's guests.
Instead, it was Lil Wayne orchestrated the resurfacing and who acted as
ringleader and fan.
From a national vantage, the term "New
Orleans musical great" conjures a lineage that streams through Dr. John,
The Meters, Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino and back through dixieland and
brass band jazz. But locally, the music that has become tradition over
the past 25 years, the sound that saturated an entire generation of New
Orleanians, is dominated by Cash Money Records. Its music made up the
majority of the playlists of the most popular radio broadcasts in the
city, abutting and outperforming the East and West coast rap that
infiltrated in the '90s. It still pours out of parked cars and daiquiri
shops, lilting lyrics spit in repetition over the jangle of the
Trigger Man beat and anchored by heavy 808 drum mixes.
When
Wayne first signed with the fledgling independent local label as a
13-year-old in 1995, his mother wouldn't allow him to use profanity in
his lyrics. I was a year older as he flitted through the halls of our
secondary school, Eleanor McMain Magnet, squeaking out onomatopoeic
rhymes while us upperclassmen rolled our eyes. That was long after the
label's legendary in-house producer
Mannie Fresh had gotten too big to DJ high school dances.
By
the time I reached senior year, Cash Money had signed a $30 million
distribution deal with Universal Records and gone national with hits
like "
I Need a Hot Girl" and "
Bling Bling"
that featured Wayne or his Hot Boys groupmates on their individual
albums. In full prom regalia, our class danced until we sweated to
Juvenile's "
Back That A** Up,"
the song having just become his first certified gold single. Friday
night a capacity crowd of 10,000 shouted along as Wayne, Juvenile, Turk
and Mannie Fresh took turns hugging and scampering across stage
performing those same songs — 78 million albums sold later.
Much of that music, and the mega hits Wayne has since recorded with his proteges
Nicki Minaj and
Drake,
owes a debt to the bounce music songs that preceded Cash Money's
nationwide rise. After opening his Lil Weezyana Fest set with a Katrina
video montage, (dismissed with a wave by the local woman standing next
to me: "I don't need to see this s***.") and a run of recent popular
verses, Wayne harmonized an a cappella version of "Why U Actin' Funny"
with Ms. Tee, the two standing arm in arm at the foot of the stage.
Wayne sent her off with a kiss "for my Ms. Twinny."
The show of
affection went a way to reassuring her and the crowd that this wasn't
going to be a soulless, self-congratulatory production. "When I first
heard Wayne was putting this together, I was like, he probably don't
want me to get in it. But I got that call. I'm glad he's showing the
world our culture because it's not just one way. We have different
styles of music." Tee, who signed as Cash Money's first female emcee in
1993 only to leave after a financial dispute with the aforementioned
founder of the label, beamed after her appearance, and broke with the
night's unofficial No Baby Talk mandate. "When I was with Cash Money I
left because of money, the same thing that they're going through right
now."
She referred to the feud between Wayne and Williams precipitated by Wayne's $51 million lawsuit
filed in January
against his former mentor for royalties owed. In April, Wayne's tour
bus was shot in Atlanta and the assailant's indictment named Williams as
a conspirator in the assault, a charge he denies. Previously, Juvenile
and Mannie Fresh had left the label citing missing payments, making
monetary disputes with Baby another longstanding New Orleans musical
tradition. Lil Weezyana was put up by local attorney/celeb Morris Bart
and iHeartRadio, and so sidestepped any of the strings that might have
been attached to Baby's involvement.
To end his 30-minute
bounce departure, Wayne ceded the stage to noted sissy bounce turned
Fuse reality TV star Big Freedia. Wayne returned and joyfully
demonstrated as DJ Jubilee called out the dances from "
Do the Jubilee All,"
a 1993 hit that was a staple at school dances and block parties and bar
mitzvahs. And he served as hype man for 5th Ward Weebie's 2013 hit "
Let Me Find Out," which, like Lil Wayne's verse on "
Pop That," uses foundational lyrics from the 1992 DJ Jimi bounce song "
Where They At."
DJ Jubilee onstage Friday night.
Diwang Valdez for NPR
"That's music to me," Wayne said of weaving bounce references into
his lyrics. The Grammy winning millionaire was reflecting backstage in a
wistful rasp much softer than his onstage yelps. "That's in me. A lot
of people know that I don't write. When you don't write you just go off
of what you're thinking and so be it. When I hear a beat, I can't lie to
you, the first damn thing I'm thinking about is I hear a bounce record
to it, I hear an old bounce song to it."
Despite the outsized
place that New Orleans holds in American culture, the city itself is
relatively small, around 484,000 residents before Katrina hit and
slightly smaller (384,000) since. Prior to the levee breach, its
populace was notoriously entrenched in its neighborhoods, with
generations of families rooted in wards whose demographics are today
completely changed, allegiant to housing projects that are now razed and
tied to Catholic and public schools splintered by closings and
charters. So, in the midst of that bounce sojourn, when Wayne and
Jubilee led the crowd in the subgenre's trademark call-and-response
chants "What's the name of your school?" and "What ward you from?" it
was communal catharsis which jolted the predominantly native crowd for
the show's second act. By design, bounce is participatory, a call to
represent where you're from or to do described dances. Throwing up nine
fingers for the 9th Ward or hunching over as Jubilee and Wayne sang,
"I'm from Uptown we 'bout to touch down" was to celebrate an oral
tradition without an explainer for the national audience livestreaming
the event on Tidal.
Lil Wayne dancing behind fellow New Orleans rapper Curren$y (in Bulls jersey).
Diwang Valdez for NPR
The back and forth ramped up the audience for all that came next: a medley from
Tha Carter III,
appearances from present day New Orleans recording artists Curren$y and
August Alsina, Master P representing No Limit Records' place in the
history lesson, a gleeful Drake performing "6 God" and "Back to Back," a
brass band and fireworks close reminiscent of Wayne's 2009 Grammy
performance.
The only lull in between those came midway through
the night, during Wayne's run of memorable mid-aughts mixtape
offerings, when he stopped the gregarious rapid-fire party songs to
growl:
Now it's them dead bodies, them lost houses / the mayor say don't worry 'bout it
And the children have been scarred / no ones here to care bout 'em
And fat shout to all the rappers that helped out
Yeah we like to thank all of y'all, but f*** President Georgia ... Bush
Lyrics from "Georgia... Bush," a scathing indictment from his mixtape
Dedication 2,
released a year after Katrina. "I've never done that song [live] and
I'll probably never do it again," Wayne said post-performance in the
gray underbelly of the stage. "But if there's ever a time to do it, here
it is."
Earlier that day, W. had made one brief,
tone deaf stop at a local school,
where the former president said of his administration's response to the
storm, "I hope you remember what I remember." As Lil Wayne wrapped up
Lil Weezyana Fest thanking his mother, his daughter, the audience and
God, before triumphantly yelling "We still here" to a sweat-drenched
crowd, one thing was clear. New Orleanians decide what will and won't be
forgotten.
Deep backstage after the show.
