And it’s impossible to talk about bounce and rap in New Orleans without talking, first, about Mannie Fresh. (You know Bryan as Baby or Birdman if you know Ronald, you know him as Slim.) At first, it was a label for bounce music, the tight, energetic genre built on bass and various chops of the “Dragnet” theme. Long before the Universal deal, Cash Money was a shoestring operation founded by a pair of brothers, Bryan and Ronald Williams. It’s the sweatiest, funkiest parts of New Orleans culture packaged for export, and it would go on to become one of the most consequential rap records of its era and the next.
It’s a masterpiece-swaggering but paranoid, pained but free. Universal had agreed, in a historically lucrative deal, to throw its weight behind the smaller label, and Cash Money countered with Juve’s third record, 400 Degreez. “Ha” announced to America that Cash Money Records, a New Orleans label that had made a well-timed pivot to rap, would be taking over in the new millennium.
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Mannie’s beat is a rattling, electronic taunt, and its coda, which could have easily anchored another hit song, is free and acrobatic and full of bounce.īut underneath the grit and grinning was a mission statement. It’s also the platonic ideal of a rap song: mean, minimal, funny, foreign. Juve laughs and sneers and, occasionally, commiserates.
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Juve is sly and sarcastic, writing in the second person, ribbing you about child-support payments and switching to Reeboks and finally figuring out how to use your triple-beam. Juve claimed that “all the drug dealers shut down” to accommodate production.Įven today, “Ha” sounds like it’s from the future, except when it sounds like it’s from the lobby of your building. The whole thing takes place in and around Magnolia, where Klasfeld and his team set up camp for three days. Its video, directed by Marc Klasfeld, is genuinely stunning-spare but stylized, high art from self-consciously low production budgets, a four-minute blueprint for the rap videos that would come after the massive budgets from the Hype Williams era evaporated. It’s been interpolated by people who win Pulitzers and bitten by countless young rappers, either in their formative periods or when they fly a little too close to the sun. This is “Ha,” one of the most singularly brilliant rap songs of the 1990s. A man on crutches hobbles down a street lit only by that ambulance’s siren lights a boy feeds a piece of deli meat to a dog money is counted and blurs until the bills are indistinguishable. There are roller skaters and pickup basketball games. Magnolians get chased and cuffed and clutched by their fathers. Women in church clothes pose soberly-so do EMTs, with arms crossed in front of their ambulance. The rest of Magnolia pops to life, either in eerily real tracking shots or in static frames that might as well be portraits. Peete he’s dancing around a porch while the family that lives there sits motionless he’s mugging in a hallway next to Baby and Mannie Fresh he’s shadowboxing. You see Juve shirtless, shimmering with sweat he’s grimacing in front of convertibles he’s showing off his gold fronts in jarring close-up he’s rapping animatedly-skinnier than you expect, all elbows and sharp angles-in front of a mural bearing the projects’ official name, C.J. A hard cut and suddenly, the frame fills with action: Juvenile in the foreground, perched over a puddle, a sea of Magnolia residents waving their arms behind him, hanging from balconies, poking curious heads out of windows. You see the rows of buildings stretching out toward the horizon, seemingly vacant and endless.
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