Saw Big Freedia last night, it was mindblowing as expected. I stood about two feet from the hurricane that is her backend and felt like my head was being dribbled just trying to follow it. Also jarring, the demographic of the audience.
Some backstory: I attempted booking Freedia for WQFS in Fall of 2010 and, in trying to get campus PRIDE involved, ended up invoking the wrath of the multicultural department. Their primary opposition lay in how, once removed from the context of New Orleans bounce scene, the potential for a predominantly white college audience to perceive her aesthetic as a perpetuation of hypersexualized stereotypes about blacks and gays loomed large. To me that sounded like an admission of failure on the part of the sociology department and a willful denial of profit for a struggling demographic whose oppression is ironically taught about in Guilford classes.
The argument got a little weirder when historiographic analysis was brought in and the method of ass shaking Freedia workshops was linked to a West African fertility ritual that when practiced by white girls came off as menstrual minstrelsy (mind you, I was being lectured about this by a white person). That in itself got thornier as one of the rhetorical strategies used in dissuading me from booking her was an anecdotal aside about how during a bounce doc at a queer film festival a gay black male in attendance quietly burst into tears beside her, which was on some Michelle Bachmann “i met a mom whose daughter is now retarded” bull. That, combined with the threat of making trouble for the radio station with public protest, led to booking Araabmuzik instead, fingers crossed no one would find his name problematic.
Most of that was unfounded, to an extent, but the all open embrace last night had some interesting intersections. Generally, when something in a polarizing genre displays crossover potential i’m interested in the world it might open up to people who would normally write it off. This is why I think Decoded as well as Jay-Z’s appearance on Oprah and Kanye’s on Ellen, as well as that Georgetown Dyson class are all fascinating. At the same time, these hopes are usually shut down when, for example, my mom’s teenage love of Mike Oldfield led her to respond to Kanye’s Dark Fantasy with the Estelle Constanza-ism of “WHY DID HE HAVE TO GO AND DO THAT?!” or Gawker snarks at academicized readings of Hov’s lyrics.
Part of Freedia’s appeal lies in the transgender queerness of her contribution to bounce culture. At the same time, she opposes the prevailing use of “Sissy Bounce” as a shorthand descriptor by nominally progressive publications covering the subject. As stated in the mini-doc above, for her it’s bounce first and sissy second. As a New Orleans-specific cultural export, her geographic solidarity with a product that provides under-class, hometown pride (especially post-Katrina) is in acknowledgement that the “sissy” aspect is another branch that can be added to its discourse. What was unusual, though expected,was the all-out embrace given to the aesthetic last night by mostly white, queer, anarchist and feminist punks (none of which i’m writing off by listing as a descriptor).
There most definitely is ideological overlap in the openly gay sexual agency expressed there, but my gut feeling says that most in attendance would not have been singing along to “I’VE GOT THAT GIN IN MY SYSTEM, SOMEBODY’S GONNA BE MY VICTIM” had the presence of a transgender homosexual not given the illusion of a safe space within which they could do that. Many of the scene’s signifiers were performed down to a T, primarily the gymnastic flexibility of cross-body ass shaking. It was basically an ass blitzkrieg during a wartime olympic ceremony (also performed: vegas-style card disposal of imagined dollar bills).
Fittingly, the music played by the house DJ in preparation for Freedia’s DJ’s to come on was Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals, which immediately brought flashbacks to freshman year in 2008 when no party was a refuge from its twenty car pile-up of intersecting mashes. Like then, people knew and were shouting Pimp C and Lil Wayne verses to each other. I’m not entirely sure how much of this is from pop cultural ubiquity where moral/ideological qualms are waylayed by canonized entry into general vernacular (from middle school dances to house parties dj’d by boomboxes blasting rotation), but it still seemed like a narrowly constructed interaction with the genre primarily allowed to blossom in an alternative setting. That may be presumptive on my part, but it kind of felt like Spank Rock with a little less irony (which is why that Check Yo Ponytail tour kind of makes some unfortunate sense, shout out to Pictureplane though).
It didn’t destroy the proceedings by any means, it was as much a cathartic pandemonium as it could be given the circumstances, while also being fascinating from a semi-distant remove. I, like half the audience, was onstage praying to whatever agnostic substitute for god with an ear to lend that there were no cameras. Freedia’s use of the stage to raze audience/performer hierarchy while still maintaining Queen Diva cult royalty was awesome, it was like some gay bounce version of Mother Teresa on a mission being swarmed by a poverty-stricken village. Love was spread all around, with all forms of dry humping sexual expression performed in reckless disregard of boundary with the exception, maybe, of niche-based insularity.
