Triksta
Life and Death and New Orleans Rap
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
What lunacy would cause a 55-year-old white male to embroil himself in the world of New Orleans rap - as ideas man, talent-spotter, lyricist, and would-be producer? Nik Cohn has loved (and hated) hip-hop since its birth and loved (and hated) New Orleans for even longer - an addiction he's never wanted to kick. But nothing prepared him for the experience of being pitched, more or less by accident, into the role of Triksta, rap impresario.
A white alien in a black world, with no funding or qualifications, and not a clue what he was doing, he had to rethink himself from scratch. Surrounded by a cast that included such names as Choppa and Soulja Slim, Big Ramp and Lil T, Bass Heavy, Fifth Ward Weebie, and Shorty Brown Hustle, he entered a world of tiny backstreet studios, broken-down slums and gun turfs.
Triksta is the story of a three-year odyssey to the heart of rap, and New Orleans, and self-knowledge.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A British rock journalist based in New York, Cohn artfully chronicles his recent infatuation with New Orleans's rap scene. His obsession with the city sparked when he first visited, on tour with the Who in 1972; over the years he regarded New Orleans "as the lover could never be free of." By the late '90s, stricken with hepatitis and flirting with death, the nearly elderly author hears "bounce," a type of New Orleans rap dictated by a formula of shout outs and street chants, and marketed successfully by the local Take Fo' Records. He immerses himself in this Southern gangsta hybrid, epitomized by Soulja Slim a "real nigga" who hailed from the tough Magnolia projects, soured on drugs, guns and jail, and was shot dead by his mid-20s in 2003 and 19-year-old, gold-toothed Choppa. Nicknamed, thrillingly, Nik da Trik, or Triksta by Choppa, Cohn gains a mark of authenticity from the musicians and even works as a well-meaning talent scout for DreamWorks (the rappers call it DreamShit) before he is defeated by the city's deeply inbred sense of futility and "cycle of slaughter." This heart-heavy patchwork (pieces of which appeared in magazines) proves especially elegiac in Katrina's catastrophic wake.
