New Orleans Bounce Party Bus Legacy

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A common cliche about New Orleans is that music emanates from every street corner. That’s not altogether wrong: for most of the year, Social Aid and Pleasure clubs, some of which have been around for over a century, sponsor second line parades that take over neighborhood streets, where large groups follow behind a brass band’s buoyant notes. New Orleans is a place of traditions, and its status as the birthplace of jazz is a constant point of emphasis at annual festivals and in tourism campaigns. But at today’s second lines, alongside the tuba and trumpet, another sound is just as prevalent — the unmistakeable samples, rapid drum patterns, and explicit chants of New Orleans bounce.

On any given Friday or Saturday night, the loudest and most public displays of bounce music come from eye-catching, brightly painted party busses. You can hear them coming from blocks away — the “Triggerman” and “Brown Beat” loops, cornerstones of the energetic rap subgenre, blast out of their sound systems and signal their arrival. They roll slowly through major intersections and stop at notable spots in the city, along the lit-up downtown strip of Canal Street and underneath the towering I-10 highway overpass in the Treme, to let passengers get out and do their dance. Over the past 12 years since Hurricane Katrina, the owners and operators of these busses have created their own thriving industry around bounce music in New Orleans.

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Before cutting on the music, Darryl plays his list of rules, recorded for him by New Orleans radio fixture DJ Chicken, which he’s been using for the past seven years. Chicken’s voice comes on the bus’s system over the “Brown Beat” to remind the passengers that “the bus don’t run off gas, it runs off arse,” and to announce that there will be “no sitting down.”

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