Shaking Politics: Sissy Bounce

On Saturday, October 16th, I biked down to Subterranean, in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, to check out Big Freedia and her special brand of sizzling sissy bounce. I should preface/contextualize this performance review, as it were, by stating that I’m a student of theatre and performance analysis specializing in African diaspora forms and Latin American/Caribbean/black drama. Yeah. If the academy were a giant tree, I’d be nesting in that part of it (the underfunded one, with the spindly little leaflets and angry and resentful, or cheerfully and actively sublimating, birds, as well as a smattering of identity politicians who fly by and peck our wood every now and again, arousing ire and desire in equal measure). Aaanyhow, but all that aside, and built-in privileges well acknowledged, I really like what I do. Lately, for example, I’ve become rather fascinated by the links between African American popular music and afro-Caribbean popular dance forms, like passa passa, dancehall reggae, reggaetón, soca, and dance moves like the “temper wine.” (If you’re ever interested, I can say a lot about a theory that I have connecting Beyoncé to Jamaica and Trinidad via her choreographers and a certain point in one of her recent videos…it’s super-fascinating but really just a conjecture at this point.) But how does this all connect with sissy bounce? Read on…

Ever so long ago, when I first met her, S. introduced me to a subgenre of bounce called sissy bounce. Bounce is that type of hiphop that’s really popular in the south, predicated on rapid beats and women jiggling their asses really, really fast without really moving the rest of their bodies. A lot of mainstream artists, like Ludacris and maybe Juvenile (?), became famous as purveyors of bounce. It’s now in the general hiphop repertoire and known to many.

But sissy bounce is probably the most inspired iteration of the bounce umbrella category, at least from the perspective of this white, middle-class, female armchair expert. I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but this is just what I’ve seen/observed. The thing that really makes sissy bounce something extra is that it’s very much live – as in, the artists sing and rap the syncopation, the downbeats and breakbeats and all that, so they need to be keeping up with this very fast, like ass-shakingly fast, beat. Another quality that’s attractive about it is that the tracks are extremely catchy and original mashups of things, studded with rap solos or gospel-like song, with call-and response and incredible audience interaction. All of this might explain why sissy bounce artists like Big Freedia and Sissy Nobby consistently attract large crowds, and also why they don’t get beat up or even killed. Because sissy bounce also foregrounds the sexual and gendered identities and expressions of its artists: they’re gay, queer, transgendered, or however-identified, and that is at the crux of sissy bounce. “sissy,” as you may know (but which is worth stating all the same) is a derogatory term for homosexual. Despite this, they appear to have a very large mixed-gender and also mixed-sexuality following, including heterosexual couples and – again, I’m conjecturing here, and there deeeefinitely needs to be a reception-oriented study around this – perhaps even straight-identified men who have homophobic tendencies. Perhaps. I don’t know, but their audiences do not seem super gay-friendly. More about that in a second, since I really don’t know who attends a sissy bounce show in New Orleans, or how the demographics have changed now that SB has been “discovered” by a bunch of white, wealthy, college-educated hipsters. More about THAT in a second too. Essentially, I want to explore some of the complex vectors of this genre and ask questions about how it’s changing now that the audiences and touring structure are changing. Then I want to talk a bit about my own experience and see how it might have related to the whole concept of sissy bounce as it is now.

Pop-ethnomusicological treatments of sissy bounce: casually browsing, I found two: XLR8R’s documentary and mixtape and a short documentary clip made by Diplo, former partner of MIA and a deejay who is really into searching out genres, like baile funk carioca, and incorporating them into his performance to produce a sort of postmodern globalized techno music that is kind of fascinating in its way.

And I want to say that I feel personally that it’s cool to want to do this. Being inspired by street dance forms is a sign of being aware of people and taking them seriously even if they’re not white, straight, or rich. It can contain an element of exotification, or a hipsterization that might be even worse, but there’s a fine line. I think that XLR8R walks this line better than does Diplo, because the former took intensive time and resources to the task of appreciating the sissy bounce genre, attending and performing at concerts, getting to know the artists, and helping them to make more money. I feel like the work done by the XLR8R crew was, in a way, the best example of how scholarship (call it what you will) can actually benefit the ‘research subjects’ (so to speak. I know, puke in my mouth. But that’s what they are in this framing). So I am not trying to throw out wholesale the idea of doing pop-ethnomusicology because it’s cool. I do, however, think that there are better and worse ways to do it. Diplo’s little doc seems rather uninformed, as if he’s the only person who has ever seen this form and he’s TELLING you about what it is. He doesn’t say people’s names or give them much credit in the film, and he doesn’t seem to spend much time in New Orleans. It feels pandery to me, like some sort of insufficient and superficial lip service that is essentially chapped (and chapping my ass). He also cites this white, hipstery friend as the expert on sissy bounce, when there are clearly copious black people in NOLA who know more about it AND can dance to it. I’d like to see that skinny white kid ‘shake [his] ass/shake it fast.’ More on that later too.

-who are/were sissy bounce’s original fans?
I don’t know who the genre’s fans were before it was discovered, but from XLR8R’s interview (which is actually very good, an in-depth and respectful treatment that contextualized the genre) as well as some footage during Diplo’s visit to the club and the youtube videos, they seem to be black people, straight queer and gay, with a variety of body shapes (ranging from the Panamanian-skinny to giant mountains of flesh with tiny features submerged in them) and of many socioeconomic groups. Black people, and blacks in New Orleans specifically, are often portrayed in the media as globally poor, but I am just going to refute that one a priori, because I can assure you that there is a huge black middle class in NOLA, as in other cities in the south (Atlanta being the mecca, or so I hear), and professional classes and upper classes and republicans and everything else. Nevertheless, the XLR8R folks discuss gunbattles at night and the essential poverty of these artists of sissy bounce, who are products of the ghetto innovating their way out and making their queerness the centerpiece of this.

One would think that when a societally disparaged figure – the gay black male or transwoman, for example – is entertaining an enormous crowd of oppositional folks, that his/her identity might be denigrated (apposite word choice there, hm) as part of the act, in the inverted way that, say, an obese woman can make a lot of money by consistently being “Fat Woman #2” in a movie. Or the classic example: black blackface (often called “ethiopian”) minstrelsy. This is always the paradox of parody: the person – or persona, rather -  being mocked and scoffed might in fact be having the last laugh, both because of the effect of the “minstrel mask,” by which the actor distinguishes him/herself from the persona who is the object of audience scorn, and materially, which becomes visible when one does the infrastructural analysis, i.e., examines the money changing hands and connections made, asking questions about who the impresario/producer is (because if the artist IS the producer or manager, what you have is essentially self-representation, and there’s a lot more room for lucrative profiting – as with henry “box” brown – even if the act itself is demeaning).

But IS sissy bounce demeaning? I would say profoundly no. I say this admittedly not knowing its former context in the mostly-black (? Not even sure if they are) clubs in New Orleans, but I would assume that it was not terribly derogatory even then. For one thing, the XLR8R people note that the dance form brings in women, including sexy women who are really adept at shaking their asses, which in turn brings in het or het-identified men. With these sorts of sexual networks forming, and with the respect and affection that the women seem to have for the queer performers, there are plentiful reasons for the het men to enjoy the show without enjoying the queerness, per se. Because the queerness is so obvious, there’s no need to call it out with mockery: like the classic purloined letter, it’s transparently available and therefore somehow hidden, or screened. This might change if the performers also shake their queer or trans asses onstage, as did Big Freedia during my show. I get the sense that they do. I don’t have the ethnographic data to understand whether 1) there are segregated queer and straight shows; or 2) whether gay men and trans people shake their asses alongside the hetero show of female ass-shaking. I don’t know how the spectacle of queerness incorporates itself, or doesn’t, into the shows. Again, there really needs to be a study ! and I smell funnnnding…and fun.

Autoethnography:
Okay, so this next part is going to describe a little bit of my experience at the show in Chicago and ask some questions. At first when I saw that Big Freedia was touring with a variety of non-sissy bounce acts, I was like, “hm, cool, whatev.” But then, closer to the show, I wondered if it would be weird, like if the show could possibly transcend irony and identity politics and avoid landing us in a kind of minstrelsy trap. This actually became a palpable fear for me when I saw the crowd, the opening acts (one of which was terrible, like TERRIBLE – a totally uninspired and unrelated act that had nothing going on. The other one, with its amazing Second Life projections and tutus with burlesque whiteface, was awesome, though). So then I started to feel nervous about abjection, the other, crowds, etc. But then Freedia herself came on, with her amazing hair (one side shaved in a design, the other hanging long with white-streaked bangs) and her very Panamanian-looking clothes – namely, a silver belt and jeans that were somewhere between baggy and skinny, Panama style. With her were a backup dj, a big-bodied water dude, and a white (or white-appearing) female assistant dancer wearing a sort of aquamarine satin unitard with fishnets. The thing that I could not get over was the female dancer’s makeup and expression, which was VERY sassy and definitely could have had something satirical/parodic going on. Simply put, she exhibited the exaggerated features of a blackface minstrel female figure. I am not bullshitting; she did. Or perhaps a white trash/po’ white minstrel figure? And when she flashed us the finger, twice, the impression was even more striking. Weird. I wondered what the relationship between Freedia and her was – whether she was the dancer for the entire tour, or just to places serving a mostly-white clientele, or what was going on there. Would it have been strange if Freedia had brought a black dancer to shake her ass for us? Was that too exoticizing? It’s not that this dancer couldn’t booty-dance as well as a black person – not at all, she was amazing. But her whiteness, or appearance of such, combined with the makeup, was very strange to me. I am still processing it and would honestly like to hear the interpretations of people of color in the audience.

Unlike the sassy backup dancer, Freedia projected a persona that was, I feel, very “pure” in a way – dignified, earnest, and honest. For example, at the end, she explained to us that she was very ill and therefore was sort of cutting it short but that she tried to hold out because she loved Chicago. This was all very touching and cool. Also, she was a class-A ass shaker but wasn’t arrogant about it. The whole vibe of her sissy bounce persona was, I felt, very put together and with the right amount and KIND of presence. The feeling that I had after the set was essentially that Freedia is a consummate performer, pardon the cliché, who really knows how to work with a variety of audiences. Not that this one was tough or turgid at all, however. The mood of the crowd was also very open to communing with the whole situation.

And I think that that provides one reason that the show transcended irony. As presented within the production/promotion of Decibelle, the event was queer-friendly, and gay rights were clearly on people’s minds there. I feel like gay rights and expression trumped race and class in this context, or rather created a venue for them, that people could relate to and that quashed hostility, to some extent. There was a sense of empathy, and I don’t say that lightly. Very few people were observing, arms crossed, from the sidelines. It was less hipster and more freak. Which I liked.

In addition to being very gay, and therefore very awesome, the show was very interactive, with participants of all shades and stripes getting up onstage and shaking their asses in various configurations. This presented a sweaty, drunk, and lusty subsection of the queer fe/male audience dancing together, on boxes, gyrating on the floor, humping and grinding against each other and the stage, eyes half-closed, in what turned out to be a very charming shambles.

But meanwhile Freedia would go through the crowd and physically point to the best ass-dancer, drawing the audience’s attention away from the poor imitators and to the one who really understood what to do with his/her body. What this did was several things: 1) established an embodied hierarchy, so that if anyone was to be mocked, it was the people trying to dance and doing so badly; 2) it prevented even those hacks from being mocked because of the eye-turning power of Freedia, the ass-connoisseur. She showed us that she was totally in control of this hierarchy, that this was TOTALLY a skill that required intensive practice and, often, athleticism, and that there were other types of power available to people. I saw quite a few people getting flustered or embarrassed when they realized the distinctions between those who really could shake their asses and those who were thinking that this was going to be something fun and casual. It’s actually a very serious thing, this dance. It involves keeping most of the body completely immobile while revolving your ass-cheeks like a washing machine. Even more tricky are forms in which the participant bends over, lies on the floor, or gets up on a structure and whirls her ass. It’s totally mesmerizing and extremely easy to pick out immediately who’s doing it well and who badly. In any case, this rearranged hierarchy defeated any attempts to mock the performance, as we saw what sexual power was also contained in this incredibly erotic dance (and it is!), which probably also explains its appeal at straight black clubs in NOLA.

To summarize, I had a great time and emerged feeling okay about it too. I’m not sure what other stops are on this tour, and I hope that there aren’t any to, like, frat boy bars in rural texas. That might produce an entirely different reception, and one that would bring out some of the worst and most racist and homophobic undertones of U.S. society and culture right now. I can say in our case that I was satisfied with the reception that we audience members gave Freedia. Despite the the mixed race but mostly queer-identified, white, middle-class audience members, the performance managed to transcend irony (while not ditching the realm of camp – using camp somewhat to its benefit, although this could have been more played up) due to its the inclusive nature, as well as the coalescence around issues of queer identity that went on, AND a hierarchy of movement that emerged and would definitely smack down any sense of irony cultivated by the lip-curling sneerers hanging on the periphery (not that there were any. In fact, the concert was remarkably upbeat and sincerely, wholesomely enthusiastic, which is a rare feeling to have from a show, especially one in Chicago, espECially one in wicker park.) I only had the sense that the organizers of the show might have wanted Freedia to directly invoke an aspect of queer politics and/or rights, but she didn’t. I’m not sure how much of a spokesperson she has been, is, or is becoming, but being linked to Decibelle, contrary to what you might think, does not seem to imply that she is incorporating their message in her work. But that is not to say that she should be: I think that Freedia knows who she is: that is to say, she is walking politics, there’s no need  to say it out loud. That’s the sense I get. I’m sure that she has views on gay marriage and DADT, but sometimes body politics are more powerful and transformative than npr’s talk-radio approach. and sometimes performance studies can be really validating, i think.