New Orleans Bounce

You're asking about a genre that's really one beat and a hundred ways to shout over it. Bounce is call-and-response party chanting over the Triggerman loop, with ward names and project names worked in as hooks — Mardi Gras Indian–style chants and dance call-outs over the "Triggerman beat" lifted from the Showboys' "Drag Rap", with neighborhoods and housing projects shouted out by name.

The records were made for cassette decks, car systems and block parties first; vinyl was an afterthought, which is why the physical trail is so thin.

Queens group the Showboys cut "Drag Rap" for Profile in 1986. It died in New York and lived in New Orleans, where DJs looped its sheriff-horn figure into the Triggerman beat.

T. Tucker and DJ Irv cut "Where Dey At" over it; DJ Jimi's version spread wider the next year.

Earl J. Mackie and Henry F.

Holden founded Take Fo' Records after seeing a special-education teacher named Jerome Temple — DJ Jubilee — work a school dance. Big Boy Records ran the harder lane with Partners-N-Crime, Mystikal and G-Slimm.

Jubilee's 1993 cassette single "Do The Jubilee All" carries what's widely cited as the first recorded use of "twerk". Cash Money and No Limit took the cadence national; Katrina scattered the artists to Houston and Atlanta in 2005; the beat came back as Jersey club and as Drake's "Nice for What".

Who: Jubilee and Take Fo' uptown, Partners-N-Crime and Big Boy from the 17th Ward, Katey Red out of the Melpomene Projects, signed after Jubilee saw her rap at a block party in 1998, then Big Freedia, Sissy Nobby and Vockah Redu.

Venues: block parties, Cohen High dances, Club Detour, the Ninth Ward barrooms. What: 95–105 BPM, Triggerman or Brown Beats under 808 kick and handclaps, no bridge, no chorus in the pop sense — just chant, break, chant.

How a record gets in: it names a ward, it gives a dance instruction, and it survives being played four times in one night.