UC Press Blog

By Lauron J. Kehrer, winner of the Society for Ethnomusicology Gender and Sexualities section Marcia Herndon Article Award for "'Sissy Style': Gender, Race, and Sexuality in New Orleans Bounce Dance," published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies.

When I arrived in New Orleans in Summer 2016 to conduct fieldwork, bounce music, a hyperlocal hip hop style associated with twerking, was just starting to creep into national hip hop and pop. While twerking became nationally known a few years before, thanks in part to Miley Cyrus’s infamous performance at the 2013 MTV VMAs, the musical and vocal styles that twerking developed to accompany were more subtly embedded in samples used by artists such as Beyoncé, Drake, and Missy Elliott, less recognizable but ever more present in the mainstream. As artists adapted bounce for their own hits, it became increasingly distanced from its New Orleans roots. This is especially true for the genre’s queer artists, as I discuss in my book, Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance.

What drew me to New Orleans bounce was as much the infectious beat as it was the fact that it provided an unusual space in hip hop in which queer and trans artists were among the most visible and influential. It is their work that non-New Orleans mainstream artists most frequently use in their own. I had come to New Orleans to interview some of these performers, attend shows, and better understand how queer hip hop artists came to dominate the scene. I wanted to experience bounce at its source.  

While I was conducting fieldwork, which often involved traveling as a queer person to nightclubs by myself and staying late into the evening, there was a deadly mass shooting at a queer nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The Pulse nightclub shooting was among the deadliest in history, leaving 50 people including the shooter dead and 53 more injured, and the shooter intentionally targeted queer people of color. I wrote about the experience of conducting fieldwork in similar spaces for Inside Higher Ed. It was both unsettling and comforting to be engaged in queer dance music during this time. 

As I conducted my fieldwork it became apparent that bounce music had often been used in the wake of tragedy as a form of kinetic community response to collective trauma. This is one of the topics I discuss in my award-winning article, “‘Sissy Style’: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in New Orleans Bounce Dance,” published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies. As I argue, one of the reasons why bounce has so many active queer artists is that they were among the first to return to performing live in the city following Hurricane Katrina, and they helped nurture and cultivate audiences outside the city in the areas in which displaced New Orleanians had temporarily or permanently resettled. Additionally, the musical characteristics of bounce facilitated physical dance styles like twerking, whose gendered aspects I detail in the article, that served as important tools for collectively processing trauma and grief. 

In light of yet another tragic mass killing that took place in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2025 on Bourbon Street, I offer a list of five queer New Orleans bounce artists whose work I’ve come to know through my research for these projects and whose musical influence will without doubt contribute to the healing work that is to come:

Sissy Nobby
“Beat It Out the Frame” (2010)
Sissy Nobby claims to be the first artist to return to live music performance almost immediately following Hurricane Katrina. He is part of the earliest generation of so called “sissy bounce” artists – queer Black rappers who took the pejorative term and created music that resonated across demographic groups. His songs typically include lewd and definitively queer lyrics rapped in his signature raspy voice, and, like most bounce, rely heavily on samples from The Showboys’s “Drag Rap.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAlqJgIO_KM

Katey Red
“The Millennium Sissy (Y2-Katey)” (2000)
Before Hurricane Katrina changed everything, Katey Red was already establishing herself as a significant voice in bounce with her albums Melpomene Block Party (1999) and Y2 Katey (2000). She was a protégé of DJ Jubilee, one of the original bounce artists, and among the first to openly talk about her identity as a trans woman in her music. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSWi93mL7rY

Nicky Da B
“Go Loko” (2013)
Perhaps few artists embodied the relationship between queer bounce music and twerking more clearly than Nicky Da B. He was a dancer for Sissy Nobby and had close ties with both Katey Red (his “gay mother”) and Big Freedia. His big break came with his 2012 collaboration with producer Diplo, “Express Yourself.” In addition to typical samples of “Drag Rap,” “Go Loko” (2012) includes references to Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi,” the Spider-man theme song,  and Jay-Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder.” Nicky Da B tragically died of an undisclosed illness in 2014, at just 24 years old. His legacy of fearless queer bounce lives on. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWcvGIn3Gzo

HaSizzle
“Getcha Sum” ft. Anjelika “Jelly” Joseph (2021)
The self-proclaimed King of Bounce, HaSizzle also maintains that he is the most sampled bounce artist. Indeed, samples of his work have appeared on songs by Drake, Lil Wayne, 2 Chainz, Lil Nas X, City Girls, and more recently Asake and Travis Scott, among others. His distinctive vocal style, which makes extensive use of catch phrases, roll calls, sounds, rhythmic repetitions, and insistent commands to dance, reflects his belief that bounce music and dance are inseparable. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_m_kam2wLY

Big Freedia
“Rent” (2018)
The Queen Diva herself Big Freedia is perhaps now the most visible and well-known bounce artist. Her voice has been featured on multiple tracks by Beyoncé (“Formation” and “Break My Soul”) and she has collaborated with other artists such as Kesha, RuPaul, and Drake. She has had her own reality TV shows including her current one, Big Freedia Means Business. She currently holds the Guinness World Record for most people twerking simultaneously, which she set in 2014 with 406 people twerking at the New Orleans Central City Festival. Big Freedia’s willingness to collaborate across genres and perform in diverse venues contributed to the spread of bounce around the world. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtU1zjRuTdU

We invite you to read Lauron J. Kehrer's award-winning article, "'Sissy Style': Gender, Race, and Sexuality in New Orleans Bounce Dance," for free online for a limited time.

Print copies of Journal of Popular Music Studies (JPMS) issue 35.3, in which this article appears, as well as other individual issues of JPMS, can be purchased on the journal’s site. Stay up-to-date with the latest from JPMS by signing up for an e-ToC alert. We'll email you each time a new issue publishes online. If you/your library do not already subscribe to JPMS, please ask your librarian to subscribe and/or purchase an individual subscription to ensure your ongoing online access to this article and other must-read content published in the journal.

Lauron J. Kehrer will be in conversation with the Queen of Bounce, Big Freedia, on Tuesday, February 11 at 4:00 PM ET in a webinar sponsored by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Harvard University Department of Music that will focus on music, community, and strength in the face of climate change. For more information and to register, please visit: https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/event/2025-conversation-with-big-freedia-virtual.