An American flag hangs on a house in New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward. The spray-paint markings are used by rescue workers to indicate that the residence has been checked for bodies (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images). At this time last year, 80 per cent of New Orleans — The City That Care Forgot — sank beneath the floods of the mighty Hurricane Katrina.
Ten thousand people, unable or unwilling to obey their mayor’s mandatory evacuation order, had gathered downtown at the Louisiana Superdome to ride out the storm. That number would go up — way up, to about 30,000 — before it came down. In the days, weeks and months that followed Katrina, the various governments’ responses to the disaster evidenced bureaucratic failures of epic proportions.
Katrina claimed at least 1,836 lives, although a final death toll may never be settled. Unknown numbers of people died waiting for help (water, food, medicine and transportation) that was too slow in coming. During the seven days it took to evacuate the Superdome, round-the-clock news broadcasts from New Orleans showed the hurricane’s survivors to be mostly poor, mostly black — and united in outrage at President George W.
Race became a hot topic of discussion immediately after the storm. There have been innumerable suggestions (and an offsetting horde of denials) that the effort and effectiveness of the government response would have been very different if most of New Orleans’s stranded masses had been white instead of black. In some circles, the disaster has become known as “Black America’s 9/11.
” Since Katrina’s devastation, many well-heeled celebrities (including Oprah Winfrey, John Travolta and Ellen DeGeneres) have made noble contributions to the relief and recovery effort. It figures that musicians (Harry Connick, Jr., U2’s The Edge and others) have been vocal members of the star ranks: New Orleans is, after all, a longtime hotbed of blues and jazz.
But in a world apart from the tourist thrills of the French Quarter, in and around sprawling, dilapidated housing developments like New Orleans’s C. Peete Projects (generally known as the Magnolia Projects), those genres have been supplanted. The new, true sound of the city’s younger generations is a gritty, greedy kind of hip hop led by the likes of Lil’ Wayne and the Cash Money Millionaires, Juvenile and Master P.
For at least the past decade, hardcore rappers have become like royalty among New Orleans’s underemployed classes. In 2003, when local icon Soulja Slim was gunned down on his mother’s front lawn, he was given a funeral worthy of a king. Thousands of mourners joined a procession across the city’s Washington Avenue, with a brass band performing his hit songs ( An American flag hangs on a house in New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward.
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