10/2/2023 0 Comments Mannie fresh![]() Longtime Anglophone residents and English-speaking newcomers from the United States mingled with German and Irish immigrants, free people of color, and enslaved Black people from Louisiana and beyond. The New Orleans of his youth was a fast-growing city with a bustling port and the country’s largest market for the sale of enslaved people. Piano virtuoso and Bamboula composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869) was the son of a London-born Jewish merchant and a white Creole mother. Juvenile in 1998, the year “Back That Azz Up” was recorded ( THNOC, 2018.0491) Gottschalk around 1842, the year he left to study in France ( THNOC, 2019.0145) Listeners would be forgiven for thinking that a strong, percussive intro is the only similarity between the songs, but “Back That Azz Up” and Bamboula share another important feature that shaped the music and the songs’ legacies: they’re both from New Orleans, and they both brought distinctively New Orleans sounds to a global audience. The Parisian elite might not have been as uninhibited as contemporary clubbers, but it’s probably safe to bet that whatever the 1840s opera house version of what New Orleanians call catching a wall was, when they heard the opening to Bamboula, they did it. Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s Bamboula begins with a set of four dyads-octaves, played fortissimo at the bottom of the keyboard, so that the left hand pounds on the piano as if it were a drum. ( Courtesy of UMG on behalf of Cash Money)Ī century and a half earlier in Paris, another New Orleanian debuted a song with a distinctive, ear-catching opening. ![]() Juvenile, Mannie Fresh, and dancers from the “Back That Thang Up” music video. Within the first few notes, people rush from their benches and barstools, end conversations mid-sentence, give up their spots in bathroom lines, and congregate on dance floors to bend it over and buss it open. It’s been more than two decades since Cash Money Records took over for the nine-nine and the two thousand, but on any given weekend in New Orleans, someone somewhere is playing “Back That Azz Up.” The second single from Juvenile’s 400 Degreez, “Back That Azz Up”-and the radio-friendly edit “Back That Thang Up”-opens with strings.
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