![Abdu Ali, Interview
Making my way up to Bushwick in a rigged up gypsy cap, I was pretty sure of what to expect. Abdu Ali, Baltimore rapper and Facebook friend of unknown origin, is easy to cubbyhole into some pseudo-niche group of neo-queer rap acts alongside Mykki Blanco, House of Ladosha, Zebra Katz, among others.
Equal parts performance artist and lyricist, the comparisons are convenient. And, as I hopped out the taxi off Knickerbocker to meet up with Ali, who’d been staying with a friend while he was in New York, I thought I knew the storyline – a played act of defiant brashness in the form of ‘banjee’ queen realness. I was wrong.
No mistakes here, Abdu Ali slays. His music is high-velocity, a constant 90 miles per hour. And, his performances are pretty much like taking an Adderall one after the other, all while drinking a Red Bull vodka and losing your mind. But, audacity takes talent; and, from the looks of it, Abdu got it.
While his music is sensational, Abdu himself is pretty innocuous. He greeted me at the door in a black, body-long jersey knit t-shirt, taking me back up to his friend’s second-floor apartment, offering me some tea before I sat down.
“I’m more self-conscious than I’ve ever been in my life – the whole music thing and putting yourself out there all the time,” Ali said about five minutes into our chat. “Everything you do represents you – and [I am] as transparent as possible.
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Abdu Ali, a regular face in middle school theatre and community fashion shows, is hardly new to the stage, however. But, that stage is getting bigger as the spotlight turns to the Baltimore rapper, whose dope inaugural mixtape INVICTOS got him a shout-out as one of 2013’s “Most Slept-On” rappers by Spin magazine.
But, it may be time to wake up because Abdu isn’t playing around with 2013, with the upcoming release of his second project Push and Slide. “[It’ll] be that next level type shit,” Ali said.
Abdu’s INVICTOS is an 11-track jolt of high-fidelity experimental beats and raw, elaborate verses deconstructed into appetizing riffs and ass-shaking melodies. After a quick listen, it’s easy to feel the influence of Baltimore’s break-beat club music with its pleasantly choppy structure and truncated notes. It’s fiery, catchy, and will probably find itself on repeat.
But, getting your name out isn’t just putting out newsworthy mixtapes, Ali says. An artist can only truly prove himself on stage, according to Ali.
“I realized how important it is for a little queen out of Baltimore to tour,” Ali said. “It’s like guerilla marketing.”
“That’s why I give Mykki Blanco mad respects. Soon as she got her little exposure, she hit the ground running as far as touring. A lot of the artists I look up to, as far as them being relevant, it’s because of how many shows they do. “
Abdu Ali’s about that city-after-city hustle life, making his way around the East Coast circuit. And, with growing fan bases from the DMV to New York, Ali is already a familiar face in the Baltimore rap scene, and he’s bound to become a common sight among the spectacle of New York’s downtown world.
Abdu recently took his act to Austin, where he joined the bill for SXSW’s GayByGayGay event, alongside artists like Light Asylum and LE1F.
“Performing [at GayByGayGay] was empowering,” Abdu said.
“Anything can become real trendy, but certain things like GayByGayGay – it’s all about the intentions, because it is about empowering queer artists and giving them a huge platform to say, like, ‘here we are’ or ‘fuck you, we’re gonna do us’.”
And, a big ‘fuck you’ indeed, as queer rappers converge on hip-hop culture with newfound venom, ditching camp (in some fashions) for an equally anti-conventional, yet bolder realness.
“Something was right in the water,” Ali said.
“…In the cosmic universe where you have gay rappers who aren’t campy, too stereotypical. And, they can actually really rap. They’re musically talented artists who can step up and be among straight rappers.”
On being a gay rapper, Abdu doesn’t feel pigeonholed, but he understands the typecast: “They don’t do it with straight people – you have your A$AP Rocky, and then you have your Tyler the Creator.”
“I use gay terms and stuff a lot,” Abdu admits. “But, I won’t let it make me some kind of ‘cunt-y queen’ [artist].”
Snap queen realness or not, there’s an openness to performing, particularly as a black, gay artist, that can lend itself to both individual expression and vulnerability.
And, among today’s lot of queer rappers – many of whom being equally defined by their performance art as they are by their hip-hop chops – it can be difficult not to be seen as a novelty act.
“I don’t think people really understand, being a performer is the most vulnerable thing that anybody could do,” Ali mentioned.
Abdu also had a few words to say on Mykki Blanco’s swift rise to popularity: “More so than anybody, she has to be careful about what she does. It can stop being about her talent and start being about who she is. “
Whether or not Abdu’s trajectory follows a similar flight plan as Mykki’s is somewhere in the cards. “I don’t necessarily care about mainstream success; if it comes, it comes,” Ali said.
But, what’s fact is that Abdu Ali has a knack for making sick tracks and rousing club crowds. So, you can keep snoozing, or head down to Baltimore to check out Abdu in the flesh at the Broom Factory Factory this Friday.
Abdu Ali’s INVICTOS mixtape is available for download on Soundcloud.
Top photo credit: RaRah](http://25.media.tumblr.com/baf06d5468542fa2317d368ce37b2e86/tumblr_mltizl8JSz1s9zi4vo1_1280.jpg)
Abdu Ali, Interview
Making my way up to Bushwick in a rigged up gypsy cap, I was pretty sure of what to expect. Abdu Ali, Baltimore rapper and Facebook friend of unknown origin, is easy to cubbyhole into some pseudo-niche group of neo-queer rap acts alongside Mykki Blanco, House of Ladosha, Zebra Katz, among others.
Equal parts performance artist and lyricist, the comparisons are convenient. And, as I hopped out the taxi off Knickerbocker to meet up with Ali, who’d been staying with a friend while he was in New York, I thought I knew the storyline – a played act of defiant brashness in the form of ‘banjee’ queen realness. I was wrong.
No mistakes here, Abdu Ali slays. His music is high-velocity, a constant 90 miles per hour. And, his performances are pretty much like taking an Adderall one after the other, all while drinking a Red Bull vodka and losing your mind. But, audacity takes talent; and, from the looks of it, Abdu got it.
While his music is sensational, Abdu himself is pretty innocuous. He greeted me at the door in a black, body-long jersey knit t-shirt, taking me back up to his friend’s second-floor apartment, offering me some tea before I sat down.
“I’m more self-conscious than I’ve ever been in my life – the whole music thing and putting yourself out there all the time,” Ali said about five minutes into our chat. “Everything you do represents you – and [I am] as transparent as possible.
(Source: nyc.brightestyoungthings.com)
3 weeks ago
![Mykki Blanco at Bowery Ballroom, 2 Apr.
Oh, Mykki. You sure do know how to throw a party. And, quite a party it was Tuesday night at the Bowery Ballroom as Blanco celebrated her birthday by working the stage in front of a jam-packed, and equally wilded out, crowd.
DJ Rizzla started off the night with a high-energy set, equal parts bass-dropping EDM and hip-hop. As the crowd packed up, the hyphey was tangible – people’s Red Bull vodkas were definitely kicking in, not to mention the affable gaggle of rolling lesbians who greeted my friend and I with a solid set of hugs and a rolled cigarette.
Vibes were in place when Ms. Mykki herself trekked out from back stage to greet the crowd with a special performance by LE1F, who performed a couple songs, including “Wut,” all while sashaying about the stage, rocking some dope-looking blonde Shirley Temple curly-cues.
Soon after, badass Bronx MC Maluca Mala jumped on stage to slay a few verses from her mixtape Chinese Food, which, with its M.I.A.-esque tribal beats and Latin sound, scorched the energetic, three-drinks-in crowd. But, the night was just ramping up, and after some waiting and a few refreshment refills, the birthday girl took the mic.
[[MORE]]Adorned with a black satin bra and a translucent clamshell bodice situation, Mykki went in, hammering out much of her Cosmic Angel mixtape with immaculate rawness. Everyone clamored around the stage to get a close peek at the performance artist herself as Blanco started kneeling into crowd, touching heads and even, at one point, wrapping herself up (quite elegantly I may add) in the velour stage curtains.
Mykki finished up with “Kingpinning (Ice Cold)” and the ultimate crowd-pleaser “Wavvy,” which, expectedly, turned the already raged out crowd (myself included) into satiated maniacs for about three minutes.
The crowd was, indeed, feeling Wavvy when the rapper invited us on stage, to the chagrin of the venue’s security, who lost the fight as we pried our way on stage to get an up-close encounter with the birthday girl.
“You guys are amazing; I love you all,” Mykki shouted repeatedly as she hugged and posed for photos with fans.
I hardly knew that I’d be going to a Mykki Blanco birthday when I copped my tickets for the performance a couple months ago. But, if Tuesday night is a harbinger of the future, I know what I’m doing next April 2.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/1bab433c961a03811976aeb74e8d7add/tumblr_mky5de9x4K1s9zi4vo1_r3_1280.jpg)
![Tidal Wavves: Femininity Killed the Homophobe
Mykki Blanco goes hard, real hard.
“I pimp slap you bitch niggas with my limp wrist, bro,” Blanco promises in “Wavvy.” It’s this fleeting, dope verse with which Mykki unabashedly introduces himself to the world.
An assertive ‘I don’t give a fuck’ to the heterosexual hegemony of rap music? Most probably.
It’s a common narrative. The cultural cognoscenti stepping up to the pedantic pedestal to address the ills of mainstream rap music — the misogyny, the homophobia, the hypermasculinity. I’ve done it; it needs to be done. But, performance is fascinating, confusing and complex.
Rap is, in many ways, both dominant and subversive, both shocking and submitting — oftentimes both protesting and supporting dominant institutions. Even A$AP Rocky goes from describing childhood cockroaches and gunfire in one verse to Margiela and Maseratis in the next.
Mykki’s 8-bars aren’t unlike his hip-hop brethren. They ooze that combative, aggressive machismo with which we’ve all become familiar, all while disavowing the same machismo that makes Mykki a jarring introduction to such a rigid culture.
Mykki’s more than meets the eye. Actually, maybe he’s exactly what meets the eye. His love of long Indian locks, satin black bras, and leather hot pants. But, can a black male rapper wear a pair of cropped short-shorts without championing a cause? Maybe one day, but challenging the masculine requisite in black culture is tricky business.
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Racism and prejudice (of erstwhile and today) can make black men feel like they need to be strong, rigid. And, femininity (particularly evinced in the black man) can be seen as a direct threat.
One thing is certain. In today’s world, femininity is disavowed in rap culture. In a time when two guys kissing is innocuous in pop culture, even, maybe, possibly in rap*, cross-dress-loving Mykki Blanco still represents a rejection to the (black) masculinity that drives much of today’s rap music.
It’s not Blanco’s rhymes and lyrics that don’t fit into today’s (mainstream) rap milieu, it’s his corporeal performance, his constant blurring of the line between who’s Mykki and who’s Michael David Quattlebaum, Jr. that do not.
The constant match between man and women, masculine and feminine — and the subsequent and inevitable draw.
And, there’s power in being able to move along that continuum. By moving from Michael to Mykki, Mykki to Michael, Blanco disproves the need for either masculine or feminine performance in rap.
But, as Mykki points out in his September 2012 interview with Bullett, addressing rap culture’s (and black culture’s) ambivalent relationship with femininity is crucial to addressing homophobia (and transphobia) in rap music.
“When femininity is seen as a source of power in black culture, homophobia will no longer exist,” Blanco told Bullett.
But, I digress. Mykki Blanco makes dope music. I’m obsessed.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/796f49c9d88a748ab39199f814c14719/tumblr_mkc1fbyZWm1s9zi4vo2_1280.jpg)
![Ira Sachs Interview: ‘Keep the Lights On’
The first scene in Ira Sachs’ latest film, Keep the Lights On, explains it all. Danish documentarian Erik (Thure Lindhardt) fumbles through potential hookups on a gay phone-sex line, masking himself with a tone of masculinity in hopes of finding that night’s acquaintance.
This lack of self-acceptance drives the film. Erik remains so fixated with everything that isn’t his true self as he walks through 1997’s Chelsea en route to his nightly screw. Little does the viewer know he’s about to find his match.
After Erik meets book publishing agent Paul (Zachary Booth), relations ensue and Paul warns Erik not to get his hopes up since, lo and behold, Paul has a girl. Well, the clock strikes 1998, and Paul and Erik are lovingly together, sharing souls and a meth pipe.
Romance in its rawest and most addictive form takes center stage in Keep the Lights On. Director Ira Sachs sets out to paint a picture of the mortal nature of intimacy and love: its ebbs and flows, its odd and morose strength, and, ultimately, its prosaic and fizzling finish. Sachs’ allegiance to authenticity drives scene after scene in Keep the Lights On. With a sort-of convicted abandon, it shatters any promise of fairytale love, replacing it with an escaping realism in which angst and addiction run the show, often to the viewer’s chagrin.
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“As a storyteller, I’m interested in characters and how they live, how they suffer, how they love,” Sachs told BYT. “It’s how I tell stories; [I] try to be as authentic as possible with the struggles and the joy of the characters.”
But, with each nugget of reality comes a moment of joy. Between the spats and the heartbreak, there’s this pulsating sense of, “that’s me,” or at least, “that could have been me.” The film may not raise your pulse or get you in the mood for roughing it up on some sex line; that’s because it doesn’t have to.
It’s not long into the film before we realize addiction is one of its major themes. But, crucially, Sachs turns addiction on its head. Addiction in Keep the Lights On goes beyond drugs and sex: it’s the addiction to romance and of intimacy, so that even the most straight-edged monogamist knows what it feels like to be an addict.
“The film is about the dynamic of a relationship over time, the traps and dangers of intimacy,” Sachs says. “But, there’s something very universal about kind of the dynamic between these two characters.”
On being a ‘gay film’, Sachs says his latest is undoubtedly not: “I made a film Forty Shades of Blue about a Russian woman living in Memphis. No one claimed I made a ‘Russian woman film,’” Sachs said.
But, nevertheless, Keep the Lights On has a particular resonance with the postmodern gay whose existence is defined by equal parts acceptance and secrecy. Sachs unravels the most confined moments of gay life for all to see.
“I really hope the film will encourage a certain conversation about what we [gays] do. In between what we ‘say we do,’” Sachs said. “From work on the way home, the kind-of quiet pockets of time that we hold for ourselves and often in secrecy…”](http://24.media.tumblr.com/b3cb43c94232f62a3ac9dddd73599783/tumblr_mka3oiRdf21s9zi4vo1_1280.jpg)
![Rapping Progeny
For decades now, rap has been the vehicle for driving a decidedly urban American dream narrative — a Horatio Alger-esque tale of rags to riches. But, what if you don’t fit the mold?
Your father may be an Academy Award-nominated actor or the founder of a billion-dollar fashion empire; or, quite possibly, your grandfather ushered in an era of rock music, and now you want to be a rapper.
Questions aside about their impetus or inspiration, this odd lot of celebrity-progeny rappers has become a phenomenon worthy of mention in the New York Observer, the Huffington Post and the Guardian, among other news outlets.
The humor of the situation abounds: amateur rappers of celeb paternal origin comparing themselves in grandiose fashion to cultural heavyweights like Motown founder Berry Gordy or bona fide billionaires, like Virgin’s Richard Branson. And of course, there are the illustrative tales of tumultuous Connecticut lives.
It would be careless to presume that there’s some unspoken prerequisite to being a rapper today, as if the rap contagion floats only in the skies over Bed-Stuy or South Side of Chicago. There isn’t a surefire formula to becoming a successful rap artist, but one thing seems constant: talent. I’ll avoid a pedantic spiel on race and wealth, but it’s not unreasonable to scrutinize when the offspring of white affluence adapt a genre of music previously appropriated by blacks as a means of civil protest.
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But, here are three rappers with quite the unconventional pedigrees. Spoiler alert: No matter the paternity or bank account, Hil is worth the listen, Haze is wonderfully amusing and Dylan, well, you just have to see for yourself.
Rich Hil (pictured)Child of Designer Tommy Hilfiger
Behind the music: Let’s call the tattoo-laden Hil the head honcho of the white-celebrity-progeny rap game. He’s a far cry from the seersucker-donning Hamptonians who adorn his father’s fashion ads. Proudly from Connecticut who reportedly went on hip-hop field trips as a young teen flanked by a family bodyguard, according to the New York Observer, Hil understands where he grew up as well as his station; he just doesn’t agree with them. “Not everybody from Texas got a f—-ing cowboy hat, you know?” he told the Observer.
Hil’s atmospheric and heavily produced style is like an overexposed picture — there’s beauty in its distortion. Hil aspires to be the best rapper to come out of Connecticut, and he just may be. His unadulterated and morose verses and beats are kin to those of the Weeknd, whose shout-out, legend has it, got Hil signed to Warner Bros.
But whether you’re listening to him spill his soul on”Love My Love” or drop a few ill bars on ”Cookies & Apple Juice,” it’s easy to see his jump into rap as a bit contrived. For some, Hil’s transformation from a mere affluent offspring to one with street cred may have come only after tattoo sleeves and court-ordered rehab.
Chet HazeChild of Actor Tom Hanks
Behind the music: Tom Hanks’ budding lyricist of a son doesn’t feign some hood life. In his Wiz Khalifa remix “White and Purple,”he reps his school, Northwestern University, while rapping about a cushy student life outside Chicago. Haze’s “West Side L.A.” plays like a contemporary hip-hop take on something straight out of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, with lofty descriptions of the good life in sunny Santa Monica, Calif., Pacific Palisades, to be exact.
With four of his songs swarming their way around the Internet — including the pop-heavy, Swizz Beatz-produced ode to his hometown ”Hollywood” — opinions are strong, venomous and divisive. Well, as the astute aphorism goes, “haters gonna hate,” including the professed arbiters of anything and everything at Gawker. But why are we so opinionated about a collegiate thespian-turned-rapper?
Pablo DylanGrandchild of Singer-Songwriter Bob Dylan
Behind the music: This kid’s certainly not shy about riding on the coattails of his grandfather’s blues-rock fame. Dylan’s ”Top of the World,” off of his mixtape 10 Minutes, is an unabashed 3-1/2-minute attempt at hip-hop crooning, with verses rife with sophomoric immodesty. In between “reinventing sound,” Dylan lets us know that “bitches always hate [him] ‘cause they knew they couldn’t get some.” In ”I’m on One,” Dylan lets listeners in on his life as a VIP, including his love of Patrón shots.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/bd1f3f1949d5652bf78b46fde4bd8e44/tumblr_mlbipo5uOC1s9zi4vo1_1280.jpg)
![Giving Hip-Hop a Little ‘Sissy Bounce’
At an inner-city Houston dance hall in an area of town where warehouses and empty lots dominate, a swift, revolving bassline drops. On cue, bodies bend nearly perpendicular, convulsing. “Toot, toot, toot it in the air,” roars through the speakers. Posteriors spiral, following the command to get lower, shake faster, show off. “Sissy bounce,” hip-hop’s most outwardly gay cousin, commands any and all to do its bidding. It’s hard to escape the carnality of its mercilessly electric beat.
It’s a scene that’s playing out around the country. Sissy bounce, the audaciously queer brethren to New Orleans bounce, is a phenomenon whose unique call-and-response, raw dance moves and unadulterated bravado create an untiring energy that is hypnotic. It’s made its way from the clubs of the 9th Ward and the unruly French Quarter to the typically heterosexual scene at Vancouver’s Post Modern Dance Bar and Washington, D.C.’s 9:30 Club. This leap outside of the Crescent City is curated by sissy-bounce deities Big Freedia, Katey Red, Sissy Nobby, Vockah Redu and others, who embrace the term “sissy” with gusto and whose candid, gender-bending ways have gained notoriety across the U.S. and across the Atlantic in the U.K.
“I see bounce music itself going mainstream real soon,” said sissy-bounce artist Sissy Nobby. “I’m fighting for it.”
Sissy bounce, which was born about 10 years ago, has attracted a considerable amount of mainstream attention in the past year, from the likes of the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and even the Guardian in London.
Big Freedia and Katey Red made headlines in 2010, when they made their inaugural appearance during the South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival in Austin, Texas. Big Freedia, whose album Big Freedia Hitz Vol. 1 was released at the beginning of last year, returned to SXSW in 2011, performing hits like “Y’all Get Back Now” and “Azz Everywhere.”While sissy bounce has yet to populate the Billboard charts, it’s garnered some heavy recognition, including Big Freedia’s 2011 GLAAD Media Awards nomination in April.
Today’s mainstream entertainment and media landscapes are arguably tied to male, white and heterosexual privilege, including hip-hop. But as the acceptance of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community grows in general, will the hip-hop community come to accept it as well?
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Raising Eyebrows
Sissy bounce got its start in the same city that bred the rough-and-tumble personas of Lil Wayne, Birdman and the rest of the Cash Money clan. And while bounce may have helped Juvenile rise to popularity with “Back That Azz Up,” sissy bounce is bringing the genre itself into the limelight.
The bold, gay subgenre of bounce sprouted up around 1999. Sissy bounce’s founding artist, Katey Red, NoLa’s first transgender MC, got her start with the New Orleans independent bounce label Take Fo’ Records. Other sissy-bounce heavyweights, like Big Freedia and Sissy Nobby, quickly followed. With their proudly “queer” personas, it wasn’t long before the queens of sissy bounce began to get noticed — and raise eyebrows.
Sissy bounce is just one of several subgenres that grew from the 20-year-old New Orleans bounce phenomenon, which traces back to MC T. Tucker and DJ Irv’s 1991 underground hit “Where Dey At.” While bounce music itself may have lingered under the radar, the genre quickly influenced up-and-coming rap and hip-hop acts from the Big Easy with its uncommon beat and repetitious chants, which come from the unique carols of the Mardi Gras Indian tribes, according to DJ Quickie Mart, a New Orleans DJ, producer and bounce artist.
While sissy bounce is labeled a subgenre by most, some artists reject the moniker. “We don’t separate it,” Big Freedia told The Root. “It’s all bounce music.”
But not everyone has seen it that way. Its rise in a thugged-out hip-hop world often obsessed with machismo hasn’t been painless. “It was rough in the beginning. Nothing was peaches and cream,” Big Freedia said. Indeed, the New Orleans bounce circuit wasn’t always cool with queer artists appropriating the genre. In the early days, clubgoers would call them names, even throw things.
“People were just not ready at the beginning. It took a minute for people to see that we were here to stay and not going anywhere,” Big Freedia said. “I did not stop. That’s why I’m still on the move.”
“Just because they are a bounce artist doesn’t mean they get down with the ‘sissies,’ ” Quickie Mart told The Root. “Sissy bounce has just gotten the most national attention lately, so a lot of people just being exposed to it think that that’s just how all bounce is.
“I think the hipsters and the festival circuit kind of took to sissy bounce, which helped blow up the music as a whole. [But] bounce was always around [when I was] growing up in Louisiana, so for it to get a ton of attention now is a little strange.”
Perhaps sissy bounce’s all-inclusive attitude is the reason for its popularity. In a rap world infatuated with manliness, sissy-bounce artists rock the stage in wigs and false eyelashes while welcoming straights, gays, semidressed women and just about anyone who can stay on the beat.
“One of the most amazing things about New Orleans is the vital, almost unrecognizable, sense of diversity and inclusion that exists in the city,” Brett Berk, a columnist for VanityFair.com, said. “And my sense is that the ‘sissies’ are accepted for who they are, not only because of the culture of acceptance and ‘live and let live’ that has existed in the city since its founding, but because the music they make, and the lyrics they deliver, are so compelling.”
While it may be rocking dance clubs across the country, sissy bounce takes on a different shape in the Big Easy, where its crowd of devotees is split between the Bywater District’s white hipsters and the black community.
“If you go to see Big Freedia at Platinum 2000, you may want to bring an ambassador if you’re not black,” Quickie Mart said. “It’s a whole lot different in NoLa than the rest of the country, with its mainly white crowds. Either way, there is a whole lot of ass shaking everywhere, and who doesn’t like that?”
Among those who are drawn to sissy bounce’s booty shaking are contigents of straight women of all races who flock to the shows, happily engaging in a little immodesty in the process.
The “sissies” may be gay, but they love their women, and women are even crazier about their “sissies.” Women heavily populate the landscape of Big Freedia’s latest video, “Y’all Get Back Now,” hoisting themselves up, tapping into every ounce of their upper-body strength to “toot it up” for the self-proclaimed “Queen Diva.”
Breaking Hip-Hop Barriers
Sissy bounce’s provocative and daring performance may be a culture shock to some, but hip-hop itself is no stranger to gay culture.
From Dallas’ D-Town Boogie to Baltimore’s Club Music, many of hip-hop’s enduring and emerging subgenres have incorporated elements of pop, dance and other music genres cultivated and embraced by gay culture. Emerging hip-hop dances, such as the Dougie and L.A.’s Cat Daddy, incorporate fluid switches, hip movements and dips that take a nod from the dance movements of gay subculture.
Gays and lesbians have entered the hip-hop arena for decades now, from Los Angeles’ Last Offence to Detroit’s Invincible. But while LGBT rappers have cultivated sizable fan bases, their success in the mainstream is less than modest.
“LGBT folks have been at the forefront of bringing music trends into popular culture for a long time, but so much of the culture of hip-hop has been about perpetrating and perpetuating a hyper-‘masculine’ stereotype,” Berk said. “There didn’t seem to be room for openly LGBT performers to be accepted.”
Perhaps sissy bounce, with its sold-out shows crammed with rump-shaking fans, will change all that. And as LGBT artists and fans become less of an issue in the hip-hop community, record labels will ultimately find gay artists like Big Freedia as profitable as their opposite-sex-loving brethren.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/8e1055f5a08f8b8ecf118b05e1d3d4e9/tumblr_mkaaamoPK21s9zi4vo1_1280.jpg)
