Make it Bounce

Lauren Calhoun Dr. Harris ENGL-2017 22 April 2026 Make it Bounce New Orleans Bounce music is well-situated in Black Vernacular tradition through its use of Southern, Black dialect and frequent sampling, interpolating, and remixing of songs by Black artists. The genre was pioneered by rappers like MC T Tucker and DJ Irv sampling songs from the 80s. This eventually led to the creation of “Triggerman beat” which is a mainstay of Bounce music’s production (Taylor, 8). The other cornerstones of Bounce music, as described by “the Queen of Bounce”, Big Freedia, are call-and-response, a heavy and uptempo bass, and “ass-shaking”. While the Bounce music genre was founded on the hypermasculine musical performances of heterosexual male artists, Bounce is widely informed and sustained through Southern, Black feminine and queer expression. K’wan Foye, a hip-hop fiction writer, describes the “booty” as the “focal point” of Bounce music’s dance expressions (Taylor, 5); twerking, rolling, shaking, wobbling, and other forms of “bending ova”, are a part of Black feminine performance and operate as the “response” of the genre’s call-and-response foundation. Additionally, rappers in the Bounce music scene often incorporate queer slang into their songs like Flyboi Keno, who references “trade”--an attractive, discreetly queer man– in his song “Kicking Flavors”. Hypersexuality is a salient part of Bounce and the genre offers itself as a space for queer and female musicians to unflinchingly express their sexuality in through music, with Keno in the same song, demanding that the man “bend him ova”. For the female rappers in the space like Magnolia Shorty, who is credited with disseminating Bounce to other states (Taylor, 10), the Bounce music scene acts as one of the few places where Southern, Black women can freely express their kinetic orality and sexuality, and thanks the genre’s now more widespread distribution, young Black girls and fems everywhere can be empowered by these women’s assertion.