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// Ned Sublette

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Ned Sublette
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The Year Before The Flood : A Story of New Orleans


The Year Before The Flood : A Story of New Orleans

It would be hard to qualify Ned Sublette in one paragraph. He is a New York musician with Louisiana and Texas roots who has long had a fascination for American roots and Afro-Cuban music. He has worked as a music journalist for years. His label Qbadisc was very influential in disseminating Cuban music in the US - and he’s certainly the only person I can think of to have both played with NG la Banda and have one of his songs covered by Willie Nelson.

 

Ned Sublette is also an independent scholar who has developed an idiosyncratic way to analyze history from a mostly musical point of view. Or possibly the other way around. His first book, the amazing Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, is a monument of historical erudition and musical insight. His second book, The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, looks into the history of New Orleans. With The Year Before The Flood, he departed from his usual scholarly format and instead produced a memoir. Ned Sublette’s mix of superb taste, serious scholarship and passionate opinions allows him to avoid the pitfalls often built into the genre and makes this book a great read.

 

The flood in question, you might have guessed, refers to the destruction brought about by Hurricane Katrina in 2006. This is not a book about Katrina, however, even though a lot of the narrative derives its strength from the hindsight that this world will unavoidably be destroyed in the months to come. The book is a kind of Pompeian monument to a vanished city.

 

The Year Before The Flood is a personal look at New Orleans and its day-to-day mix of splendor and squalor. It’s about a world of insular traditions which have found their ways into mainstream American culture since its very beginnings. And of course, it is a book about music and musicians, written from a musician’s point of view. Ned Sublette anchors the book with his own history, that of growing up two hundred and eighty miles from New Orleans in the town of Natchitoches, Louisiana, in the 1950s. A town so segregated that Sublette had no interaction with his African-American peers. Their lives, in fact, were so separate that it was hard to even tell that he lived in a violently racist society at a time when Jim Crow laws were still in effect. His first contact with black culture came through radio. As he remarks, they had “segregated society but integrated radio”. Fats Domino got a lot of airplay and Sublette was smitten. So were a lot of people. White people who didn’t see anything wrong in not letting blacks eat in their local restaurants were listening to black people on the radio. Interestingly enough, it’s now become the other way around.

 


Ain't That A Shame" - Fats Domino

 

Fast -forward 45 years and Ned Sublette finds himself a Rockefeller fellow at Tulane University, living in New Orleans for a year. His Louisiana past seems to have long been overridden by his New York life and his Cuban trips and, at first, he doesn’t seem to be the strongest advocate for a city he claims a few times not to like. It’s not an easy place to live in. It’s way too hot. It has one of the highest murder rates in the country. And Bourbon Street attracts some of the scariest, dumbest people on the planet. Yet, as we discover along with Sublette, the music is so good, the culture still so vibrant and so profoundly rooted, that it eventually casts its spell. Even if living there occasionally means dodging bullets or drunken frat boys.

 

Sublette treats the musical panorama as a historical continuum where second line, jazz, R&B, funk and hip hop are inextricably linked. The argument is not a revolutionary one but the argumentation feels completely fresh. The mix of historical background, speculation and first-hand accounts proves very convincing. The juxtaposition of 1920s legendary cornet player Buddy Bolden’s experiences of abuse with similar contemporary stories does much to link the various scenes together.

 

And those various scenes, the genres and sub-genres are not just linked chronologically, they are also linked in a dynamic way. The separation between genres is often blurred as they all seem to feed one-another. The culture of New Orleans has always been insular and kinship should often be understood literally. Rapper Soulja Slim exemplifies the literal kinship between musical styles and family. His step-father led the famed Rebirth Brass Band, his mom was part of second line group the Lady Buck Jumpers and all of them lived in the Magnolia projects, the housing projects famous for being at the epicenter of Nola’s hip hop scene, and infamous for their murder rate. Soulja Slim was himself killed in 2003. All of them played some variation on funk, but funk was their common language, the language of New Orleans.

 

Sublette investigates many sides of New Orleans’ musical history - the story of Mardi-Gras, with its dual African and Anglo-American roots and some of its racist imagery is especially fascinating. As are his portraits of local legends such as Ernie K-Doe and his wife Antoinette, and his description of Mardi-Gras Indian rituals.

 


All On A Mardi Gras Day – documentary on New Orleans black carnival history directed by Royce Osborn

 

Sublette repeatedly stresses that New Orleans’ singularity is largely a product of the multiplicity of its roots. The city was settled and developed by three distinct colonial powers: the French, then the Spanish, and finally the Anglo-Americans. Besides their own national cultures and different ruling styles, each brought about a distinct group of African slaves with their own culture and a specific set of social and musical codes. Before the Louisiana purchase, slaves could buy their freedom and a significant portion of the black population was made up of freed slaves.

 

This is what distinguishes New Orleans’ black culture from the rest of the country - the fact that there was a free class of people of color, and the diversity of its musical sources. More stimulation, musical and otherwise, and more opportunities to play and develop new idioms. This explains in part why the music came to have such strong appeal and why the culture of New Orleans is really at the heart of America’s musical culture.

 

The history of African America, very much like that of New Orleans, is at the heart of American history, at the root of its culture, and yet, it is completely marginalized, often even occulted. New Orleans, which gave America much of its musical culture, is viewed as an exotic anomaly. The same could be said of African-American culture at large and The Year Before The Flood works beautifully as a metaphor on how African-American culture is exoticized and marginalized in American society.

 

 

The Year Before The Flood by Ned Sublette is published by Lawrence Hill Books

 

 

All In A Mardi Gras Day

All On A Mardi Gras Day
DVD directed by Royce Osborn
is available via Spyboy Pictures

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Olivier Conan


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