Review of “Triksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap,” by Nik Cohn
Alfred A. Knopf. $22.95
by Joe Longo

The author, Nik Cohn: a.k.a The Black Tom Wolfe

It would be very easy to be suspicious of “Triksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap,” a book about the New Orleans rap scene written by Nik Cohn, a journalist in his sixties whose major claim to fame was writing the book on which “Saturday Night Fever” was based, a book that he later admitted was partly fabricated.

Indeed, I carried this suspicion through the book’s opening chapter, an account of a frightening foray into the Iberville projects. (“I was asking for trouble. Seeking it out, in fact.”) But on page 11, a description of his block on Solomon Street circa 2003, convinced me that his eyes and ears could be trusted:

“Solomon Street was in transition. White gentry were moving in and buying up every house they could lay hands on. Nights, they sat gossiping on their stoops or walked their dogs on the sidewalks. The remaining blacks preferred to walk the center of the street, where they could see what was coming at them.”

Triksta is a book for those of us, white or black, who walk the center of the street.

In the early 70s, while touring with The Who, Cohn passed through New Orleans and was smitten by it. For the next three decades he would return often, and with each visit he took note of the city’s descent into poverty and crime. These three decades coincide, of course, with the birth and maturation (and commercialization) of hip-hop and rap music, a genre Cohn had come to love as rock and roll had degenerated, as he writes, into “dirty old men molesting guitars.”

It is not until 2000, however, that Cohn, suffering from Hepatitis C and all its symptoms, decides to get personally involved in New Orleans rap, a scene dominated by “bounce,” a type of rap music emphasizing call and response which emanated from neighborhood block parties. (“The giant speakers, the steam-heat streets, the filthy lyrics and blazing beats, the DJ stoking the furnace, the girls in their skins…”) Here Cohn begins his ill-fated attempt as rap impresario, working as a producer of sorts with local artists desperate to cash in on the fame and riches that has elevated local stars like Juvenile and Lil Wayne into better lives.

And the stakes, for some, are high. Cohn devotes all of Chapter 2 to the story of Soulja Slim, a rapper of local acclaim who was gunned down on his mother’s Gentilly lawn on Thanksgiving Eve 2003. Cohn portrays Slim as having a self-destructive streak, frequently courting danger, but despite that I can’t help but think but for one more hit record Slim could have moved his mom into less-vulnerable English Turn or Eastover where the risk of getting caught out is much smaller. Biggie and Tupac notwithstanding, it seems the longer you toil on the lower rungs of the rap game, the more dangerous it becomes.

On the other hand, Cohn also documents the paralyzing fear that constrains the more talented artists he comes across. The rapper for whom Cohn has the greatest affection, Junie B, is so emotionally defended that the risks of exposure that all artists must take are for her a fatal barrier. She even asks Cohn to leave her out of the book, a request with which he does not comply, thankfully, as Junie’s story is the most intriguing of the bunch. The shy Junie B that emerges in Cohn’s pages is very much in keeping with my perceptions of her. I remember seeing Junie B perform with other Take Fo’ Records artists at Jazz Fest in 2001 (an event Cohn does not discuss), and as I recall she brought out exactly one verse, and it was the same verse I’d heard her reluctantly kick on a local Take Fo’ public access show she co-hosted with another, much more boisterous Take Fo’ rapper, Choppa.

Ah, Choppa. Cohn’s account of the rise and peak of the career of Marrero rapper Choppa is worth the price of the book. Any avid Q-93 listener remembers the two-year period when Choppa’s local hit, “Choppa Style,” kept re-emerging in various remixed forms, culminating in the final, Master P-endorsed version that finally got Choppa onto BET and the “106th and Park” countdown. In “Triksta,” Cohn supplies the behind-the-scenes look at that era, a time when big label A&R people were courting Choppa without ever having heard him perform. Who could blame Choppa for not wanting to go through the trouble of recording new tracks?

My favorite Choppa scene involves a lunch meeting with Andy Wickham, then a senior A&R man with Warner Brothers:

Lunch was at the Daiquiri Hut on Tulane, fifty yards from the studio. Choppa, under pressure from Earl [Mackie, Take Fo' CEO], was only twenty minutes late. He ordered a portion of Buffalo wings with extra sauce and tackled them with an air of long-sufferance. Global stardom was his birthright, not worth sweating, though he was willing to play the game. He even asked Andy Wickham who all else he’d worked with.
….he [Wickham] started at the Rolling Stones and worked painstakingly through the decades. If he had looked up, he’d have seen that Choppa’s eyes were closing…
‘Where you located?’ said Choppa at last.
‘I live in London,” said Andy.
Choppa looked blank for a moment, than he nodded and showed his new gold teeth. “Europe, right?” he said. “I like Europe. A friend of mine, he took my demo over there, he said they lovin’ me in the clubs.’

If that passage doesn’t make you proud to live in this city, than your New Orleans is different from mine. (The meeting, by the way, culminated in a $250,000 recording budget, ultimately short circuited by Wickham “paritng company” with Warner Brothers, one of many near-misses the book chronicles.)

For me, appreciation for “Triksta” comes from my ability to see the narrative from inside the city. The outer narrative arc—what the hell is a 60 year old white European Hep C sufferer doing trying to produce New Orleans bounce?—is interesting though less compelling. Someone with less knowledge of the music and with the forces that thwarted Cohn’s efforts (complacency, fear, ignorance, mistrust, narcissism—in short, New Orleans) might find themselves sharing in Cohn’s frustration. For folks like us, it’s a more fun read when Cohn discovers what we already knew.

Ultimately, we should be grateful to Cohn for bringing this book into existence at all. It’s impossible to imagine the local rap scene will ever recover from the mass displacement of residents who produced it, and Cohn’s book, should the names and the stories and the milieu be familiar to you, will read as a tragicomic elegy to what our city was.

Joe Longo is Senior Editor at NOLAFugees.com.