Though Big Freedia started out as a backup dancer for her friend Katey Red, a transgender bounce rapper who dropped her first album in 1999, she hit with real force just after Hurricane Katrina. In the wake of the floods, there was tremendous support for music from New Orleans nationally, and both emotional and pragmatic reasons to travel with it for artists: People in exile wanted to hear the sound of home, and with fewer stages in the city, the artists (who were sometimes unstable in their living situations in New Orleans themselves) needed to travel to work. Freedia built a name exponentially, performing a punishing regular schedule in New Orleans and Houston and soon, beyond. She also expanded her reach outside of the traditional Southern hip-hop scene after hooking up with Rusty Lazer, a DJ and drummer for a freaky-jazz cabaret group. On the road with him, Freedia crashed on couches and got introduced to a queer-friendly punk scene that loved to dance. (Fans of Peaches liking Big Freedia — who would have guessed?) Diplo got involved, and so did RuPaul, but the core essence of the sound stayed true: rattling beats and big, joyous, call-and-response shouts.
With the same force Freedia uses to command crowds to shake, twerk, wobble and exercise, if you ask the rapper what pronouns are preferred, she’ll tell you to pick. (I am using “she/her” here because those are the ones with which Freedia was introduced to me, somewhere around early 2008.) This fluidity sometimes seems less about Freedia’s own identity – she usually refers to herself as a gay man, when pressed – than a comment on what such labels mean, and whose problem they are. (If you require one, then it’s yours.)
That flexibility, too, has precedent in New Orleans, the city that builds its calendar around a lengthy holiday celebrating, in part, the whole idea of being more truly yourself by casting off boring strictures of dress and identity. Big Freedia fits into a grand lineage of black New Orleans performers who made gender identity fall in line behind who they were as artists and as people; for instance, Bobby Marchan, a gay man from Youngstown, Ohio, who arrived in the city with a female impersonators’ troupe called the Powder Box Revue in the late 1940s and made a splash at the New Orleans nitery the Dew Drop Inn.
Big Freedia Is The 21st Century’s Ambassador Of Freedom
Photo Illustration: Tim Mosenfelder/WireImage/Getty Images and Angela Hsieh/NPR
