Living in New Orleans, oftentimes reality feels like fantasy. Not a cookie- cutter kind of fantasy, more like a slow excitement, an awesome that is burdensome and frightening. Every summer, every hurricane season, a cliffhanger of epic proportions. Since that hydra of Katrina, reality is intertwined with myth so much that I feel like I know everything about myself and yet still nothing at all. Mourning can be a long estrangement from the self. Music is a tide that pulls me back to what remains.
Grief comes in stages, they say. And after wholeheartedly believing that I had navigated them all, I recently realized that I had been vacillating for nearly a decade between bargaining and depression. I am living outside and beyond time and memory, fractured between a pre- and post- that can’t be reconciled. This knowledge, however devastating, has made space for release, an awareness that I must get on with it, through the pain. With the wisdom has come an aesthetic and intellectual freedom, a peering between and beyond many veils. I can move toward a seeking, always, of quality experience in the present.
In both unique and mundane ways, sound connects me to this present that is past. I have always loved music, made music. My dad once said to me he knew I was happy when I was singing. Not that I have the greatest voice, but it does make me happy to use it. To learn its possibilities, to express emotions not fully contained by my use of the written word. During the quarantine period of the pandemic, I found myself singing, recording covers, all the time. I was especially taken with Sade’s “Jezebel” and Nirvana’s “All Apologies.” I was fascinated with Cobain’s unique register, the bending and breaking of his and Sade’s voices that took them away from technical perfection and toward the divine. I comforted myself in those days of silence and quiet horror by seeing what my voice could do, where it could take me.
So I make instrumentals with my Akai MPK Mini. Sometimes they end up a part of my visual practice, where I tell stories through both moving image and sound. But many times, they are just for me. They are my own personal mantras and they guide me through the days. No one can tell me I don’t belong within the notes I create.
* * *
I miss the city I grew up in. New Orleans in the ’90s and early ’00’s was full of reggae, dancehall, and Latin sounds. Early hip hop and bounce from artists like Partners-N-Crime used dancehall-inspired rhythms and deliveries. It felt to me like a callback to the historical influence of New Orleans musicians on reggae and ska.
Growing up was fun, at times chaotic, full of contradictory messaging. On the cusp of mainstream fame, the Hot Boys (Lil Wayne, B.G., Juvenile, and Turk) performed at a local event called Teen Summit. They enthusiastically encouraged us to stay in school and avoid drugs while living the opposite. Heroin had hit the city hard. We went to D.A.R.E. and sang songs with hooks like give me some her-ron please, ’cause powder makes me sneeze. It was all so innocent, but deadly.
It feels like a fairytale when I say it now, but there was music being played on the street twenty-four hours a day. Secondline routes were not published through official media channels and circulated instead on paper printouts that traveled through the community. Permitting was much less strictly enforced, so the spontaneous neighborhood processions that may occur in the wake of someone’s death were more frequent. The music is still present—to this day I can open my door and hear someone on their horn practicing, or high school marching bands rehearsing for carnival season. But gentrification has shrunk so many of the social spaces that made culture happen. As neighborhood bars and storefronts and small in-home churches that dotted every other corner disappear in New Orleans, so do the incubators of spiritual and sonic improvisation and innovation.
* * *
The water welcomes, the water is ravenous, greed ravages. Grief is hungry, grief starves.
I was born near the water at the mouth of the Mississippi. We still live and resist here. And I have learned how grief can also sustain you once you accept its nonlinear nature.
I chose to be a writer before and I am still one after.
I have led a few lives as a writer, more still to go.
I have felt the weight of many silences. History is a war, and the battle often lies with who gets to tell it. Whose truth do we hold in regard and why? It’s not very often people will say it out loud, but many times until a man in your field “vouches” for you, others, even other women will keep their distance. And if you should meet the misfortune of a powerful man’s disapproval, they may outright shun you.
What I have learned from women writers, musicians, editors, and producers is that there is power in the pivot. Learning as much as you can about many genres and disciplines within the field of writing is a saving grace. I’ve been kicked out of better places than this is the old saying, and I learned what I needed to each time. Failing up and forward without shame.
In this mixtape, there is wisdom and humor, and they are tied to specific memories of time and place. These songs in one way or another reflect the inherent contradictions of being a woman with the desire to express herself. This music is memorial too: we lost three of these women musicians prematurely.
The losses are connected to the ways the world and fate can be careless with women’s bodies and minds. A recurrent theme in many of these songs is dodging, surviving, not becoming the collateral damage of men’s decisions. Taking before being taken, not wasting too much time dwelling. Being quick on the comeback.
As a quiet girl, listening to them gave me the gumption to put my thoughts into words. I learned so much about how to make a character speak and feel real from hip hop; this mixtape also contains a few notes, memories, poems, essays, and short stories of my own.
* * *
1. Mia X, TRU, “I Always Feel Like…,” 1997
The evil eyes be watchin’, ’cause n****s
Be always tryin’ to get in the best players spot and
Knockin’ motherfuckers heads off and criss-crossin’
Throwin’ mo’ salt than Morton, when it rains it pours
Whores with pitchfork tongues, they’re tryin’ to get me slung
On my back, got to watch them, jealousy acts so black (yeah)
My eyes be in the front and the back and on the sides peepin’
For all them crooks that be out creepin’
TRU of Master P’s No Limit Records began in the early ’90s as a group with a dozen or so members from New Orleans and Richmond, California. By the mid-to-late nineties, the group would be comprised solely of Master P and his brothers Silkk the Shocker and C-Murder. Mia X, a fellow label mate, frequent feature and unofficial group member, released her debut album Good Girl Gone Bad with No Limit in 1995.
Mia takes us all to school on “I Always Feel Like….” It’s not easy being a Black woman who has a way with words. There will be those who cannot take that and for that fact alone strive to make your life a living hell. You have every right to return fire and defend yourself as much as you have the right to quiet and retreat. This life is yours and no one else’s. Protect it like you would the one of who you love most.
* * *
2. Sister Nancy, “Bam Bam,” 1982
Me born an me grow inna Princeton 6
I Nancy write me crissest lyrics
when you hear dem nuh sound like Christie’s biscuits
Yuh cum inna di place so me seh well well slick
A some a dem a seh me a go mash up dem plan
a true dem nuh know me a one business ‘oman
Sister Nancy she a one inna 3 million
Sister Nancy she a one inna 3 million
One of the most sampled tracks in hip hop, “Bam Bam” was a last-minute addition to Sister Nancy’s debut album, One Two…. “Bam Bam” had a rhythm and lyrics she had been toying with but ultimately went with a freestyle she recorded on the spot.
Sister Nancy would retire at the peak of her fame, all before knowing what a massive international hit that freestyle would become. Working as a teller and an accountant, she would eventually recoup royalties for what her record label had stolen from her. She returned to the stage in 2018 after decades away and began to sing again.
* * *
3. Nas, “Small World,” 1999
Carolyn from Maryland, she Lady Heroin
She elegant, her apparel in the M-Class caravan
Keys of dope, loving cats to skeet in her throat
She fuck killers in her condo, her Benz and her boat
Her iced throat, ass is curvy, 40 years old
She passin’ for 30, Gucci frame glasses from Purvy’s
Madison Ave., shopping when she not, copping bricks of that shit
She hopping on dicks, riding ponies who trick
At my man’s wake, she said the eulogy
After that I usually bumped into her shoppin’ for jewelry
I was technically too young to be listening or connecting so deeply with this character. Carolyn from Maryland, she knocked me off my feet. I don’t know if Nas intended her as a villain or not. Regardless, I recognized and was attracted to the fact that there was awe in his voice as he rapped about her. Similar to Carmen San Diego, my childhood-self missed the plotline entirely: We were supposed to root against her, fear running into her, resist becoming her. But Carolyn survived, and even as a little girl, I took note of that.
I saw a photo of melvin van peebles
and his red socks said:
Speak– He nodded
as Amiri read,
along
His poem agreeing
Red socks said:
Tell them how your first real art
Teachers were drug dealer’s girlfriends
With their superior taste and penchant
For honest money.
– from “A Mass For World’s Pre and Post: Preface
to a 918 Volume (304 children) Suicide Note or
Letter to June Jordan on Jonestown reply written
in New Orleans, 1,392… official count”
by Kristina Kay Robinson
* * *
4. Hurricane G, “Underground Lockdown,” 1997
Qué puñeta, yo represento Borinquen tierra
y no voy a soportar ninguna mierda
porque soy la dueña, la super morena
que te deja desesperao y quemao’, wow
Hurricane G lockdown
with high priestess status, undercover like Idalis
I got turned on to Hurricane G and her album All Woman by my older cousin. I remember reading an article about the Brooklyn-born rapper Gloria Rodriguez in The Source where she talked about her connection to the Afro-Indigenous spiritualities of Puerto Rico. This was before African traditional religions and mentions of Orishas were common in pop culture’s vernacular. Hurricane G was the first female member of the Def Squad hip hop collective, an offshoot of the Hit Squad, alongside Redman, Keith Murray, and Erick Sermon of EPMD (with whom she had her only child).She wove themes revolving around city culture, love, religion, and street life seamlessly. She was baby-faced with a sharp and commanding tone. Her 1997 single “Somebody Else” reached the top ten on Billboard’s Hot Rap Songs chart.” She is also notably featured on multiple tracks with Redman, including 1994’s “We Run N.Y.”
G’s death from lung cancer in 2022 hit me hard. Her music reminds me of sweet days with my cousin and spending the summers building our own world of references together. My cousin’s best friend at the time was Venezuelan. She shared with us the music and telenovelas we couldn’t fully understand but experienced through her childlike and loving practice of translation. This private library of music, movies, books we shared together… I’ve come to understand its importance over time. We were cultivating our own point of view, forming a surety in our taste that would serve us later as we entered creative fields.
* * *
5a. Magnolia Shorty, “Monkey on the Dick,” 1997
Like I say when a fucking soldier fucked ya
Ya better believe we just like them niggas, we gon duck ya
5b. Princess Loko, Tommy Wright III, “Still Pimpin,” 1995
Keep a nigga for the ride, on the side keepin’ dough
You ain’t know? A pimp must maintain her style
Local legends, major international influence and impact, Princess Loko and Magnolia Shorty were teenagers when they started making waves in an adult’s game. They played with their voices and sound with gritty and girly whimsy. Magnolia Shorty’s 2010 “Smoking Gun” remix (a bounce redux of Jadakiss and Jazmine Sullivan’s single) is sampled on Drake’s 2018 hit “In My Feelings.” Princess Loko’s verse in 1995 on “Still Pimpin” with Tommy Wright III re-emerges more than twenty years later on Beyoncé’s 2022 single, “I’m That Girl.” I had the strangest sensation, a slight déjà vu, when I listened to Renaissance for the first time. I heard it before I had a fleeting memory of listening to a Memphis mixtape with older cousins and friends. An article in Scalawag about the resurrection of Princess Loko’s music later unearthed its source for me.
I didn’t know how young Magnolia Shorty was when she was first introduced to me in the early days of Cash Money Records. I was in middle school; she was just barely in high school. It’s odd to say I associate a song called “Monkey on the Dick” with the tangled innocence of childhood but I do. Her own assertion of virginity in the song calls up so many of the contradictions we were raised with as girls in ’90s New Orleans: our culture’s healthy yet sometimes distorted appreciation for human sexuality unfolding in an industry where the name of the game was to exploit it.
Princess Loko, a mother of three, passed away at 40 years old in 2020. Her avant garde and experimental flow is still ahead of its time and hauntingly pushing on boundaries. Shorty was murdered just blocks away from the house where I grew up. I lived in it again for a brief time after Katrina, before it was lost again through a maze of bureaucracy and red tape. My friend and I were sitting on the living room floor with my then two-year-old son who was playing and comforting ourselves through the grief of losing his father a year earlier. The automatic gunfire was so loud, we thought the shots were coming from next door. I am still not over that.
Yeah, Shorty, Yeah… Rest in Peace.
* * *
6. Juvenile, “Ha,” 1998
You wanna stop these niggaz from playing wit you ha
You wanna run the block ha
You wanna be the only nigga with rocks ha
You keep your gun cocked ha
You count the money at the end of the night ha
The music video for Juvenile’s “Ha” starts with a chorus of mostly children behind him smiling and lighting up the frame. This is a place of beauty and energy, it says. The first few seconds of the song are urgent and announce to the world, something new is happening.
Scrolling through Twitter, an activity that both eased and fed my storm and canceled-trip anxiety, I came across a thread debating which was “better”—Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt or Juvenile’s 400 Degreez. Both had inarguably changed the course of rap music’s history, but which one was better? It was a deeply regional discussion. Which album had impacted you more upon its release—or which articulation of similar subject matter impressed you more—might have had a lot to do with your location at the time. But there was also an undercurrent and sometimes an explicit assertion that even though 400 Degreez had such an indisputable impact on culture, it just couldn’t be as good, and certainly not better than Reasonable Doubt, simply because it had come out of the South. There was a certain kind of incredulousness that there was even a conversation where Jay-Z and Juvenile existed in the same universe.
The year after 400 Degreez’s lead single “Ha” was released, I was in high school and living for the summer on the campus of Xavier University in New Orleans. Juvenile had followed up on the breakout success of “Ha” with “Back That Azz Up” and the country was in the throes of Cash Money’s takeover. In my program, I bonded most quickly with two girls from New York. One was Dominican from Washington Heights and the other Black American and Honduran from Bushwick. We sat up together listening to “Ha” and I enjoyed their wide-eyed glee. They had never heard anything like it, and they reveled in their inside-view of a place most of their friends back home would never see.
Though his contribution was not met with acclaim at the time, Jay-Z recorded a remix to “Ha” with Juvenile which was included on 400 Degreez’s commercial release. Two very different but uniquely Black worlds were having a conversation. A conversation that was as plain and forthright as the one we were having as teenage girls about our mutual understanding and misunderstandings of each other’s cultures and vernacular. This was all before Hurricane Katrina, before gentrification changed both New York and New Orleans in irrevocable ways.
–from “Marronage of the Ocean” an essay by Kristina Kay Robinson
* * *
7. Nicki Minaj, “Itty Bitty Piggy,” 2009
Ay-yo, I was on the plane with Dwayne (yo)
You could call me Whitley, I go to Hillman
Listen, I’m the baddest in the school, the baddest in the game
Excuse me, honey, but nobody’s in my lane
I don’t think there are more decisively millennial opening lines than the ones that open Nicki Minaj’s “Itty Bitty Piggy.” Minaj invokes both Whitley and Dwayne from “A Different World” and the man who signed her, Dwayne “Lil Wayne” Carter. A TV show and a rapper so many of us grew up with. I started following Nicki on Myspace as soon as I heard it. My friend and I took to her instantly. Those were the first few years after the storm, a frightening and fast-moving time. I have a lot of good memories though. She’s going to be big, we said.
There was something familiar in her humor and the Caribbean-style mean girl antics that were rooted in such fun. It’s been a wild ride in the years since, in music and life. I’ve listened to Nicki during her career highs and controversies. Through them all, I’ve always appreciated the excited fury she brought to her raps and delivery. The antics of her loyal fan base, better known as the Barbz, are the stuff of legend. In their best form they rally to support the rapper regardless of industry trends; at their worst they bully and dox those they perceive to have offended the Queen. Good, bad and ugly, they make up a self-sustaining and autonomous pop culture community that we hadn’t seen before in rap music and likely won’t again.
While inhabiting a body seemingly cultivated by the male gaze, Nicki mostly eschewed it and instead reveled in her role as their villainous big sister, birth order be damned!
* * *
8a. Mobb Deep feat. Lil’ Kim, “Quiet Storm” (Remix), 1999
I’m a leader, y’all on some followin shit
Comin in this game on some modelin shit
Bitches suck cock just to get to the top
I put a hundred percent, in every line I drop
8b. Lil’ Kim feat. Mary J. Blige, “Hold On,” 2000
But still, I feel my strength might die
Like right now, I’m tryin’ hard not to cry
Even when I close my eyes, I still see it
Damn, I just don’t believe it
The bad times I buried, like the cemetery
I been with my nigga before he came in the game
No one’s, no V’s, we used to take the train
Just us and the M.A.F.I.A. goin’ out to parties
I guess back then we was real nobodies
Grief is forever and complicated. Its stages swirl but don’t end, and fracture comes with processing who you were before and after major loss. For me the loss of a partner and the loss of New Orleans are forever intertwined. Just three years after Katrina wreaked its havoc, my one-year-old’s father passed away suddenly in 2008. Though the cause of his death was inconclusive and though I can’t prove it, I know that week in New Orleans of no food, no water, extreme stress had a hand.
I write fiction to understand others and myself more, to work through the things that are too big for justice, recompense, or resolve. Sometimes people ask if it is autobiographical and the answer is both no, not at all, and yes, of course. But the important part is what we glean from the story and its telling and retelling.
Lil Kim’s legacy is complicated and sometimes overshadowed by the men who surrounded her career. Inevitably someone will mention Biggie’s contribution to the lyrics of Hard Core; rarely will they mention the great albums and songs she made that followed his death. Her verse on Mobb Deep’s “Quiet Storm Remix” is one of the genre’s most memorable and there are stories from those present of Kim writing it in minutes. The emotion in her voice on the closing verse of “Hold On” is palpable as she looks back on the times with Biggie no one else was there to witness.
* * *
The DJ announced Three the Hard Way was coming up. Magic City was packed. Bank$ had his own section in the strip club. The four of us sat on sofas, not too close, but in perfect view of the stage. We had our own private platform and pole. The lights went lower and the music louder. The crowd whooped and three girls came out onto the stage. One girl had her hair dyed the color of red, yellow, and orange-blue flames. I knew the other two of them, Panda and Peanutt, from home. Panda’s ass and her breasts had gotten bigger, but her hair was all gone. She was almost bald and what was left was bleach blonde. Peanutt wore a blood-blue Farrah Fawcett wig and put two snakebites under, and a Marilyn Monroe piercing above her lips.
The three of them were doing this trick where Panda positioned herself onto the pole flipped upside down; her feet serving as a base for Peanutt to appear to be lying flat out like a tabletop across them. Peanutt, playing table, gripped the pole with the inside of her thighs, while the fire-haired girl stood atop her and made the fringe on her outfit, and her ass cheeks, and the meat on them move in all different directions. Strippers are strong people. They called that shit the spinning top.
“I know them,” I said.
“Who?” Bank$ asked.
“The bald one. And the blue-haired one with the piercings.” I watched as they exited the stage and collected their roses, while the floor man collected their trash bags full of dollars.
I motioned in Panda’s direction. She saw me and Bank$ and a big smile spread across her face. She was cute with those two little golds. We were still here. Storm or no storm, no one could say we didn’t still exist. That we hadn’t landed on our feet, at least for the night.
She bounced as she headed over to our section. I picked up a stack of Bank$’s ones and flicked them playfully at her. Sigrid and Mikhel were happy to instigate the scene. Mikhel gave her some more bills and Sigrid laid them out in a heart shape around our pole. Panda hopped up on the platform, swung once around and squatted right down in the middle of the heart. She popped a little, then stood up and put her ass right in my face. I smacked it—hard. The DJ played one of Bank$’ songs and the dollar bills began to fall from the sky.
“Oh yeah? From where?”
“Home. The bald tatted one, she used to fuck with my dude.”
“Nigga won’t tip that one then,” Bank$ rested his weight on my back
for a second and I leaned into it.
“Nah, it’s cool. He’s dead now,” I said.
–from “Drive Slow,” a short story by Kristina Kay Robinson
* * *
9. Mary Lou Williams, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” 1975
Along with making music, I listened to Mary Lou Williams’s sacred music a lot during quarantine. She and the chorus of voices who accompany her on her albums were the extra bodies and souls I craved. Mary Lou’s Mass, Mary Lou Williams Presents Black Christ of the Andes, and The Zodiac Suite were constant companions. I returned to her during many bouts of my own sickness that came in the years that followed.
We live. We write. We record. We go on.
I found a lot of clarity in the practice of recording my own voice. If I am an archive, I will be one in all ways. As a writer sometimes my perspective is welcome; many times it is not. I understand that I am writing against the grain of so many structures that at the root oppose equity for me, so I agree with myself to let those words take the shape they need. Rendered in the semi-permanence of print or the ethereal eternity of sound, I am leaving something behind to be found.
* * *
By the time Kalo gets back home from school most evenings, it’s already dark. Kalo walks mostly main streets, but this evening, she cuts back down the alleyway. Kalo wants to see if Corey is out. He is. Standing on a porch that is barely holding on to the house it’s attached to. A yellow, black, and red bandanna holds his hair back, and his locks stick out around his head like a crown. He will be out here all night. Still here in the morning when Kalo is heading out to school again. Corey won’t move off the spot till all of it is gone. Every last rock.
“You going home?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Wait here a second. Ima walk you back.”
Corey comes back out the house with a freshly rolled cigar, sparks it. Kalo inhales deep and exhales slow. Her knees disappear for a second. Kalo is struck with knowing that no one will ever know the story of The Garden the way they do. As she and Corey head to her house at the very edge of the neighborhood, Kalo tells him, “No matter where it is, I want to go with you.” Corey agrees to this plan and takes her hand. There is no way of knowing what is next for either of them. But they decide that they will go together. The path leading forward, toward power or fire—whichever came first.
–from “Per Capita,” a short story by Kristina Kay Robinson
