her 12th year
claimed to see God
Black boys
on bottle caps
heard voices
strangled in dance step
Sourced from the broken wind
of overgrown sea
hormones
within the waves
dismantled
more black than white keys
Some songs we cannot sing
until we cross to the other side
New Orleans is at a crossroads
Music is at a crossroads
America is at a crossroads
—SAUL WILLIAMS (2009)
Saul Williams’s words, speaking of the power and possibility in creative work, the spirit, the natural world, human identities, and collective sensibilities, come from the liner notes of a 2010 CD titled Dear New Orleans.1 Released in August 2010 to commemorate the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and to respond to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the album was produced by Air Traffic Control (ATC), a nonprofit organization supporting activism, advocacy, and philanthropy among musicians.
Dear New Orleans consists of thirty-one tracks recorded by some of the sixty participants in the “artist activism retreats” in New Orleans that have been sponsored since 2006 by ATC and the Future of Music Coalition (FMC), the latter of which addresses policy, legal, technological, and economic issues on behalf of musicians.2 These retreats have brought musicians from across the United States together with local musicians, organizers, community leaders, tradition bearers, and other artists. According to ATC, retreat participants’ interaction with local artists and activists left them with the “feeling that their lives have been changed by what they have experienced in New Orleans and with a sense of empowerment for what they can accomplish through their music and activism.” These collaborations have, in fact, led outside musicians to engage in philanthropic fundraising for and activism on behalf of New Orleans–based community and grassroots organizations. They have also inspired a number of musical collaborations among participants. These two sets of practices come together on Dear New Orleans. In addition to offering some compelling music, the album raises money for Sweet Home New Orleans, which supports New Orleans cultural workers, and the Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental organization dedicated to protecting coastal wetlands and other projects.3
As a listener, I like the breadth of this album. The performances on it represent a range of genres—pop, jazz, country, R&B, folk, rock—and a diversity of inspirations. Some songs are directly about the city or Katrina. Others are merely thematically connected to New Orleans or the storm. Others simply remind artists of the city or were performed live at retreat concerts. I also like the ways the fusion of genres comes together powerfully on successive tracks and within individual performances. Listen to the way jazz pianist Vijay Iyer’s mournful, tense original instrumental “Threnody” sets the stage for “Where Is Bobbie Gentry?,” singer songwriter Jill Sobule’s haunting follow-up to Gentry’s 1967 number one hit, “Ode to Billie Joe,” sung in the voice of the grown-up ghost of the aborted baby that, according to some interpretations, is the object that the narrator of “Billie Joe” threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge. And dig Nicole Atkins and trombone-centric band Bonerama’s version of Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie’s “When the Levee Breaks” (as appropriated by Led Zeppelin). With its loose and bluesy horn arrangements, its distorted electric guitar and trombone solos, and Atkins’s fantastic rendition of Robert Plant’s caterwauling, it is simultaneously a brilliant parody of classic rock excess and a politically on-the-mark recontextualization of this blues lament about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. And to use a certain vernacular, it absolutely rocks.
As a writer, I appreciate what Dear New Orleans represents as it marks Katrina’s fifth anniversary. The producers and musicians framed it as a response to New Orleans Times-Picayune writer Chris Rose’s epistolary editorial “Dear America,” published eight days after the storm hit. Rose expressed gratitude to the Americans who reached out to shelter the displaced and who sent resources or came in person to the city to rescue and rebuild. His letter was also a statement of local pride—in the place and its unique culture, and more importantly, in the people. It spoke of the resiliency of New Orleans residents and what they would offer the nation in the future. “So when all this is over and we move back home, we will repay to you the hospitality and generosity of spirit you offer to us in this season of our despair. That is our promise. That is our faith.” And in response, five years later, “America” wrote back to New Orleans in the liner notes to Dear New Orleans, expressing our regret for the “super shitty things [that] keep happening to you” and for only writing when they do. America was thankful, too, for the city’s music, even if we could not quite figure out what to make of it. But beyond just a “sorry” and “thank you” that were not quite adequate, America sent back some music “we made while thinking about you”—and some money.4
Dear New Orleans performs an economy of obligation that has surrounded the city over the past several years, of political and moral failings needing to be rectified. Something we know all about, at least if we are willing to read against our own forgetfulness and many of the accounts offered by the corporate media. We know, then, about the damage caused by the winds and the rain, as well as the more devastating surge of water that overwhelmed the levee system and flooded 80 percent of the city. And the long-standing knowledge that the levees might fail, and the federal government’s failure to maintain them despite that knowledge. And the deplorable conditions Katrina victims faced at the Superdome and Convention Center. And the delays in the arrival of active duty troops and National Guard personnel to rescue them. And the rapes and murders. And the exaggerated reports of rapes and murders and the concomitant “elite panic” that made the rescue efforts such a disaster as they put less focus on rescuing victims than on protecting others from them.5 And the police and vigilante killings. And the cluelessness of President George W. Bush and his mother. And the 1,800 plus officially counted dead in the immediate aftermath and the many more who died later from inadequate medical care, stress, or grief. And the suicides. And long-term and permanent displacement. And the innocent and minor offenders lost for months and years in jails and prisons. And the difficulty people have had extracting money to rebuild from governments and insurance companies. And the toxic FEMA trailers. And the unscrupulous contractors. And the diminishing workers’ rights, the scaling back of environmental regulations, and other manifestations of “disaster capitalism,” in which elites use a crisis to lessen state protections and further their market-friendly political agenda.6 And the closure of structurally sound Charity Hospital and public housing projects. And gentrification, planned and unplanned. And high rents. And the failures of the social safety net and the criminal justice system. And the fired public school teachers and a privatized public school system that still fails families without financial means. And joblessness and poorly paid jobs. And ultimately, as many of these phenomena attest, the ways poor people (especially black poor people) have been most dramatically affected by these things while being blamed for their own suffering.
But five years after the storm, this musical exchange also marks an important economy of inspiration and a horizon of possibility rooted in the heroic deeds of New Orleanians who have tried with varying degrees of success to bring their city back as they knew it or wanted it to be. And rooted also in the work of outsiders who have expressed their care for and dedication to the city. As Rebecca Solnit notes, disasters bring out the worst in some human beings but some of the very best in others, especially in a world defined increasingly by “private life and private satisfaction.” “Disasters,” she continues, “in returning their sufferers to public and collective life, undo some of this privatization, which is a slower, subtler disaster all its own.”7 And there seems something particularly special about the ways many New Orleanians have risen to the occasion of Katrina.
We saw this public response begin immediately with