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Matt Miller. Bounce: Rap Music and Local Identity in New Orleans. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2012. 214 pp. $24.95.
As the field of hip-hop studies has solidified and become a critical entry point for research on race and culture, scholars have tracked the transnational reach of the genre while also highlighting the many regional variations. While books such as Tricia Rose's Hip Hop Wars have measured the global impact of the commodification and circulation of hip hop, and Murray Forman's The 'Hood Comes First underscored the ubiquity of "the street" and "the ghetto" in so much hip hop, there are also case studies ranging from South Central Los Angeles (Marcyliena Morgan's The Real Hiphop) to Tokyo (Ian Condry's Hip-Hop Japan) that have drawn attention to the local specificity of hip-hop scenes.
In the 1990s, after rap was established in New York City and spread to Los Angeles, Southern cities such as Atlanta, Miami, and New Orleans developed their own regional styles known together as "Southern rap" or "Dirty South." Matt Miller's book focuses on one of these nodes of cultural production, New Orleans, where a subgenre called "bounce" became the most recent in a long history of musical forms associated with the city (including jazz, brass band, Mardi Gras Indian, rhythm and blues, and funk). Emerging in the 1990s, bounce featured characteristic rhythms, vocal chants, and lyrical themes that set New Orleans apart and helped to launch...