Azz Everywhere: How Bounce Music Hit Big Time
In September, veteran underground New Orleans musician Big Freedia stood atop a makeshift stage in New York’s Herald Square, flanked by two back-up dancers, a Guinness World Records judge and hundreds of would-be twerkers. The event was ostensibly to set a world record for Most People Twerking Simultaneously (they did, with 358 people). But it also highlighted the mainstreaming of twerking and, by extension, bounce music—an uptempo strain of hip hop popularized in New Orleans in the early 1990s designed to make asses, well, bounce.
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