They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib

Author:Hanif Abdurraqib [Abdurraqib, Hanif]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Burning That Which Will Not Save You: Wipe Me Down And The Ballad Of Baton Rouge

I. Shoulders

When people talk about hurricane katrina, particularly in the national conversation, they focus almost exclusively on New Orleans. That city, of course, bore the wrath of the storm’s center—uncovering a failing of local and national government and infrastructure before, during, and well after the hurricane, with effects from it still lingering to this day. But with the lens pulled back, the full story of Hurricane Katrina is not only about water and the dead. It’s also a story of the living, of place and displacement.

Think of Baton Rouge, which Katrina’s weather impacted in less direct ways. In the days leading up to and especially after the hurricane, when New Orleans became uninhabitable, the population of Baton Rouge swelled, almost overnight. Tens of thousands of New Orleans residents made the short journey up Interstate 10 to seek shelter in Louisiana’s capital city, causing it to burst at the edges. The school system took in nearly 6,000 new students, causing immediate overcrowding. Traffic swelled, making navigation of the city nearly impossible. No matter how good a city’s infrastructure is, there is no preparing for an unexpected population increase that rapid.

There was also a swelling of violence. In the years after Katrina, while many of the evacuees settled into their new city and gave up on returning to their old one, the murder rate across Baton Rouge briefly soared, well beyond that of other cities its size. In 2004, homicides per capita in East Baton Rouge parish were at 14.5 per 100,000 people. By 2007, that number had jumped to 21 per 100,000. Residents and law enforcement insisted that this wasn’t simply due to the influx of new bodies in the city, but rather to the lingering state of crisis and uncertainty, where crime can thrive.

So the story underneath the story is about the weight one city can carry on its own. The edges of New Orleans broke open, and there was a flood, and those fortunate enough to escape the flood became a flood themselves, and pushed the edges of another city to its breaking point. Homelessness in Baton Rouge rose, briefly and dramatically, in the years following the hurricane. People were making homes wherever there was land not touched by the ruin of the hurricane and its memory.

In 2007, less than two years after the face of Baton Rouge shifted, the remix to Foxx’s “Wipe Me Down,” featuring fellow Baton Rouge MCs Lil Boosie and Webbie, was released as a single. The original version, released a few months earlier, was a Baton Rouge street classic, but got little traction elsewhere. Comparing the original version’s music video with the video for the remix, released months after the single began creeping up the charts, is an almost comedic endeavor. The original video is blurry and shot at odd angles, while various tags and ads tremble across the screen. In the remix, there is gloss, jewelry, all of the trappings of the mid-to-late-2000s rap video aesthetic.

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