Category: bounce

Bounce music is an energetic style of New Orleans hip hop music which is said to have originated as early as the late 1980s. As hip-hop started to spread outward from its birthplace in the Bronx. One of the new localities that embraced and advanced the genre was New Orleans.

Local producers and record label owners with past success in other black genres tried their hand at hip-hop. But soon a new generation got involved.

Kevin “MC T. Tucker” Ventry, one of the first Bounce artists, captured the attention of the city in 1991 with his style of rap “defined by a preference for chanted refrains…and the use of several core samples to form the backing music,” two characteristics which came to signify Bounce music. The subgenre flourished in the city without much national recognition. But soon New Orleans’ artists would take over the country.

In the second half of the 1990s, No Limit Records and Cash Money Records, led by Master P, Beats by the Pound and Birdman, Mannie Fresh respectively, took over.

Those artists, while based in Bounce music, certainly saw their ties to the art form “become progressively more tenuous as their national exposure and wealth increased.