Yesterday I said that the internet needs to make Action Bronson its next YouTube superstar. I think we may need to add New Orleans bounce artist Mr. Ghetto to that list.
Why, you say? Because his new jam, “Walmart,” is one of the most hilarious and ridiculous things I’ve ever seen. It’s basically an ode to the real meat market some people apparently view Walmart as. The song’s intro says it all: “Man forget about going to da club when you want somethin’ new. When I want me somethin’ new, I go get me a basket and I go walk around Walmart. All the women be in Walmart, ya heard me?!”
Later on, Mr. Ghetto romanticizes the notion of ample-bottomed, honey-skinned hotties buying Massengill douches at “Wal-ly World” with their Louisiana Purchase card, which is what Louisiana calls its food stamp program.
The video appears to have been shot guerrilla style at the Walmart on Tchoupitoulas St. in New Orleans, with big asses bouncing around impossibly in the air all over the place, as is bounce music’s proclivity. This is especially hilarious to me for two reasons: a) The Walmart on Tchoupitoulas is the Walmart that I shop at, when I do shop at Walmart, and b) this is the same Walmart that even some members of the New Orleans Police Department looted days after Hurricane Katrina. If you saw Spike Lee’s documentary, When the Levees Broke, you know exactly what I’m talking about. (The looting cops got off, btw.)
Anyway, enough blabber from me, here’s Mr. Ghetto and his ode to Walmart and its women…
On a related note, if you ever get the opportunity to see a bounce show, DO IT. Your eyes will see things they’ve never before seen, and it does seem to be spreading a bit. The New York Times Magazine even devoted a front page feature to it — specifically the gender-bending strain of bounce known as “sissy bounce” round these parts — last year. Here’s how the writer of the piece, Jonathan Dee, described the scene at his first bounce show, a performance by local sissy bounce legend Big Freedia…
Sometime after midnight on the sweltering Thursday before Memorial Day, the giant plasma-screen TVs at the Sports Vue bar (which “proudly airs all major Pay Per View events from the world of Boxing and Ultimate Fighting”) were all switched off, and the bar’s backroom turned into a low-lit, low-ceilinged dance club, where more than 300 people awaited a return engagement by Big Freedia, who by day runs an interior-decoration business and who is, to fans of the New Orleans variant of hip-hop music known as “bounce,” a superstar.
…
At the first sight of the commotion outside the Sports Vue, everyone’s energy level picked up. (Freedia’s manager Rusty) Lazer pulled the minivan into a long maze of cars parked haphazardly all up and down the grass median on Elysian Fields Avenue. Outside the metal detectors at the entrance, cops were pretending to listen to the grievances of two women who had just been thrown out of the bar. “Every night,” Lazer said fondly. While patrons were being patted down by bouncers inside the door, he and Freedia disappeared into the crowd; a few minutes later, the music stopped, and a loud, excited voice yelled into a mic a brief introduction — so brief the longest part of it was the polysyllabic participle between the words “Big” and “Freedia.”
And then something remarkable happened. The crowd — just about evenly divided between men and women — instantly segregated itself: the men were propelled as if by a centrifuge toward the room’s perimeters, and the dance floor, a platform raised just a step off the ground, was taken over entirely by women surrounding Freedia. The women did not dance with, or for, one another — they danced for Freedia, and they did so in the most sexualized way imaginable, usually with their backs to her, bent over sharply at the waist, and bouncing their hips up and down as fast as humanly possible, if not slightly faster. Others assumed more of a push-up position, with their hands on the floor, in a signature dance whose name is sometimes helpfully shortened to “p-popping.”
Go on, get-chu some. You know you wanna! Where y’at, baby?!
(via Mandalay)
