The New Law Hell's Gates / 27 votes More

Dutchmassive I Want Her / 27 votes More

FATGUMS X BAMBU Gunslinger / 26 votes More

Boognights Get to Know Me / 187 votes More

Primeridian Hang On (Nicolay Remix) / 533 votes More

BEST BBQ VIDEOS

by Adam Figman

Interview :: MIIKE SNOW

by Travis Hayden

Michael Jackson Tributes

by URB Staff

INTERVIEW: Amazing Baby

by Som Khamsaysoury

Telefone Tel Aviv : Phone Home :: New Orleans expatriates keep the town's sound alive in the Windy City

By Jen Boyles   Photography by Matthew Taplinger

03/28/07 :: URB 141

Even if you weren't there, Hurricane Katrina made a strong impression across the country-not to mention a submerged war-zone out of New Orleans. She left a city brimming with rich musical history overflowing with sewage, backhanding the Big Easy in one guiltless swipe. New Orleans native and Telefon Tel Aviv producer Charlie Cooper, 29, felt like he was powerlessly watching his dearest friend get the ass-whooping of a lifetime, and just when Cooper thought the initial terror might be over, FEMA waltzed in-not with bandages and an outstretched hand but with a tremendous suckerpunch Cooper swore he could feel himself. People closest to the hearts of Cooper and his production partner-childhood best friend, Josh Eustis, were left in the hands of the elements and one chillingly inept government agency-and they could do nothing about it. At least, not at the time.

Proud sons of New Orleans but equally proud Chicago imports since around 2000, Cooper and Eustis turned their living room into a television-equipped watchtower.

"[Friends] were trying to contact the Coast Guard and when all the lines were blocked, they'd all call us and say, 'So-and-so is stuck in a sinking house.'" Cooper tells URB while sipping a drink at the Chicago lounge, Rodan. "My friend's girlfriend's mother was trapped in a house and drowned. I knew other people who died, and a lot of my friends lost everything.

"It hit all of my friends," he continues, still bewildered by the magnitude of it all. "I would come to work daily and just want to cry. At home, I would sit there like, I don't know what to do. But imagine how they feel."

Cooper, whose amiable smile and mannerisms slightly resemble that of actor Jason Schwartzman (post-Rushmore) adds that though he was nauseated that he couldn't be of more help, he was glad he wasn't physically there to witness what he calls "a nightmare of immense proportions."

For the next several months, friends of Cooper and Eustis (and their friends, and their friends' friends) trickled up from the battered Gulf to the Windy City, and the duo's apartment became Orleans Central. At any one time, there could be 10 displaced friends in and out of the place. On a roll and making it his mission to get his friends more happily settled into the Chicago groove, Cooper—who works for a successful restaurateur that owns multiple Chi-Town hotspots—hooked his pals up with regular gigs.

"My boss said, 'I don't care if you have a spot or not, find them one and fit them in wherever we can,'" Cooper explains excitedly. "So we did. They all have the same jobs now as they did a year ago."

As time wore on, Cooper's refugee friends began to get rather homesick, so they all sat around one night and brainstormed-the result: an Orleans "bounce rap" night in Chicago. Think DJ Funk on three bowls of rum-laced jambalaya.  

"It's party music. Party shit." Cooper says, smiling knowingly. "You don't listen to it any other way. It's like Baltimore has this whole booty club stuff now? Well, this is our shit. All the tracks have dances, call-and-response stuff. They ask you to do this dance now, do that dance now, call out your neighborhood!"

Cooper coolly throws his hands in the air and smirks as he says that last line. You can see a twinkle in his eye when he talks about bounce, which, to someone who only knows him as a heady minimal electro producer, is pretty hilarious and somehow really inspiring. He grew up in the 'hood, he says-the equivalent to Chicago's South Side ("But I'm not a Vanilla Ice"). Back home, Cooper befriended the metalheads and the hip-hoppers, who all sort of labeled him the weird kid, but skateboarded and played hoops with him all the same. 

As much as Telefon were influenced by European electro, they grew up with Miami bass, which eventually grew into its own tangent called bounce. And with lines like "It must be the pussy cuz it ain't yo face," what's not to love?

"We were hanging out one night and were like, 'Man, why can't we find a place like [NOLA club] Butler's? Everybody got down with the local shit. It was literally a shack that got closed down in the '70s, and decades later the owner just literally turned the lights back on and started it up again."

Cooper already had a party night in motion before his friends drifted north. So it was a perfect idea to try and turn that night into six hours of New Orleans bounce-rap debauchery.

On the first Monday of the month, the Telefon boys keep finding more New Orleans exports, and about 15 to 20 of them come to their bounce night, which ends up turning Danny's Bar into quite a grindy sweatbox by 2 a.m.-but it's undoubtedly all in fun, and Charlie reminds us of that as he slides a CD full of bounce-rap across the table.

"I'll warn you, the CD can be a little bit racy. . .kinda vulgar. It's all in jest, but it's very gangster-ass shit," Cooper stumbles to find the right words. "A lot of uh. . .terminology?. . .gets thrown around."

Minutes later, Charlie's friend Fredo (who fronts a band called Endian) saunters up to the table with a big funny-running-into-you-here smile and hooded sweatshirt pulled over his forehead. "You should totally meet my friend!" he exclaims and stands up. "He moved up here after Katrina, too."