Like many transplants, Campanella hadsuccumbed to the social pressure to think of Bourbon Street as an ersatz and degrading freak show best viewed as cultural negative space. I avoided it in my perambulations, glibly denounced its inauthenticity (as if I were the arbiter of reality), and discouraged newcomers from going there.
He had learned, as all newcomers do, “that declaring disdain for Bourbon Street is the first step toward showcasing [one’s] taste and gaining insider status.”
But he was moved to see that Bourbon Street was the first part of the city to return to operation, “put on a party face,” and go on with its business—which is the business of making money. “I couldn’t think of a better model for the city to emulate,” he writes. His book argues that Bourbon Street, long considered an R-rated theme park—a convenient gutter into which all of the drunk tourists can be swept—remains, in many ways, the “heartbeat” of the city. This is a truth that will sit uneasily with natives and transplants alike.
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It is here, halfway through the book, that Campanella rounds into his main argument: that a street largely seen as phony, sleazy, and shamelessly pandering to tourists is in fact utterly democratic, organic, and—that word again—authentic. As Campanella points out, Bourbon Street has no central entity, organizing body, corporate support, or marketing branch. The businesses on the street are owned and operated almost exclusively by New Orleans natives (the main exception are the strippers, who tend to come from all over the South, there not being enough strippers native to New Orleans to support the high demand).And not all locals shun it: the lower part of the street is the city’s main gay public space, home to the city’s first gay bar and the widely attended Southern Decadence festival; and despite a legacy of racism and segregation, the street remains relatively popular among local African-Americans, who tend not to care too deeply about questions of “authenticity.”
Bourbon Street exists in its current form—strip clubs, daiquiri bars selling drinks like the Hand-Grenade and the Jester (“The World’s Strongest Drink”), clubs featuring live bands playing Journey and Bon Jovi songs—only because this form is exactly what most tourists want, and will pay for. In 2012, nine million people visited New Orleans; more than seven million of them came to Bourbon Street. One veteran of the street interviewed by Campanella even goes so far as to say that Bourbon businesses don’t want locals on the street because they don’t spend as much as the tourists.
Transplants who protest that the street panders to tourists miss the point. Bourbon Street has to appeal to tourists in order for the city to survive. Tourism is today New Orleans’s leading industry, responsible for supporting the local economy in a city that, despite the recent boom, remains severely underpopulated. One out of every twenty jobs in New Orleans is located on Bourbon Street. Campanella estimates that it produces billions of dollars a year for the city. If most tourists mistake each other for locals, and see Bourbon Street as a true representation of New Orleans, it’s not the city’s loss. It’s the city’s gain.
Campanella is most persuasive, and most gleefully subversive, when he contrasts Bourbon Street to the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, beloved by “cultural cognoscenti” for its vast array of regional food offerings, musical acts, and exhibits devoted to local culture. You do not see beads at Jazz Fest, or flashing coeds, or Bourbon T-Shirts (“I Got Bourbon Faced on Shit Street”). The festival, as Campanella notes, “sees itself as a cultural refuge from all that phoniness.” Yet Jazz Festwas invented by a man from Massachusetts as part of a worldwide megafestival circuit—essentially a local franchise of a global chain. Meticulously choreographed and carefully policed, it is managed out of New York, coordinated by crack professionals, “presented by Shell” (a phrase now officially appended to the event’s name), increasingly dependent on global superstar acts, subsidized by an on-site Acura showroom, and funded by Big Oil—not to mention an entrance fee that has risen 400 percent in ten years, to fifty dollars per person [now $70, in fact], more than the median daily take-home pay for most New Orleanians…. Jazz Fest is the epitome of invented, planned, centralized cultural control that leaves nothing to chance and covers its tracks with the trappings and aesthetics of authenticity.
Readers might concede Campanella’s argument about Bourbon Street’s democratic spirit, financial significance, and local pedigree, but still fail to be charmed into loving it. While the spectacle of the street can be fascinating, it is also numbingly predictable. As Campanella writes, “a walk down Bourbon Street today could be swapped for any evening twenty-five years ago with no great noticeable difference.” The hawkers’ patter, the Jesters and Huge Ass Beers, the songs heard (“Margaritaville,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Don’t Stop Believin’”), the tchotchkes and T-shirts sold, the cons practiced by hucksters, the smell (equal parts vomit, beer, and urine), and the placards held by the street preachers (“Party in Hell Cancelled Due to Fire,” “Are You God’s Barf?”) have remained unchanged since the 1980s. (The most obvious difference is the recent decline in public nudity, thanks to the ubiquity of smart phones.) The street shows no sign of changing, either, as the recent defeat of the proposed noise ordinance, which was supported by Mayor Mitch Landrieu, demonstrated. Bourbon Street may not be charming, but it turns a serious profit. The city, and its citizens, ought to be grateful for that.
Sorry for the lengthy quote. It's interesting stuff, imo.
