In the Eye of the Storm
Fifth Ward Weebie — Fuck Katrina (2005 / New Orleans Bounce)
Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re rebounding from Hurricane Beryl with the Bounce pioneer’s most important song.
It took only two years of living in Houston, Texas before I experienced my first hurricane.
I was nine years old and my family had moved from Los Angeles, just after my sister was born. My mom tells me now, in her adapted drawl, that she didn’t want to leave LA. The first thing I can remember about arriving in Houston was the heat; I arrived by plane from a chilly grey summer in Alaska where my mother’s family is from, and walking off the plane onto the skybridge felt like stepping into a wood burning stove. I also thought the cicadas were rattlesnakes in the trees, shaking their rattles while waiting for me to get close enough so they could drop down and kill me with their venom.
That first hurricane I experienced back in 1983 was named Alicia and it registered a Category III. And for forty-one years after that day, I wouldn’t go through another direct hit again until last week. This hurricane was named Beryl.
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A popular thing to say when expecting a hurricane is that you don’t want to end up on “the dirty side”.
“Let’s just hope it takes a hard right turn when it hits land, don’t wanna be on the dirty side of this thing".
The dirty side is where the wind is. You don’t want the wind. Then again, you don’t want the rain, either. In 2017, Houston got the rain: Harvey dumped over fifty inches on the area as the storm lingered for several days, moving back and forth from sea to land back to sea and immediately back to land, like a cat that can’t make up it’s mind when you open the door. That storm traumatized Houstonians and left people wondering if living on the Gulf Coast was still worth it. After all, hadn’t that been a city marketing slogan:
Houston. It’s Worth It.
In the 1990s, I had a friend whose parents lived in Covington, Louisiana, which is a mere twenty-six feet above sea level. Covington is about an hour drive from New Orleans, much of which is spent on the nearly thirty mile long Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, the world’s longest continuous over-water bridge. One hurricane season a storm looked set to turn hard north in the gulf towards Eastern Louisiana, and we speculated that we were going to see a major hurricane hit New Orleans dead on in our lifetimes, and how that would destroy the city. New Orleans is only six feet above sea level—the depth of a properly dug grave.
Of course, in 2005 that’s basically what happened.
New Orleans had been lucky for a long time. While the city has experienced a plentiful share of major storms (like the catastrophic Camille in 1969), Katrina was the disaster scenario everyone had predicted—the storm surge overpowering the levee systems, the city being claimed by the sea.
You don’t want the wind, and you don’t want the rain, either. But you really don’t want the storm surge.
About a week before Beryl waltzed across Texas, I was having dinner with friends in Vancouver, BC. It was the last night of an all too quick vacation and as we sat around the large table, digesting our food and polishing off numerous bottles of wine, I instinctively checked the weather app on my phone. I’ve always explained away my weather obsession to non-Texans by telling them:
“You have to pay attention, because it can change out of nowhere and kill you”
I seem to have held on to the belief that sinister forces are always at work in Texas, whether they’re dropping down from trees, or lurking in the Gulf of Mexico.
I’d been checking the updates on Beryl as it moved through the Caribbean, engulfing every island in its path to the Gulf of Mexico. I was alarmed at its rapid intensification. I also thought about its drab name; that’s the kind of storm you might want to keep an eye on. You kid about the name and then it drowns your family.
I joked about it that night, telling my friends that it’d be just my luck to get back to Houston and then have to prepare for a hurricane, hahahaha. At that point it was still being tracked to stay course for the area where Texas and Mexico meet. I returned to Houston the next day, in time to prepare for Independence Day, aware but not alarmed.
In fact, I was more concerned for my sister. She had already rented a beach house in Port Aransas for a family vacation, roughly a four hour drive down the coast. Exactly where Beryl was now being predicted to make landfall. So instead, she and her family drove inland to San Antonio to wait it out, planning to then go onward to the beach once things had settled. I thought it was a weird idea, since they could’ve just stayed in Houston to wait, but I was fine with it because they gave me their house for the week they were going to be gone.
Turns out they made the right choice—how ironic, they pre-evacuated a city that was never expected to get more than a bit of cast-off rain to wait out a storm that never got close to where they thought they were being careful to avoid. The storm path redirected, now aimed at Houston.
So I talked with my mom, who was now preparing in her apartment, about ten miles away from me. We’d decided we weren’t overly concerned: It was a Category I and you get used to these things living on the Gulf Coast. Sunday afternoon, I cleared every possible projectile off the patios and into the garage, filled the bathtub with water and watched Oppenheimer. As I was falling asleep around 1 AM, I heard the rain begin; the first outer bands of Beryl had arrived.
Around 6, I woke up, alert. Things were building. My mom texted:
Here we go
A hurricane is a beautiful and frightening experience.
I’m not trying to downplay how dangerous they are, but the amount of force at work is mesmerizing. I stood underneath a covered patio, protected from the winds, smoking cigarettes and watching the large pine trees whip about, huge limbs cracking off the oaks, rain pushing sideways. For five hours.
At one point, I watched the neighbor across the street take his dog out, then promptly bring the dog back inside—only to return to the driveway and hop in his Land Rover to snuggle it up against the house, out from under the giant oak that shaded his driveway. No less than twenty minutes later, that big beautiful post oak had fallen onto his driveway where his vehicle had been, and across the entire street, blocking any future traffic out of the neighborhood. It was incredible. Later, as all the neighborhood guys worked with chainsaws to break the tree completely down, I heard him say he’d just moved here a few months before.
Welcome to Houston.
When Katrina sank New Orleans in 2005, I was living in Austin. We were glued to the television, watching as 500 miles away the world was ending. I can’t imagine how my then-partner must have felt as things went from bad to worse. She had just moved to Texas from Canada; by then I was numb to the horrors of this country. We watched the Canadian Mike Meyers fumble to respond to Kanye’s truth, live on TV—back when Kanye had real clout. It felt like a mirror, maybe. I can’t say I was shocked in the slightest in how the government met the moment and that sounds so sad and cynical to speak aloud but it’s true. A pretty good eye-opener for freshly landed new Americans.
While Austin took in evacuees, Houston took on more. One of those evacuees was rapper Fifth Ward Weebie.
On a Monday, after the hurricane but while things were very much still, for lack of better way to put it, fucked up, a guy I shared an office with told me about being at a club that weekend, when the deejay threw on a song with the call and response:
Fuck Katrina, Fuck Katrina
He said the crowd went nuts.
Legend has it that Weebie was playing a club in his newly adopted Houston, and made an impromptu change to one of his songs. It was an instantaneous release for everyone in the crowd, the pressure cooker blowing its lid. Within days, a new Fifth Ward Weebie track was hitting mixtapes.
I called Red Cross, they refused to pay
That bitch George Bush, he was on delay
FEMA playing games, so I had to get me
I want that second check for 23
Within the first four lines, he’s broken down just how broken down the whole system really is for people in need. Beginning the song with FEMA’s automated answering message is both funny and frustrating. But his rage isn’t militant. He calls out all the wards. He cracks on both Katrina and the following storm Rita. He jokes about blowing FEMA checks at Houston’s Sharpstown mall. Using party music, he unifies us—while particularly speaking for everyone in New Orleans—especially the Black population that suffered tragically disproportionate loss, he’s also bringing in everyone who witnessed and understands America at its most dysfunctional. We’re all brought to bear the frustration, and it’s the type of frustration familiar to anyone who isn’t rich in the world’s richest nation. Fuck Katrina. Fuck George Bush. Fuck FEMA.
In Houston, energy is deregulated. Which means that there is a free market system for energy providers.
This is bullshit. Centerpoint is pretty much what you’re stuck with here. It’s kind of baffling, but if you want an idea of how it works, there’s this. So regardless of who you pay your bill to, it’s dished out up the chain by Centerpoint. So if Centerpoint has a problem, chances are you have a problem. At my mom’s apartment, she loses power almost any time there’s a storm.
Houston is set to be the 3rd largest city in the US. It should have a functional energy structure. And a backup plan for emergencies. Hurricanes happen regularly. It’s insane.
I’m reminded of Firth Ward Weebie because last week I saw a video on Instagram. In the club, two women were dancing while holding a sign that said:
Fuck Centerpoint.
Because by then, 2 million people had been without power for almost a full week. Have you ever been to Houston in the summer? If not, imagine every morning when you walk out the door, someone wraps you in a hot, wet down comforter and sends you on your way. My mom’s apartment was without power for six days. By then, she’d lost every item in her freezer and most of what was in the refrigerator1. We were lucky because a mere ten miles away, my sister’s power came back on after three days—her power is provided by Entergy, which is based in…New Orleans. So we camped there while my sister finished out their time in Port Aransas. So far, eighteen people have died, the majority of them elderly—from heat exhaustion.
Fuck Katrina. Fuck George Bush. Fuck Centerpoint.
America is busted. This system we’re trapped in is sooo busted. The CEO of Centerpoint is named Jason Wells. Add him to that list above. Centerpoint has a history of questionable salaries for CEOs—while Wells’s base salary is reported at $1.5 million, his package with stocks is around $7 million for this year. Centerpoint has toned things down though: in 2022 it was reported then CEO David Lesar pulled $33 million in stocks, although I’ve also read in 2024, his compensation package was $16 million at his retirement. Either way, it’s an unconscionable amount of money.
Before Centerpoint, our Jason was CFO at Pacific Gas & Electric when the utility declared bankruptcy. This was because they were being held liable in a number of lawsuits brought by victims of wildfires like the 2021 Dixie fire, for failure to properly manage the forest and electrical equipment. Jason and Centerpoint are currently facing major backlash for the response to Beryl, how easily trees took down their lines and how AWFUL their energy outage tracking was. It’s so typical: cut costs for the quarter by not doing the necessary work to avoid issues, let the long term play out and if there’s a snag, tie it up in the courts. Centerpoint will recoup the recovery costs by upping rates on users. Nothing will happen to Jason. He will make $7 million dollars this year. Houston has a 1 in 6 chance of being hit by a Category III or higher this season. There are still four more months to go. Centerpoint won’t be prepared.
When the Soviet Union’s marriage to Communism began to speed up in collapse, the oligarchs started dismantling the state. In the US, they didn’t even wait for the speed up, they precipitated it. Or maybe it was always this way and we were just too glued to the TV (or our phones) to notice until it became so obvious.
I wanted to dive deeper into how songs like “Fuck Katrina” operate, the type of resiliency that comes out of disaster and how it’s always the people who rebuild their communities. But I’m unable to shake a thought that someone close texted me yesterday:
…sick of every city needing to be “strong”
People in Houston are sick of having to be “Houston Strong”. Instead, people are Houston Tired.
Fuck Katrina. Fuck George Bush. Fuck Beryl. Fuck Jason Wells.
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Musik Klub: “Everythang’s Workin”
We tried to go meet my sister after day two. We loaded all perishables into coolers, but only had a few ice packs and a small bit of ice that hadn’t yet melted. We got about twenty miles down the road before I ran over some unseen debris, causing a flat tire. I won’t explain the ordeal that followed trying to get that dealt with, but we ended up returning to where we started, tired, frustrated and hot. I wrote a horror story in my head about this.
In Oregon, we are told "the big one" may happen in our lifetime and Portland will collapse and the coastal towns will be sucked out into the incoming tsunami. The ultimate doomsday scenario that America loves.
But then again, it may not happen in our lifetime. 300, 600, 1000 years overdue in the life of a massive sheet of rock is a blip in time. But every fucking year, without fail - tornadoes and hurricanes hit huge swaths of our country.
When we were in Peru a few weeks ago, a 7.2 earthquake hit. The next day everybody was talking about it. I didn't feel it, but my wife did. Apparently, the bed in our hotel was shaking. The four Pisco Sours I consumed that night made my bleary head sleep right through the fucker. But, just like Texans - Peruvians and Chileans are hardened to the Nazca and South American plates rumbling - A LOT. They get on with it, they laugh about it the next day. They also don't want to be on the "dirty side."
Groovy track - those hardened souls in the 5th and 9th Ward know how to get on with life after the dirty side turns up on their door.