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Sub Sub Mariner

New Swamp City, LA

About

Way back in 2005 we naively believed all that talk about restoring wetlands and levee protection. We could tell George Bush's forced speech in Jackson Square was insincere but we felt the nation's sympathies were a better guarantee anyway. This protection is so simple to provide - pile up more dirt on the existing levees and pipe some of the nourishing Mississippi River water into the wetlands. Well, it didn't happen and the lack of protection plus global warming resulted in a devastated city that is permanently flooded. It was not long before the early Republican lead started a larger exodus and today only a few of us are still living in our flooded houses and keeping New Orleans' culture alive.

How? Well I consider myself the only underwater archaeological ethnomusicologist in the world. The police think I am a simple looter. As a compromise, let's consider that I am recycling abandoned music collections from flooded homes. Recycling was a fine profession, until I made a surprising discovery which legitimized my underwater, archaeological, ethnomusicologist title. Bear with me, this needs some explanation.

It is difficult to imagine a modern city completely devoid of sound. In flooded New Orleans, there are no human, animal or even insect sounds in a city. It is perfectly quiet, so quiet that I thought I was imagining things when I began hearing music. I was worried about my hearing, and maybe even my sanity, so I spent months trying to record this music and finally created a combination microphone and magnetic tape pick-up device that sporadically recorded up some very faint music. At first, I figured it was picking up distant radio broadcasts until I stumbled into an amazing discovery.

While I was underwater, archaeologically, ethnomethodologisting myself to a warm Dixie beer at Tipitinas I playfully interviewed the rusty Professor Longhair bust with my goofy recorder. When I played it back later that night, I was shocked to hear a loud and clear recording of the Neville Brothers show. I went back to Tipitinas the next day and pointed the mic in a different direction and it picked up a Billie Jo Shavers/Kinky Friedman show. Whoa, what have we here?

I think this is how it works - New Orleans' unique combination of humidity and our inability to install water-proof roofs established a coat of rust on all the metal of New Orleans decades ago. Nails, support beams, conduit, all metal in New Orleans has a coat of rust just like the iron oxide (rust) coating on magnetic recording tapes. And like recording tape, the iron oxide particles are shaped by the electromagnetic waves emitted from electrical power sources - including musical amplifiers. So when I pointed my recording device at the rusty metal bust of Professor Longhair in Tipitina's, it picked up the sound magnetically imprinted by the Neville Brother's amplifiers during their 1997 show. I then went out to the Fairgrounds and pointed my recorder at the race track guard rail and got a great JazzFest set by Little Band Of Gold. You can listen to that recording on the "music player" portion of this site by selecting:

New Orleans Year 2025 - Pirate Radio Audition.

Oh yeah, and it also picks up old radio and television shows and you can often hear these snippets of popular culture between songs in my radio show. Which is all a long-winded introduction leading to why I'm staying in New Orleans. I'm going to keep broadcasting this music from my flooded house to keep the culture alive. Broadcasting? Oh, I guess that requires some explanation too.

Radio towers are usually not located near the station's studio. Instead, the station's signal travels along a wireless microwave link to the radio tower where it is amplified and transmitted on the station's frequency. To broadcast my radio show, I hijack WWOZ's microwave link by using a much higher-powered microwave link that I aim at the radio tower's receiving dish. My much stronger signal overwhelms and drowns out the microwave signal from WWOZ's studio. The radio tower transmitter then simply transmits what it hears, my signal. I should just go volunteer at WWOZ but the radio piracy is a continuum of the finest New Orleans' cultural traditions.

Yeah, I know I living here in a flooded city means I have to dodge gangs and police but that has always been the situation and I'm one of many music lovers who cannot leave this city. And you know that unless we continue to broadcast the unique music and culture of this city, this petri dish for great writers, artists, and musicians will dry up.

Best,

Sub Mariner a.k.a. "The Substitute Mariner"
The love child of Prince Namor and Gracie Allen.

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