TWERK SOMETHIN'
TWERK SOMETHIN'
Investor & Network Presentation
"The culture keeps moving. The memory stays."
The Story
Born in the neighborhoods of New Orleans and built from a beat, a dance floor, and a culture determined to make something its own, Bounce grew from an underground sound into a global cultural language. Twerk Somethin' traces that journey through the artists, producers, DJs, dancers, photographers, filmmakers, families, and communities who lived it, revealing how a culture created in Black New Orleans survived tragedy, transformed American music, traveled around the world, and now confronts the question of who remembers its origin.
Music gets us through the door. Culture gives the story its scale.
The Sizzle
See the tone, the archive, and the culture before you read another page.
Why This Story, Why Now
Content travels faster than context.
For most of Bounce's history, the culture moved faster than the documentation surrounding it. Records circulated before journalists understood them, dances traveled before anyone recorded who created them. Today a dance created among friends can reach a stadium, a video game, and millions of people who may never know where it began.
Forty Years of Cultural Transmission
Culture travels at the speed of people, parties, DJs, dancers, cars, cassettes.
Radio, record stores, labels, TV, and national distribution expand the reach.
Katrina scatters New Orleanians, carrying the culture into new cities.
YouTube, digital video, and streaming remove geography as a requirement.
Culture reaches the world instantly, while context and attribution struggle to keep pace.
Can culture travel so far that it loses its address?
Structure
How does a community create something entirely its own?
"Drag Rap" reaches New Orleans; DJs, MCs and crowds transform it into Triggerman. A collection of parties, records, and dances becomes Bounce.
What happens when culture becomes valuable?
Cash Money and No Limit prove New Orleans culture can be national business. Local culture becomes national industry, then Katrina approaches.
Can culture survive when the place that created it is disrupted?
The diaspora carries Bounce outward as YouTube and social media build new pathways. A concentrated culture becomes portable.
When everybody participates, who remembers where it came from?
The Griddy travels from a phone to the NFL. Global influence becomes conscious preservation: the Culture Capsule.
Each solution creates the next problem. The culture itself is the protagonist.
Cultural Ecosystem
Bounce did not come from a recording studio alone. It came from an ecosystem: neighborhoods, housing developments, recreation centers, clubs, schools, cars, radio, record stores, barbershops, and family homes. Neighborhood identity mattered: someone created a dance, another saw it, a DJ incorporated it, another neighborhood answered.
It recognizes creative wealth, not poverty.
Bounce's laboratory. A record is tested in real time: does the crowd move, does the call work, does the DJ play it again.
Cassettes, cars, record stores, and flyers functioned as distribution. Polo Silk's camera and Chris Roberts' video became infrastructure.
Second lines, brass bands, and church music share a deeper civic behavior: people are expected to participate, not just observe.
Characters
Not a giant interview list. Every voice has a narrative function.
The Cultural Spine
The Showboys · MC T. Tucker & DJ Irv · DJ Jubilee · Juvenile · Cash Money & No Limit · the Hot Boys · Mia X · Soulja Slim · Katey Red
Big Freedia · Sissy Nobby · Ha Sizzle · Kourtney Heart · Nicky Da B · Allen “Griddy” Davis · Ja'Marr Chase · Justin Jefferson
The person who remembers what happened in the room is as historically valuable as the person holding the microphone.
Evidence
The archive does not illustrate the story. It helps discover it.
Television, newspapers, music videos, commercial recordings, radio, and official documents: America's image of New Orleans at a given moment.
Polo Silk's photographs, Chris Roberts' footage, personal VHS collections, family photographs, flyers, and cassettes: the community's own image of itself.
Someone remembers a flyer: we find it. Someone describes a performance: Chris has the tape. Someone remembers a room: Polo has the photograph. Memory provides emotion; the receipt provides evidence.
Form
VHS tracking errors, compressed early digital footage, and blown-out club footage carry historical information. A VHS tape is not inferior footage. It is a historical object. The form evolves with the history:
VHS, cassette, vinyl, flyers, physical objects.
Music videos, television, stages, national media.
Disaster archive, absence, early digital cameras.
Social media, streaming, search, video games.
Recurring Storytelling Devices
If we turn the sound off, the audience should still know which era they're in. If we turn the picture off, they should still know they're in New Orleans.
Sonic DNA
The Showboys' "Drag Rap" establishes the starting point. Episode One explains how New Orleans DJs, MCs, dancers, and crowds transformed elements of that recording into the Triggerman foundation. After the audience learns it, the rhythm can reappear, mutate, and return across generations. The documentary educates the ear without turning into a lecture.
A second line approaching before we see it. A DJ mic distorting. A crowd answering an MC. A cassette clicking. A buffering video. A stadium crowd. The Mississippi. Silence.
Handmade and analog in Episode One; expanded in Episode Two; fractured and reconstructed in Episode Three; digital and layered in Episode Four, giving way, at the end, to the recording of "Twerk Somethin'."
The Hinge
Katrina does not simply destroy buildings. It disrupts connections.
The DJ loses the room. The dancer loses the crowd. Families scatter. Artists lose equipment and archives. Neighborhoods change or disappear.
No disaster pornography. We use the image because the audience already understands who and what is being affected, not because the image is powerful.
The Rebuild. Displaced New Orleanians carry Bounce into Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, and Baton Rouge. Digital networks begin replacing functions once performed by physical geography.
Episode Three ends with a culture that no longer requires proximity to New Orleans in order to travel.
Four Directors, One Vision
Bounce has never had one voice. Four filmmakers with connections to New Orleans allow the form to acknowledge that multiplicity, while a centralized series architecture preserves continuity.
Narrative discipline and character-centered filmmaking, ensuring a large cultural history remains human.
A documentary perspective rooted in New Orleans. The city does not require an outside filmmaker to explain it to itself.
Memory, family, and displacement, bridging the physical community of the first half with the digital network that follows.
Establishes the series' thesis, chronology, archival pathways, music lineage, and the Culture Capsule ending; directs the finale as the story reaches contemporary digital culture.
Executive Producers & Producers
Carries the series' authority as the artist who took New Orleans language national, lending the production his firsthand command of the culture's commercial breakthrough.
The moving archive behind the series' visual memory, now producing alongside the team that is turning decades of his footage into history.
Different energy. Same rhythm.
Trust
Love the culture enough to tell the truth.
Preservation
The culture keeps moving. The memory stays.
Throughout production, participants are asked one question: if you could leave one piece of this history for someone to discover decades from now, what would it be? The series ends in reverse of how it began. Screens disappear, and records, tapes, flyers, and photographs return to our hands at a riverfront gathering, closed not by institutional authority but by Cheeky Blakk.
"Twerk somethin'."
Reach
You've heard this. You've seen this. You've danced to this. Now let us show you where it came from.
Enter through artists and records they already know.
Enter through character, archive, and American cultural history.
Enter through athletes as cultural distributors: the Griddy.
Enter through social media, dance, and digital culture.
Enter through Cash Money and No Limit as commercial models.
The series is conceived for a premium platform capable of supporting cultural specificity, archival storytelling, music, animation, and screenlife. Its specificity is what makes it global.
"I didn't know that" becomes "What else don't I know?"
Ready to Build
The Package & The Ask
We are seeking a producing and distribution partnership capable of taking a fully developed creative vision into a premium four-part documentary event. The right partner does not need to redefine what the project is. The opportunity is to protect the authenticity already present.
We are not looking for someone to tell us what Bounce is. We are looking for the partner who understands what this can become.
The Vision
"I know enough to recognize the difference between somebody explaining New Orleans and somebody remembering New Orleans."
"Bounce was created to make people move. I do not want to make a history lesson."
"We can preserve the history while the culture is still here to tell us what it means."
E R O N, Creator, Writer & Producer
"The culture keeps moving. The memory stays."