Rising from the city’s Seventh Ward, Mannie Fresh Mannie Fresh built New Orleans hip-hop from the ground up. BY MARTIE BOWSER
I t’s a Saturday night in the early ’80s in New Orleans, and Otto “DJ Sabu” Thomas Jr. has returned to his Seventh Ward home with his son, Byron, after spinning the latest R&B records and disco tracks at one of his notorious neighborhood block parties. As the evening winds down, he turns on some Marvin Gaye and tells his son to come listen.The veteran DJ encourages the young sponge at his side to intently absorb Marvin’s lyrics and melodies as, he says, the singer’s music will tell tales of life “throughout all time.” Little did Sabu know that, with this advice and example, he was molding the mind that would subsequently shape the future sound of New Orleans. Mannie Fresh estimates that he was ten or eleven the first time he touched the turntables.“I was just messing with my dad’s stuff, not knowing what to do,” he said.“I thought,‘Hey, I’m gonna try this out for a little bit.’ Then I went back to regular stuff and revisited it again when I was around twelve or thirteen.When ‘Good Times’ [by Chic] came out, my dad would cut that record, like back spinning, and I was like, ‘This is incredible.’ Some old-school DJ shit made me fall in love with disco, too. Watching him backspin and break that song down made me say, ‘OK, I got an understanding of what scratching and DJing is.’” With a Numark Mixtrack DJ controller and a set of “terrible” Toshiba turntables, Mannie would soon follow in his father’s footsteps, performing at local parties and school dances. Taking the moniker Mannie Fresh, an alias earned from his love of fashionable sneakers, the young teen set about building a name for himself in the capital of American music.
Mannie’s ability to flawlessly mix on the turntables and create original beats using drum machines made him a perfect fit for a group of DJs and MCs that Denny had formed called NewYork Incorporated. “[DJWop] said, ‘Hey,my cousin’s group is a little more established, and, if we join forces with them, everything will be bigger,’” Mannie recalled. “I had only seen my dad do things like this, but Denny, he kind of knew everything. He grew up in the mecca [of hip-hop] in NewYork. I was blown away the first time I saw him DJ, and I knew it was something that I wanted to learn. I wanted to be with them more than they wanted to be with me because I felt like Denny was so creative and so talented, and the things that he brought to the table we hadn’t ever seen.” Along with sharing different DJ techniques, Denny also introduced Mannie to the concept of rhyming while controlling the turntables, a blending of roles that was not yet familiar in New Orleans.“Some of the songs he blended were crazy,” Mannie recalled. “And the way he would rhyme with the songs, it was more than just a DJ. We didn’t say anything on the mic [before], so it was like,‘Oh, I’ll rock the mic and DJ?’ I definitely wanted to be a part of that .” One night in 1984, New York Incorporated hosted a rap battle at Pentagon, a club that once stood on A.P. Tureaud Avenue in the Seventh Ward. In the crowd was Mannie’s longtime friend, Mia Young, later known as rapper Mia X of No Limit Records fame. With the encouragement of her family, Mia took the stage, shocking everyone at the party, especially Mannie. Impressed by her skills, Mannie, Denny, and Wop brought her and another female rapper known as MC Sporty into their group.“We started going everywhere with Mannie and Denny, and we became the two girls of NewYork Incorporated,” Mia shared. “Sporty and I would break out into freestyles over whatever instrumentals Manny and Wop would play. And we were in that group from ’84 until ’87.” As a fellow Seventh Ward native, Mia was already privy to the legacy of the Thomas family. Her uncle, the New Orleans DJ legend Slick Leo, was a contemporary of DJ Sabu, granting her a bird’s-eye view of the pedigree behind Mannie Fresh. “I was never surprised
Mannie’s burgeoning talents soon put him on the radar of fellow DJ, Denny D.The NewYork transplant was the cousin of Mannie’s close friend and early DJ partner, the late DJ Wop.At the ripe age of fifteen,
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( opening spread ) Mannie Fresh in 2002. Photo by Gregory Bojorquez.
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