Freedia is widely credited with popularising bounce music, which found its roots in the New Orleans underground in the early nineties. While her detractors would file her music under the “sissy bounce” side of the genre, Freedia maintains that it’s all bounce, that there’s no need for the division. For those in the know, Freedia was a cult icon before she featured as a voice over along side Messy Mya on Beyonce’s Formation single.
From performing raucous, sexually aggressive sets at Berghain to collaborating with RuPaul, Freedia is known for her high energy voice and sexually explicit lyrics which position her as a proudly sexual body. As a gay man who’s gender performance is far from binary, however, her spirited words and characteristic voice have often been used by mainstream artists who don’t necessarily want to platform Freedia’s image, it straying too far from the acceptable realms of the mainstream as a black queer body.
Freedia continues to push for her representation, “that’s something we’re steady working towards to make it happen,” she told The Fader. Gin in My System is one of Freedia’s original hits, and the video which features people ass-bouncing across a bunch of Freedia’s gigs, a trademark of a devoted Freedia audience.