DJ Jubilee: The King of Bounce

The King of Bounce

Before bounce music was a genre with a name, before Big Freedia took it global, before Drake sampled it on the biggest song of 2018 — there was DJ Jubilee, a kid from the St. Thomas Projects in the Lower Garden District, DJing block parties and inventing a musical movement that would define New Orleans for the next three decades.

Jerome Temple — DJ Jubilee — started DJing at neighborhood block parties in 1990. What he was doing wasn't quite hip-hop, wasn't quite dance music, and wasn't quite anything else. It was call-and-response chants over the Triggerman beat — a sample from the Showboys' "Drag Rap" that would become the rhythmic backbone of an entire genre. It was music designed to make a crowd move, and it worked like nothing else.

Jubilee's 1990 cassette single contains what scholars have identified as the first recorded use of the word "twerk." Let that settle in. One of the most ubiquitous words in modern pop culture — a word that launched a thousand think pieces and a Miley Cyrus controversy — originated with DJ Jubilee at a block party in New Orleans. He also created numerous dances that became foundational elements of bounce culture.

His 1998 album Take It To The St. Thomas debuted at number sixty-one on Billboard's Top R&B albums chart. In 2013, he became the first bounce artist to perform at Preservation Hall — the sacred temple of traditional New Orleans jazz opening its doors to the city's newest musical tradition. That moment said everything about what bounce had become: not just party music, but a legitimate part of the New Orleans musical canon.

DJ Jubilee has released nine studio albums and continues performing. He's the King of Bounce — the man who stood at the beginning of a genre and helped shape it into the cultural force it is today. Every time someone twerks anywhere in the world, they're doing something that started at a block party in the St. Thomas Projects with DJ Jubilee on the mic.