A lot to answer for

"Nothing got did." -- Dr. John, on post-Katrina reconstruction in New Orleans

MORE THAN three years after Katrina's floodwaters receded, New Orleans remains a long way from recovery. The city and its people are still awash in a flood of greed, indifference, corruption and neglect at the hands of federal and local government, corporations and land developers, and right-wing ideologues bent on putting their free-market palaver into practice.

While the Superdome and the French Quarter have been restored for the tourists, the reality for the majority of the city's residents is much grimmer: Three-fifths of the people who left during Katrina haven't returned--the mostly Black and poor Lower Ninth Ward, devastated by the storm, has only 11 percent of its pre-Katrina number of households.

And those who managed to return have found public housing gutted--of the city's 142,000 housing units damaged or destroyed by Katrina, 79 percent were low-income housing--while rent has gone up 46 percent since the storm. Nearly 7,000 families are still living in FEMA trailers in the metro New Orleans area.

To add insult to injury, 4,500 public housing units, though undamaged by Katrina, were bulldozed to make way for 900 "mixed-use" units. When residents protested this decision by the City Council, they were tear-gassed and tasered by New Orleans police. Huge swathes of the city remain devastated and without electricity--creating what residents call the "jack-o-lantern" effect at night, small areas of light surrounded by a sea of darkness.

Public schools have been replaced by largely for profit charter schools with no public accountability and little room for children with special needs, while the health care system remains in a shambles, particularly after the closure of Charity Hospital, the city's largest public hospital, after the storm. Public transportation has been cut by 80 percent.

A stark symbol of today's New Orleans can be found under the Claiborne Avenue overpass for Interstate 10--referred to as "Under the Bridge," it used to be a place where Mardi Gras Indians convened and where second-line parades would often pass because of the acoustics. Now it's a growing encampment of some of the city's 12,000 homeless and is regularly harassed by the police, who have started staging sting operations in the area, leaving beer and cigarettes on the dashboards of open cars and charging people who take them with "simple burglary"--a felony punishable by up to 12 years in prison.

WHILE OTHER New Orleans musicians have addressed the city's struggles during and after Katrina--notably Chris Thomas King's album Rise and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band's cover of Marvin Gaye's classic What's Going On--none have done it better than Dr. John and The Lower 911 in City That Care Forgot.

Like Louis Armstrong, Professor Longhair and the Neville and Marsalis families, Dr. John is a New Orleans icon--his name, voice and music synonymous with the city where jazz was born, and where playing the tuba or the trombone never stopped being cool. So when he weighs in, it's time for us all to stop and listen. And he doesn't disappoint.

In the song "City That Care Forgot," co-written by New Orleans legend Bobby Charles, whose own house was destroyed by the flood, he sings:

Uptown everything looks fine...
(but) When you get down to the lower 9
The smell of death still hangs on the honeysuckle vine
Magnolias lie on the streets in the city that care forgot
Everything been strung up and shot in the city that care forgot.

"It's tragic, the lack of help, the places people are living. This has affected every area of New Orleans across the board...This is definitely racist and definitely an ugly thing," he said in a recent interview.

The album doesn't mince words. In "Dream Warrior," a dark, funky tune that harkens back to his days as "The Night Tripper," he sings:

So you tell yo Miss Billie Holiday the strange fruit of today ain't hangin' from no tree
layin' on the ground, left to rot where they drowned
like some monument to some slaver's pride
you know me, I can't let that slide.

But the racism during and after Katrina isn't just about the official neglect of a mostly Black and poor population abandoned during the flood. In one of the album's darkest and angriest songs, "Say Whut?" he refers to stories which have surfaced of a series of killings of Black evacuees in the city's mostly white Algiers Point neighborhood by racist white vigilantes (and as yet virtually uninvestigated by the New Orleans Police Department):

They tell me forgive, they tell me forget
Ain't nobody charged for the murders yet
Half of the story ain't never been told
All these "drowning victims" full of bullet holes.

THE ALBUM'S also not afraid to connect the dots. In the same song, he sings "Blackwater rollin' like they're in Iraq/Shootin' women and children in the back" referring to the role mercenaries from Blackwater Security played in patrolling the city in the days after Katrina, as well as in Iraq.

And in "Black Gold" he draws a straight line from New Orleans to Iraq, pointing a finger at the same politicians and corporations who profited both from the war and the destruction of southern Louisiana's wetlands, leaving the city more vulnerable to the storm:

Say there ain't Global Warming, it's lies, whys and alibis
Make a killing off the money, they think they so wise
Send our children off to war, they don't care how long or how far
Send our children off to die without a single tear in their eye...
Our phones is tapped, our lives is bugged
Even our veterans bein' treated like thugs...
All for the love of that fonky old black gold.

The album also describes the more personal battles being fought every day in New Orleans as people try to rebuild their lives and protect their neighborhoods and culture, particularly in the face of the indifference if not outright hostility of the city government and the notoriously corrupt New Orleans Police Department. In "We Getting' There," he talks about New Orleans' rising suicide rate, three times what it was before Katrina and no surprise in a city where services for the mentally ill have been gutted while depression and post-traumatic stress disorder have reached epidemic proportions.

And "My People Need a Second Line" is both a call for solidarity (the "second line" in a New Orleans street parade is the dancers, who line up behind the band and the friends and relatives of the person who's died), and a defense of traditional funeral parades. It was written after the police broke up a funeral procession in October 2007 for Kermit James--a New Orleans tuba player--in the Treme, one of the oldest Black neighborhoods in the country and home to many of the city's neighborhood-based social and pleasure clubs.

This harassment of the traditional parade culture, which continues today, is particularly ironic since executives and conventioneers, Hurricanes in hand and slung with Mardi Gras beads, regularly parade in mock "second lines" throughout the French Quarter, often with police protection.

But City That Care Forgot isn't just about the words--it's the music that dominates, ranking with Dr. John's best. While studded with guest appearances (Willie Nelson, Ani DiFranco, now a resident of New Orleans, and Eric Clapton, surprisingly playing his most inspired guitar in years), it's carried by The Lower 911 alongside Dr. John's funky piano rolls and organ licks, outstanding horn arrangements, and some stellar New Orleans talent--including Trombone Shorty, Wardell "The Creole Beethoven" Quezergue and trumpeter Terrence Blanchard, who scored Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke. While it lays bare the city's broken heart, City That Care Forgot also struts New Orleans' soul.

City That Care Forgot is both haunting and unforgettable, and the message is clear--the floodwaters may be gone, but the battle for New Orleans continues. Like the good Doctor says,

Crime after crime, lie after lie
So many people go crazy when you leave 'em to die
This thing ain't over, don't close that door
There's a whole lot of shit to be answered for.