That's why the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina might appear predictable in hindsight. For all the city's structural and social decay, something was bound to go wrong in New Orleans.
The veteran British journalist Nik Cohn knows the feeling, and he captures it with uncommon clarity in ''Triksta," a dry-eyed love song to a city masquerading as a hard-bitten memoir. It's the highly unlikely tale of a 60-something white man's descent into the underworld of New Orleans's hard-core gangsta-rap culture. An improbable source of poignancy, it's all the more moving as a result.
Cohn is a pop historian; he has written extensively on the early days of rock 'n' roll, and he uncovered the working-class nightclub scene that inspired ''Saturday Night Fever." As his lifelong infatuation with New Orleans reached a fever pitch -- mounting health problems resulting from his battle with hepatitis C convinced him to spend more devil-may-care time in the city that practically invented it -- he found himself moving well beyond the typical bounds of the cultural reporter. Eventually he tried his hand at producing records, with disastrous results.
Like so many of us, Cohn's obsession with the terrible beauty of New Orleans was born well before he got there. As a pubescent youth growing up in London in the 1950s, he found an illicit paradise in the pages of Jelly Roll Morton's memoirs: ''Every night, in bed, I strolled the streets of Storyville," Cohn writes, ''. . . with my pistol at my hip and all those girls in satin and lace just dying to turn my damper down, whatever that might mean."
In the 1970s, he finally experienced the place firsthand while on tour with The Who. His senses, as they tend to be in New Orleans, were assaulted: ''The filtered, stained-glass light. Smells of coffee, damp bread, musky sex." And the music, endless music, spilling from every doorway, courtyard, and passing car.
The sound of New Orleans, of course, is a prime reason the city became a tourist destination. It is the cradle of jazz, a birthplace of rock 'n' roll, a town where every voice joins the gospel hymns and the Mardi Gras chants alike.
