The battle of New Orleans: NIMBYs and newcomers threaten to regulate the Big Easy's music into extinction.

• Author: Kjorness, Chris
• Position: Culture and Reviews

THE LATE-NIGHT dancers in New Orleans wear everything from designer suits to bondage-club attire to nothing much at all. But recently a new accessory has started appearing in the Crescent City's nightlife: headphones. Silent discos, which have appeared at such local hotspots as the Dragon's Den and House of Blues, allow hipsters to pay a few bucks, strap on a pair of ear goggles, and dance to music spun by DJs broadcasting on site.

With its second-line parades, open drinking, and raucous live music spilling out into crowded streets, New Orleans is not the kind of town you'd normally associate with silence. But headphone venues are taking advantage of an escalating clash between neighborhood associations, clubs, musicians, and the city. Some have labeled it the War on Music.

During the last few years, this socially laissez-faire music capital has started trying to bring order to the endless party by stepping up licensing and zoning enforcement and passing laws designed to improve the "quality of life." By attempting to fine-tune the city's cultural economy, authorities are jeopardizing the very institutions that have made New Orleans such a vibrant and valuable part of American culture.

The crackdown is coming from two main sources. One is the deluge of idealistic newcomers who flooded into New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to help rebuild what many older residents had fled. While many of the new transplants were particularly attracted to the music scene and other vestiges of "authentic" New Orleans--Mardi Gras, second-line parades, drinking outdoors--that doesn't mean they were accustomed to living with all-night noise.

NIMBYism is especially common among the older, more affluent professionals who also moved to the city after Katrina, hoping to own a little piece of historic New Orleans magic. These gentrifiers have often been hostile to one of the city's central cultural institutions: the clubs where working musicians make a living.

The second main source of party pooping is the mayor's office, which has a fondness for top-down plans. Elected in 2010, Mayor Mitch Landrieu inherited more than $67 million in debt and a police force so corrupt he asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate it. Landrieu set out to bring order and prosperity to his notoriously unmanageable city, with tourism and the arts as prime revenue generators. Before becoming mayor, he had unveiled the New Orleans Convention and Visitor's Bureau Boston Consulting Group Master Plan, an ambitious proposal that sought to attract 13.7 million annual visitors to New Orleans by 2018. Order and cleanliness, he maintains, are essential to any increase in tourism, and quality of life improvements have become a major goal of the Landrieu administration. The trouble is, cultural creation isn't a clean and orderly process, and "quality of life" can be a sticky issue for the city's clubs.

The Battle for North Rampart

This isn't the first time New Orleans has been remade by an influx of immigrants. The city's unique culture was born out of a melange of French, Spanish, English, African, and Caribbean influences. And the town's new arrivals have been a blessing in many ways. While much of the country was experiencing the Great Recession, New Orleans' unemployment actually dropped, thanks in large part to new entrepreneurs and developers. (The shrinking population helped too, as did federal reconstruction aid.)

But along with their enthusiasm and their economic activity, the gentrifiers brought a new willingness to wage war on noisy music clubs. Take North Rampart Street, which before Katrina was one of the city's cultural hotbeds. Only a few blocks away from Bourbon Street, North Rampart's two-block strip felt a world apart from the daiquiri shops and megabars that French Quarter tourists so often associate with New Orleans.

North Rampart attracted locals, longtime residents of neighboring Treme (made famous by the eponymous HBO series), and many gay and transgendered New Orleanians, who have deep roots in the area. Two clubs dominated the street, each with a special place in the city's cultural ecology: the Funky Butt, a modern jazz and funk venue, and Donna's, home to brass bands.

Both clubs were...