And this album -which focuses on experimental house records, many of them rarities, many of them released between 19 -opens up an opportunity to retell the story of Chicago house that gives belated emphasis to the music's progressive roots.Ĭhicago boasts a long history of radical, roots-oriented music making. UK acid house culture, which referenced Phuture's sublimely freakish "Acid Tracks", soon came to signify a broader dance movement that was awash with bright yellow smiley faces, stylistically challenged baggy t-shirts, interminable debates about the meaning of "acid" that rarely referenced the music, and a new mythology that situated the culture's roots as much in the sunny holiday resort of Ibiza as the windswept post-industrial landscape of Chicago. Then, following the successful release of Virgin's debut techno compilation, Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, Chicago house was cast (yet again) as the intimate and conservative cousin of disco -a music that, in contrast to techno's heroic and radical engagement with the future, was determined to look (or listen) backwards. The disco-derived "Love Can't Turn Around" went Top Ten before house had had a chance to create a buzz amongst dance aficionados. The strange life cycle of Chicago house in the UK only added to obfuscation of house music's original trajectory. This was, and remains, disconcerting for many Chicagoans. Experienced through New York's eardrum, Chicago house sounded like an offshoot of New York disco. When Manhattan's spinners finally caught on, they tended to favour disco-flavoured cuts such as JM Silk's "Music Is the Key" over the obtuse, alien sounds of records such as "Acid Tracks". Drenched in disco, the city was initially suspicious of house, with Larry Levan, one of its most progressive DJs, notoriously slow to pick up on the genre. The heavyweight presence of New York has made it difficult to establish this alternative history. And that its most influential spinner was not the ambassadorial Knuckles, but the deviant Ron Hardy ¾ a towering figure who, extraordinarily, was never interviewed before his untimely passing in 1992. That the genre's key venue was not the celebrated Warehouse or the magisterial Power Plant (where black gay men were dominant), but the ramshackle Music Box (where the crowd was black and straight-leaning-towards-pansexual). That the key musical reference point for house wasn't disco, but a range of off-the-wall sounds that spanned late sixties rock and early eighties new wave. And while Knuckles played a heroic role in keeping disco alive in a city where so many chanted for its death, the acclaimed "Godfather of House" was a secondary figure when it came to pushing the mid-eighties incarnation of the genre.Īn alternative genealogy of house might propose the following. But the sound of house emerged from an acute and unexpected angle that was in many respects cut off from the past.
The genre might have received its abbreviated name from the Warehouse, where Knuckles, proud and defiant, continued to spin dance grooves in the aftermath of Dahl's headline-grabbing histrionics. House music's birth, however, has been largely mystified by this Darwinian story of destruction, survival and evolution. Metaphorical retribution arrived, according to the Knuckles, when dance artists, revisiting the disfigured disco of Dahl's melted vinyl, melded it into house. The disco sucks movement had its spiritual and organisational headquarters in the city, and the organisation's campaign reached its vitriolic climax when the celebrity rock DJ Steve Dahl detonated fifty thousand disco records during the halfway break of a baseball doubleheader.
In this case home, to quote Gil Scott-Heron, is where the hatred is, or was. So said Frankie Knuckles, reflecting on the charged history of the genre, which emerged in hometown Chicago in the middle of the 1980s.