CHIGAGO HOUSE

by Andy Battaglia  September 10, 2009

Chicago house trafficked, like most dance music, in a rarified realm of singles that proved fleeting almost by design. They came and went, played by DJs at specific times in specific places, and they remain hard to gather for all their chaotic glory. Beyond that, distinguishing what constitutes house music requires at least a decent working notion of what constitutes techno by comparison. It helps to know that Chicago house evolved in tandem with techno in Detroit. Both shared certain mechanistic allegiances, but Chicago house diverged significantly in telltale terms of “soul.” House was more directly descended from disco, which made it more buoyant and fleshy than techno—more transfixed by the body, both as a vessel for the soul and as a machine that could be tweaked according to all sorts of seamy, sinister desires. Prior to the rise of house, in fact, Chicago had been the site of an infamous 1979 episode known as “Disco Demolition Night,” a stunt during which a radio-station DJ detonated a stock of disco records and incited a riot after a White Sox game at Comiskey Park. The ugly spectacle served as a rallying cry for burgeoning disco-sucks orthodoxy, but its message meant nothing in the largely black and gay clubs where house was born. (Indeed, it’s since been an ongoing project for revisionist historians to chart the racism and homophobia latent in anti-disco protests at the time.) It was at such underground clubs—namely The Warehouse, from which the genre’s name sprang—that house morphed from an offshoot of disco into a style of its own. As it adapted to new technology in the 1980s, house took on sometimes harsh, abstract electronic forms, even as it adopted an inclusive language that was all about communalism. Much of that language was coded, in accord with the drugs and deviance at play in all-night club affairs, but just as much of it was in service to the kind of shared spirituality at play on the dance floor.

Possible gateways: Frankie Knuckles, “Baby Wants To Ride” & Adonis, “No Way Back”

A New York DJ who started playing in Chicago during the heyday of disco, Frankie Knuckles was a major force in the early days of house. (Much later, in 2004, the mayor of Chicago officially decreed a stretch of the city’s Jefferson Street as “Frankie Knuckles Way.”) His classic 1987 single “Baby Wants To Ride” represents Chicago house at its slyest and most spacious, with a distended beat stretched beneath a digressive spoken-word riff about steamy sex and civil disobedience. This is the strain of Chicago house that dug its nails deep into the back of a fellow Midwesterner named Prince, and it carries a pointed message—especially around the 6:20 mark, when it starts to pair a wry little-drummer-boy beat with lyrics like “America—clap your hands over this bullshit land” and “It’s hard to ride, baby, when you’re living in a fascist dream.” Lurking within it is a solemn protest against intolerance related to race and sexual preference, but the spirit is more slaphappy than sad.