“Do You Remember House?” Memory, Mediation, and Crossover Community-Making in Chicago House Music Culture By Micah Eli Salkind B.A., Brown University, 2006 A.M., Brown University, 2010 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of American Studies at Brown University May 2016 (C) Copyright 2016 by Micah Eli Salkind This dissertation by Micah Eli Salkind is accepted in its present form by the Department of American Studies as satisfying the requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy. Date_____________ _________________________________ Dr. Tricia Rose, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date_____________ _________________________________ Dr. Kiri Miller, Reader Date_____________ _________________________________ Dr. Matthew Guterl, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date_____________ _________________________________ Dr. Peter Webber, Dean of The Graduate School iii Curriculum Vitae Micah Salkind was born May 10, 1984 in Lawrence, Kansas. He earned a B.A. from Brown University’s Department of American Civilization in 2006 and an M.A. in Public Humanities from Brown University’s Department of American Studies in 2010. A DJ, sound designer, and curator of live performance, Salkind’s writing on Afro-Diasporic cultural production and post- industrial cultural development complements his work towards establishing innovative models for sustaining community art institutions and art-makers in Providence, RI and Chicago, IL. His research has been supported by an Imagining America Publicly Active Graduate Education Fellowship and a Sixth Year Interdisciplinary Opportunities Fellowship from the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities & Cultural Heritage. iv Acknowledgements “Do You Remember House?” could not have happened without the tremendous intellectual mentorship and support of my advisor, Tricia Rose, and my dissertation committee members Kiri Miller and Matt Guterl. Sandy Zipp and Patti Ybarra provided critical guidance as I was preparing for my oral exams and refining my dissertation prospectus as well. I am ever so grateful for the support and attention of Brown American Studies’ peerless department manager Jeff Cabral, as well as Sabina Griffin, Jenna Legault, and Chelsea Shriver at The John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities, Orwig librarian Laura Stokes, and my artistic mentors Karen Allen Baxter and Elmo Terry Morgan at Brown’s Department of Africana Studies/Rites and Reason Theatre. Steve Lubar, Anne Valk, Susan Smulyan, Ralph Rodriguez, David Katzman, Paul Buhle, and Donald King also played critical roles supporting my dissertation writing and scholarly/artistic work. In addition to the core group of faculty and staff at Brown, and in Providence, who have supported my work, I am profoundly grateful for short-term professional development opportunities that have enriched my research, such as the 2015 ACRE visiting artist program, the 2014 Performance Studies Creative Ethnography workshop at Northwestern with Ramon Rivera- Servera, E. Patrick Johnson, and D. Soyini Madison, and the 2013 Mellon Dance Studies Workshop with Susan Manning, Rebecca Schneider, and Janice Ross. My collaborators and interlocutors during my fieldwork animated this project in innumerable ways as well. To say that it could not have happened without them is a gross understatement. My dear comrade in study, Boogie McClarin, you continue to push me to be the ethical scholar I want to be. Jesse Saunders, Alan King, Toy Foster, and Vanessa Cooper- Honoré, thank you for keeping me in the mix at The Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic. v Latham Zearfoss, Aay Preston-Myint, Jacqui Guerrero, Justin Mitchell, and Rita Bacon, your work together on Chances Dances will reverberate far beyond my writing in the years to come. Meida McNeal, Abra Johnson, Felicia Holman, Marlon and Denise Billups, and Aisha Jean- Baptiste, you continue to show me that art is not just what we make, but how we live. St. Sukie De La Croix, Doug Ischar, Jake Austen, and Kristin Basta at the Michael Abramson archive all generously shared their archives and resources. The Center for Black Music Research, in particular former director Monica Hairston-O’Connell, digital archivist Laurie Lee-Moses, and librarian Janet Harper, helped launch this ship. Publishers Matthew Terry and Czarina Mirani of 5 Magazine filled its sails with wind. Charles Matlock and Lauren Lowery of the Modern Dance Music and Archiving Foundation have been inspiring fonts of first-hand knowledge and public scholarship too. It is not hyperbole to say that this project would have been impossible had I not had access to the writing and archives of Jacob Arnold at Gridface.com. Jacob’s tireless, exacting, work documenting the many unsung contributions of Chicago disco and house DJs, producers, and promoters is legend. He has been an incredibly generous source of information and support over the past couple of years. The support of my friends and colleagues in the academy has been nothing short of astounding. Majida Kargbo, Crystal Ngo, Sam Franklin, Horace Ballard, Adam Bush, Alex Agloro, Catherine Michna, Elena Gonzales, Heather Lee, Patrick McKelvey, Cora Johnson- Roberson, Francesca Inglese, Naomi Bragin, Jim Steichen, Daniel Callahan, Aymar Jean Christian, Karl Swinehart, Kemi Adeyemi, Jasmine Johnson, Paul Farber, Jazzmen Lee-Johnson, Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Ethan Philbrick, Nate Sloan, Sam Shonkoff, and Montana Blanco, I have been so lucky to bask in your brilliant light. vi I stand on the shoulders of my ancestors as well as my chosen family. To my parents, Neil and Leni Salkind, thank you for modeling the ethical behavior you expected of me and for unconditionally supporting my artistic and intellectual pursuits. To my sister Sara, thank you for your unwavering support and guidance. To my sweetie, Ted McGuire, thank you for joyfully taking up the labors of love with me over these past eleven years. Your generosity and indomitable spirit have their marks all over “Do You Remember House?” vii Preface When I went through puberty I began to give up on alternative and punk rock as sites of expressive possibility and started seeking out electronic sounds. Walking home from Central Junior High, my racially and class-diverse public school in Lawrence, Kansas, I would scour the used CD bins at record stores for artists putting out material on the Astralwerks or Warp labels and pick up copies of the British clubbing rag Mixmag at Borders Books. I came to understand that although the music that record labels and journalists were calling “electronica” was a big thing in Europe, four-to-the-floor dance music was, for some strange reason, out of favor in the US. My first memories of dancing in public to what I would come to know as house music are from a trip that my family took in the spring of 1999 to an all-inclusive Club Med in Baja Mexico. I snuck into the resort’s “night club” - really just a bar with a loud sound system - where the DJ was playing a house remix of Lou Bega’s cover of Dámaso Pérez Prado’s 1949 “Mambo No 5,” a song that would become inescapable on American airwaves that following summer. I recall gyrating my hips, feet planted on the sand, as “Mambo’s” rhythm swept me away. There was something I was reaching for then that was related to my budding sexuality and growing desire for erotic knowledge that I couldn’t quite name. A few years later I began sneaking out to raves that were being thrown at convention centers, laser tag galleries, and other non-alcoholic venues around Kansas City. It was at these all-ages events that I became enraptured with hearing and dancing to Chicago house – the uplifting vocals, the thick, mesmerizing 808 drums, the rubbery bass lines that sounded like disco, but not disco. Being a longtime musician, formally trained as a choral tenor, guitarist, and viii French horn player from about age 11, I connected to the musicality of house, the richness of its melodic and harmonic structures, not to mention its thick, rhythmic densities. I was sixteen or seventeen when I went to my first gay bar to hear house music. It was warm enough to have been late spring or early summer and an older friend from work had promised to sneak me into Tremors for their Wednesday “Family Night.” Although I had spent plenty of nights crowd surfing and pogoing at rock clubs and punk houses, and by that point dancing at raves and festivals too, the gay club implicated me in a new way. I was underage and still unsure of how and where I could explore my budding queer desires without getting a black eye. When I moved to the east coast for college, I went to clubs in Providence and Boston to hear specific DJs, dance music producers, and dance-oriented pop artists on tour. As an intern at Kinetic Records in New York City the summer after my freshman year, I got my first taste of the old school Body & Soul parties, Giant Steps promotions, and the burgeoning disco punk/DFA Records/Misshapes scene. Dancing in New York City I came to understand that if I wanted to get the affective, spiritual charge from house that I so desired, I’d have to seek out experiences characterized by social difference, not sameness. In the spring of 2005 I studied abroad in Barcelona, immersing myself deeply in the city’s dance music culture at clubs like Razzmatazz, Moog, Paloma, and Apollo. After I returned to Providence, my experiences in BCN’s vida nocturna influenced my work at The Providence Black Repertory Company, where I volunteered as an intern during the summer of 2005 before joining the staff as a half-time employee that fall, and a full-time employee the following spring. It was working on Providence Sound Session at Black Rep, an Afro-Diasporic music festival our organization produced in collaboration with the City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + ix Tourism, that I began to think critically about Afro-centric politics of house music, especially hearing it alongside jazz, reggae, salsa, hip hop, spoken word, brass band music, and punk. Between 2007 and 2013, I honed my entrepreneurial skills DJing and promoting dance parties in Providence with my collaborator Jackson Morley. Our monthly function, Providence is Burning, took place on first Saturdays at a small art gallery where we featured traveling DJs and musicians that our friends and co-residents Max Gitlin and Sam Posner (Certified Bananas) helped us book. When Providence Is Burning ended after about a year, Jackson and I doubled down on a DJ-only format for our promotions, playing house music at tons of one off events, as well as weekly bar nights, and new monthly dance parties (PB&Jams, Goosebumps, Wild at Heart, Savage Soul etc.). My experiences DJing, hustling flyers, hugging friends, and stamping hands in these years have become critically important points of reference for my scholarly research. Despite the many ways I was living and breathing dance music and culture when I began my doctoral work, I did not come into Brown’s American Studies program with a concrete plan to study Chicago house. In fact, my advisor, Dr. Tricia Rose, suggested the topic. Even after I committed to a scholarly project broadly focused on house, I thought this would be a story of its deracination and disconnection from queer of color bodies and narratives via its incorporation in the UK and Europe during the mid-1980s — the story of how I had come to it several steps removed. As my fieldwork took shape on the ground at The Chosen Few Old School Picnic in the summer of 2012, however, I realized that focusing on the disconnection of the music and culture from Chicago would only serve to (again) minimize the city’s expansive house worlds, recapitulating the very uncoupling I was trying to work against. Rather than open up from a narrow aperture to explain how house has been incorporated into national and international x music and social dance cultures, I instead decided to focus on the ways that house music and culture remain firmly enmeshed in Chicago. After immersing myself in ethnographic fieldwork, oral history interviews, and archives in Chicago between 2012 and 2014, I now understand that stories I bring together in my research have already have been told countless times, both by people in the communities under my gaze, and by outsiders like me. I am, in part, a white, and also Jewish, impresario who stands to gain cultural capital off the lived experiences of queer, black, and Latino house heads with relatively less access to institutional power. Rather than speak for these narrators, I hope to amplify their voices. Undoubtedly my own queerness and experiences of marginality affect how I approach this endeavor. While I focused on setting up house music oral history interviews with women, queer people, and Latino folks whose voices I found to be conspicuously absent from existing, mostly journalistic, archives, I did my best to let my snowball sample of interviewees evolve organically, in part by contacting informants who were recommended to me by previous interviewees. As such, The House Music Oral History archive I have developed with the support of The Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College reflects the distinct life experiences of a truly heterogeneous group of stakeholders. Not all interviews went as I would have hoped. Some potential interviewees declined to meet with me, responded to my requests with vague or confusing language (or emojis), or met with me but insisted that I not quote from or attempt to represent their stories. Where possible, I have tried to honor their contributions to Chicago house culture despite these challenges, but I have not attempted to recuperate the fullness of their stories in the absence of consent. xi The following account is not meant to be an exhaustive hagiography of house music’s masculine heroes and hits. More importantly, it is not an attempt to cover over, or discount, the many diverse, conflicting stories about where house comes from or where it is going. I begin with a little bit of my personal relationship to Chicago house music to situate this dissertation project as part of a simultaneously individual and collective journey towards understanding a fuller picture and soundscape of house. I hope that those who don’t see themselves reflected adequately here will take it upon themselves to get my ear, but also to authorize their own accounts using whatever media they can. House is a polyphonic cultural practice grounded in the utopian yet-to-be and I can’t wait to read, hear, and see what comes next. xii Table of Contents Curriculum Vitae ………………………………………………………………………………...iv Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………………………v Preface ………………………………………………………………………………………….viii List of Illustrations .……………………………………………………………………………..xvi Epigraph .……………………………………………………………………………………....xviii Introduction .………………………………………………………………………………………1 PT. 1 Chapter One - Like a Phoenix From The Ashes: The Social and Spatial Antecedents of Chicago House Music Culture A. Introduction .………………………………………………………………………………9 B. Disco Demolition Night …………………………………………………………………14 C. Urban Renewal, Deindustrialization, and Top-Down Development ……………………23 D. Bottom-Up Cultural Development South of The Loop …………………………………27 E. Queer of Color Cultural Antecedents …………………………………………………...33 F. Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………40 Chapter Two - The Warehouse and The Music Box: House Music’s Social and Aesthetic Priorities A. Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………...43 B. The Development of The Warehouse …………………………………………………...47 C. NYC Antecedents ……………………………………………………………………….53 D. Chicago’s Proto-House DJs……………………………………………………………...57 E. Tight Spaces, Expansive Vibes ………………………………………………………….60 F. Sacred Ground, Spiritual Practices ………………………………………………….......63 G. Reel-to-Reel Remix ……………………………………………………………………..68 H. The Twilight of The Warehouse, The Dawn of The Music Box ………………………..72 I. Decoupling Proto-House Culture’s Polysexual and Cross-Class Mix …………………..73 J. Ron Hardy’s Technological, Sonic, and Social Innovations ……………………………76 xiii K. Ron Hardy in The Mix …………………………………………………………………..83 L. Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………94 Chapter Three - Making House Music Radio: Adaptation and Queer Remediation A. Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………...97 B. The Deep Times and Spaces of Chicago’s Black Social Dance Cultures……………...100 C. Remediating Juice Bar Repertoires for Radio …………………………………………107 D. “Saturday Night Live Ain’t No Jive”……………………………………………….......125 E. Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………..140 Chapter Four - House Music on The Move: Juice Bars, Labels, and The Making of Crossover Communities A. Introduction …………………………………………………………………………….142 B. Making and Selling Chicago House …………………………………………………...144 C. Chicago House Music Moves Out ..…………………………………………………....158 D. Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………..177 PT. 2 Chapter Five - “Is It All Over My Face?” Sustaining a Love Ethic at The Old School Reunion Picnic A. Introduction …………………………………………………………………………….179 B. Reunion Picnics, Chosen Family, and Camp Culture ………………………………….182 C. Sounding The Classics …………………………………………………………………190 D. Dancing The Loving Community ……………………………………………………...197 E. House Masculinities and Queer Elisions ………………………………………………203 F. Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………..211 Chapter Six - “Are You Ready to Get Your Life?” Queer Neostalgia and Wild (Re)visions of House Music Culture A. Introduction …………………………………………………………………………….213 B. The Hermitage of House ……………………………………………………………….217 C. Safer Spaces on The West Side ………………………………………………………..226 xiv D. Queen!’s Neostalgic Musical Mix ……………………………………………………..233 E. Sounding Wildness at Chances Dances ………………………………………………..245 F. Queen!’s Neostalgic Visuality …………………………………………………………255 G. Cuteness and Wild Visuality at Chances Dances ……………………………………...266 H. Conclusion: Dancing in Brave Spaces …………………………………………………280 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………..288 Notes on Terminology and Citations …………………………………………………………..292 Bibliography A. Books …………………………………………………………………………………..293 B. Articles …………………………………………………………………………………300 C. Websites, Online Articles, and Multimedia ……………………………………………310 D. Conferences, Lectures, Symposia, Unpublished Dissertations, etc. …………………...320 E. Oral History Interviews ………………………………………………………………...322 F. Partial Discography …………………………………………………………………….325 xv List of Illustrations Fig. 0.1 - Ron Hardy altar, Da House Spot, 7130 S. Chicago Ave, February 22nd, 2014; photograph by Micah Salkind. Fig. 1.1 - Comiskey Park and The State Street Stroll. Illustration by Julia Gualtieri. Fig. 1.2 - Near South Side Large-scale Development. Illustration by Julia Gualtieri. Fig. 1.3 - Record Row 1 and Vee-Jay 1 and 2. Illustration by Julia Gualtieri. Fig. 1.4 - Record Row 2. Illustration by Julia Gualtieri. Fig. 1.5 - Cabrini Green and AME Church. Illustration by Julia Gualtieri. Fig. 1.6 - Queer Bronzeville. Illustration by Julia Gualtieri. Fig. 1.7 - Near Northside Discotheques. Illustration by Julia Gualtieri. Fig. 1.8 - South Side Queer of Color Spaces. Illustration by Julia Gualtieri. Fig. 3.1 - Vertigo promotions flyer, Chicago’s top D.J.s. Fig. 3.2 - Chicago Hot flyer, The Izod & Burger Bash Fest! Fig. 3.3 - The original Hot Mix 5 - clockwise from left: Kenny “Jammin” Jason, Scott “Smokin” Silz, Ralphi “Rockin” Rosario, Farley “Funkin” Keith, and Mickey “Mixin” Oliver. Fig 3.4 - Invitation, New Music Seminar DJ International showcase at Better Days, July 16, 1986. Fig. 3.5 - Poster, New York versus Chicago Hot Mix 5 DJ Battle, October 2, 1982. Fig. 4.1 - “Your Love” 12” record label with Trax label designed by Vince Allen. Fig. 4.2 - Medusa’s flyer, ca. late 1980s/early 1990s. Fig. 4.3 - Club Naked reunion, digital flyer. Fig. 5.1 - David Risqué and Carnival Dancers, Chosen Few Picnic 2012; photograph by Micah Salkind. Fig. 6.1 - Cabaret Metro and Smart Bar exteriors; photo by Robert W. Krueger courtesy of Chicago Public Library, Sulzer Regional Library. xvi Fig 6.2 - Plate 18 by Doug Ischar, from the exhibition Marginal Waters; image courtesy of the artist. Fig 6.3 - Artist Sofia Moreno, and Chances Dances DJs Justin “Swaguerilla/Hijo Pródigo” Mitchell and Jacqui “CQQCHIFRUIT” Guerrero on stage at The Hideout, May 4, 2014; photograph by Micah Salkind. Fig. 6.4 - Derrick Carter spinning on his birthday at Queen!, October 20, 2013; photograph by Micah Salkind. Fig. 6.5 - Smart Bar logo and Queen! logo, ca. spring 2013; courtesy of Smart Bar. Fig. 6.6 - April 2104, November 2013, and October 2013 Queen! flyers; author’s personal collection. Fig. 6.7 - Queen! hosts Luis Lazu, Ruby Dee, and Sal-E at Queen!, August 5, 2013; photo courtesy of Tasya Menacer. Fig. 6.8 - Dancer and choreographer Darling Shear cutting a rug at Queen!, August 5, 2013; photo courtesy of Tasya Menacer. Fig. 6.9 - Chances Dances logo; courtesy of Chances Dances. Fig. 6.10 - Chances Dances bathroom signage. Image on the left designed by Garrett Hansell; courtesy of Chances Dances. Fig 6.11 - Chances Dances Summoning a New Queer Reality float and parade participants, June 24, 2007; photo courtesy of Chances Dances. Fig. 6.12 - Summoning a New Queer Reality Sylvester DIY mask; courtesy of Chances Dances. Fig. 6.13 - WITCH HAZEL at Subterranean, November 18, 2013; photograph by Micah Salkind. Fig 6.14 - Borderless Musical Imaginaries, performance and panel, January 26, 2014, featuring left/top to right bottom, Micah Salkind, Latham Zearfoss, Rosé Hernandez, Ali McDonald, Precious Davis, Juana Peralta, and Mister Wallace; image courtesy of Link’s Hall. xvii Epigraph I remember house before it was called house. I remember house when house respected house. I remember house when house grew from the roots of house. I remember house when house was soul music and r&b, before house was disco … I remember house before the super clubs. I remember house when people knew the lyrics of house. I remember house before record labels sold house. I remember house when house was about love ... Do you remember house? I remember house when house was more then just a name to package the sound, this groove, this emotion. I remember house when it was just one house. I remember house when house had artists, songwriters, and personalities. I remember house when you didn’t have to be a DJ just to be into house. I remember house when house was broke. I remember house when house was done in the house. I remember house when it was a spiritual thing ... Do you remember house? I remember house before it was techno. I remember house before it had an afro. I remember house before it was deep. I remember house before it was hard. I remember house when house had tempos. I remember house before MPC60s. I remember house before house had roots. I remember house before the whole world knew. Do you remember house? Blaze Feat. Palmer Brown - “Do You Remember House?” xviii Introduction: Do You Remember House? In January of 2014 I had the opportunity to conduct an oral history interview with Robert Williams, one of the founding fathers of the Chicago house movement. Williams was surprisingly candid after so many years answering what probably sounded like the very same sets of questions. When we finished after nearly three hours, he was sparkling, animated. He told me about his intentions to write a book about his amazing experiences and asked if maybe I would want to help him find a co-author; maybe I could even help him write it! I told him that I had my hands full working on my dissertation project, but that I’d love to help him look for collaborators. We ended with him inviting me to “see how they really did it,” at his birthday celebration the following month. I was amazed at how personable this gentleman remained after nearly a half century in the limelight. I was also touched by the connections we had drawn out with respect to our love for music. I felt as though this was a queer elder that I had truly connected with around a set of shared cultural traditions, even if we accessed and experienced them differently because of our distinct generational affiliations, racial backgrounds, and life experiences. Flash forward to February 22nd and I am pulling up outside the Hebrew Cultural Center, aka Da House Spot, on South Chicago Ave. It is still relatively early when Williams greets me at the door, and as my eyes adjust to the darkness, I can see that there are already a few people dancing in the main room. The space is overflowing with bouquets of large, spherical helium balloons and there are chairs set against the walls where early guests have begun to congregate in small clusters. Williams guides me through Da House Spot’s two floors, showing me how he has created multiple seating and dance areas, including a space with free hot food in the Cultural 1 Center’s small theater/bar and a windowless basement room where a solitary second DJ warms up to the pulse of a blinding strobe light. As he puts it, the whole affair is “very after hours.”1 Before Williams is pulled away to attend to his guests and I am left to my own devices, we bump into DJ Celeste Alexander. I nearly give her a heart attack. Alexander pulls back from Williams’ embrace and looks me up and down with a hand over her mouth, eyes wide in surprise. As she calms down and Williams introduces me, I realize that she mistook me for Ron Hardy, the legendary resident DJ of The Music Box, the club where many of the folks who will soon arrive tonight learned about Chicago house music and culture. Hardy died in 1992 when he was 34 years old, but during the height of his popularity in the late 1980s he would have been about my age tonight. At my height, with my slender build, facial hair, and six-panel ball cap cocked to the side, I know instantly why I must have reminded her of him: Fig. 0.1 - Ron Hardy altar, Da House Spot, 7130 S. Chicago Ave, February 22nd, 2014; photograph by Micah Salkind. 2 I mention this account of mistaken identity not to position myself as racially ambiguous, nor to imply that my “passing” for Hardy constitutes some kind of privileged moment of reflection or insight, but rather to suggest that the spaces where Chicago house music enthusiasts produce their events are suffused with powerful ancestral spirits, and that these spirits affect the ways that house people come together to dance, worship, give thanks, and sweat in joyful communion. In “Do You Remember House?” Memory, Mediation, and Crossover Community-Making in Chicago House Music Culture, I use archival, ethnographic, and textual analysis to interrogate the emergence, memorialization, and queer remediation of house music in Chicago between 1970 and 2014. This project contributes to the fields of popular music studies, dance studies, and urban studies by bringing together close readings of house music with an expansive historiography of queer, black, and Latino social dance communities and media institutions in Chicago. It draws attention to the creativity of house producers, DJs, and dancers who adapted the sounds of house to new social contexts and stretched the affordances of new sonic technologies, interrogating the complex ways that cultural markets exploit the ingenuity and creativity of queer people of color. By considering house music as an expansive queer of color repertoire in motion, “Do You Remember House?” simultaneously reifies house culture’s Chicago roots, and acknowledges the multiple routes that have brought it to global marketplaces. In addition to the contributions it makes to popular music, dance, and urban studies, this project intervenes in the fields of critical race and sexuality studies by investigating the means through which house culture has supported the maintenance of crossover communities characterized by multiple, intersectional experiences of social marginality. I recuperate the concept of “crossing over” by 3 reframing it as an unending process of intimate, reciprocal audience engagement through which diverse neighborhood affiliations, races and ethnicities, sexualities and gender presentations, as well as age cohorts and generations, are actively bridged, rather than a linear progression through which increasingly popular artists reach ever larger audiences whose differences get sublimated or smoothed over. Ultimately I show that even as house music culture has been appropriated and exploited, it remains what Chicago DJ Craig Cannon calls a “musical Stonewall” for the Chicago’s queer people of color, a cultural toolbox for staying alive and human. In the six chapters of “Do You Remember House?” I weave together research undertaken in institutional and uncommon archives, close readings of an array of cultural texts, co- performative witnessing in public, and engaged auto-ethnography. In addition to the club nights, dance classes, photography exhibitions, and experimental lectures I draw from, I use sixty newly collected oral histories of mostly queer, Latino, and female-identified progenitors of and participants in house culture to better ground a scant secondary literature on Chicago’s late- twentieth century social dance communities. Archived with Columbia College’s Center for Black Music Research, these narratives are crucial to understanding the development of house music both in terms of its aesthetic priorities and its economic contours. They augment decades of interviews, autobiography, and journalistic literature documenting the important interventions made by mostly middle class, straight, African American men. Throughout “Do You Remember House?” I track the ways that house music developed in part through its connections to an established local commercial infrastructure in Chicago, and in part as a sustained, fugitive response to this infrastructure, as well as the racist American popular music industry writ large. Chapter One analyzes the local specificity of the 1979 Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Stadium, an infamous White Sox promotion at which baseball 4 fans detonated a pile of r&b and disco records, and a flashpoint that presaged the codification of Chicago house music as a distinct set of cultural practices and a multiplicity of danceable sounds. Taking a spatial studies approach, I trace the geographic and social frameworks that gave rise to house by showing how the demolition of musical artifacts surrogating queerness, blackness, and Latinidad symbolically re-segregated Chicago’s cultural landscape while suturing post-Great Migration histories of residential and economic segregation to the development of house music spaces near the city’s central business district. Chapter Two works through Chicago house music’s emergence at the nexus of queer, black, and Latino music communities and social dance spaces by closely reading the sonic, visual, and spatial dimensions of two underground clubs housed in post-industrial lofts, The Warehouse and The Music Box. It examines the creative ways that Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy, the resident DJs at these venues, as well as the promoters that supported them, adapted New York City’s queer of color social dance cultures for Chicago audiences. This chapter also interrogates the ways that new affordances of acoustic and recording technologies enabled these adaptive processes. The third chapter of “Do You Remember House?” examines the routes by which mostly straight, black, and middle class, teenagers accessed and further adapted the social and sonic templates of house music’s queer of color progenitors. Using close readings of radio “hot mixes” and oral history interviews with DJs, promoters, and dancers involved in the city’s early 1980s “juice bar” scene, I suggest that an emergent generation of middle class, black, radio entrepreneurs remediated queer of color social dance traditions and musical repertoires for new heterogeneous listening publics. I coin the term queer remediation to account for the anti- teleological ways that their shows incorporated and transformed the aesthetic priorities of teen 5 juice bars, gay discotheques, and black appeal radio to promote house music as a shared, if often contested, soundscape in greater Chicagoland. Chapter Four expands the concept of queer remediation to consider the ways that house music radio, record labels, and specialty DJ stores lubricated commercial pathways for amateur house music producers in Chicago and helped to codify house music as a corporate genre. It examines the integration of even more heterogeneous musical programming on Chicago dance floors before the end of the juice bar era, addresses some of the ways that HIV/AIDS affected the maintenance of queer of color house music culture, and accounts for house music’s spread outside of Chicago in the second half of the 1980s. Part Two of “Do You Remember House?” reflects on the ways that contemporary house audiences and producers in Chicago strategically make recourse to, and revise, the house music histories articulated in the first half of the dissertation. Chapter Five examines the ways that dancers, DJs, and other cultural entrepreneurs who came of age in the teen scene central to the third and fourth chapters memorialize and perform nostalgia for house culture at the Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic, a yearly house music festival on Chicago’s South Side. In this chapter I analyze the ways in which foodways, music, dance, and adornment have become critical elements of trans-generational community maintenance and memorialization in Chicago’s “old school” house scene. Chapter Six focuses on Chicago’s contemporary queer clubbing communities and their relationships to house history. I use field notes from over ten months attending Chances Dances and Queen! to unpack the often subtle ways that house music’s alternately “neostalgic” and wild sonic and social traditions got integrated on the dance floors, in the DJ booths, and through the 6 marketing and promotional efforts of Chicago’s queer nightlife producers between 2013 and 2014. In many ways this project owes a limitless debt to Dr. Tricia Rose, who has not only been my dissertation advisor and mentor, but also a primary scholarly interlocutor. Her path-breaking 1994 monograph, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, inaugurated the field of hip hop studies and inspired me to write about black popular music. Like Black Noise, “Do You Remember House?” attempts to recuperate an under-theorized, technologically advanced, DJ-oriented music culture born during the end of the disco era as a product of post-industrial neoliberal economic restructuring and the social fragmentation that accompanied the rise of Reaganism. Unlike Dr. Rose’s writing on hip hop, this project comes much later in the life-cycle of house. It also puts working and middle class queer people and middle class African Americans at its analytic center and attempts to respond to the ways that Chicago’s political, social, and cultural histories have shaped a different set of vernacular music and social dance traditions than those of New York City. Chicago is neither a global center for the recording industry, nor is it the heart of news and entertainment media in the US. Additionally, Chicago’s black community had far fewer Anglophone Caribbean migrants contributing to its cultural life. Finally, the city didn’t develop crack cocaine-driven gang cultures analogous to those that accompanied hip hop’s ascent.2 These are just a few of the factors that have made this project a stylistic and analytic departure from Black Noise. Taking its title from a 2002 club track produced by New Jersey duo Blaze and vocalist Palmer Brown, “Do You Remember House?” suggests that Chicago house audiences contest the idea that success in the marketplace is wholly indicative of cultural value.3 They fashion Chicago 7 house history by telling, and re-telling, personal accounts of the music’s emergence and repeated resurgence in the city of its birth. “Do You Remember House?” asks its readers to repeatedly ask themselves, and each other, if, and how, they remember house, as well as what they remember it to have been. It never supplies an answer. 8 Chapter One - Like a Phoenix From The Ashes: The Social and Spatial Antecedents of Chicago House Music Culture 1.A - Introduction When Chicago’s Comiskey Park opened in 1910 its boosters hoped that it would be a salutary response to the raucous call of the burgeoning black nightclub district along Bronzeville’s State Street Stroll.4 Built at the intersection of 35th Street and Shields Avenue, just a mile northeast of the Union Stockyards, the population of the Park’s South Armour Square neighborhood surged with the influx of African Americans seeking industrial employment in the war industries. By the 1940s Comiskey was in a majority-black residential community. The Park’s earliest supporters had imagined Comiskey as a site where Irish, German, and Swedish immigrants living in its shadow would learn to be American, but by the mid-century it came to be understood as a distinctly South Side institution where black patrons could come to enjoy Negro League games.5 Fig. 1.1 - Comiskey Park and The State Street Stroll. Illustration by Julia Gualtieri. 9 Although Comiskey was a celebrated site of black sporting culture during the mid-20th century, black earning power declined precipitously with the ongoing flight of industry from Chicago during the 1960s and 1970s and few blacks had enough disposable income to spend money on White Sox games. Comiskey’s South Armour Square neighborhood had become the city’s struggling black South Side in a microcosm: bracketed by recalcitrant white segregationists in Bridgeport to the west (home of the Daley machine), train yards to the north, and the Dan Ryan Expressway to the east. The neighborhood was both physically cut off, and beset by chronic joblessness and poverty.6 Already operating under the assumption that the presence of majority black residential communities to the south and east of the park deterred white spectators from attending games, the White Sox marketing department eventually stopped courting black patrons altogether.7 As Comiskey’s boosters attempted to shore up their brand with the white suburbs, the country’s biggest record labels pumped money into new disco a&r divisions. Following the enormous successes of 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, and its slick Bee Gees soundtrack, as well as the record-breaking all-disco radio format pioneered by WKTU-FM in New York City, the “majors” invested mostly in artists that could reproduce a narrow slice of the disco sound, sublimating its underground queer, black, and Latino roots to give it crossover commercial appeal.8 What had until the late 1970s been a fluid amalgam of danceable soul, funk, and r&b tracks played by DJs to diverse audiences, began to be supplanted by a homogenous corporate genre indexing upward mobility and social exclusivity.9 Major labels released a deluge of inferior, hastily produced and novelty disco records that oversaturated radio markets.10 As a result, most white, suburban listening publics came to know disco as the sound of pop singers and has-been crooners performing a warmed-over version of 10 queer, black, and Latino club music. By 1979, the corporatized disco culture the majors were propping up faced an overtly homophobic and covertly racist backlash from cultural critics who decried its commercial distillation as “glitter and gloss, without substance.”11 The national turn away from corporate disco shaped the local context in which White Sox owner Bill Veeck’s son Mike developed his now-infamous Disco Demolition Night. Although Veeck junior had little experience in sports promotions, he was given leeway to partner with WLUP radio DJ Steve Dahl, a sophomoric personality infamous for blowing up disco records at suburban malls. Dahl and Mike Veeck agreed that on July 12, 1979, WLUP listeners would be able to enter Comiskey Park for the White Sox game against the Detroit Tigers after paying just 98 cents if they sacrificed a disco record. Even if baseball didn’t interest them, Dahl’s fans would be able to come watch their anti-hero demolish the material evidence of queer, black, and Latino incursions into mainstream, white popular culture. The Veecks were unprepared for disco demolition’s enormous success, and shocked when attendance, by some estimates around 60,000, far exceeded the capacity of their ballpark. By the time Dahl drove a Jeep onto center field in camouflage fatigues to detonate thousands of records at halftime, Comiskey’s mostly white crowd was completely out of control. Hundreds of intoxicated patrons stormed the grass, rendering it unfit for play, and forcing the Sox to forfeit to the Tigers.12 The White Sox owners were caught unaware because they failed to consider how performative derision of disco might allow for a cathartic release of anti-black vitriol under the guise of race-neutral cultural preference. As house producer Vince Lawrence says, the promotion “was more about blowing up all this nigger music than, you know, destroying disco.”13 House 11 music promoter and advocate Valencia “Mother Diva” Dantzler likens the promotion to an act of political subversion. Just like black Chicago’s iconic Panther Fred Hampton, disco had to be “assassinated” to maintain white (cultural) supremacy.14 Disco Demolition invoked the fascist purges of jazz recordings during World War II, and denigrated contemporary queer, black, and Latino communities in Chicago.15 In the late 1980s, journalists writing about the birth of house music used metaphors to explain how the club sound was “reborn” from “the ashes of disco.”16 In fact, house producer Jesse Saunders connected house explicitly to the death of disco on July 12, 1979, writing in his memoir that house was like a “phoenix” emerging from the ashes of Disco Demolition Night.17 Godfather of house, Frankie Knuckles, said the music was not disco’s revival, but rather “disco’s revenge,” emphasizing not only the persistence of “disco that did not know it was disco” in the house sound, but also a new audacity that found footing away from the glitz and glamour of Chicago’s racially dystopian gay discotheques.18 In this chapter I use original oral histories, primary archival sources, and secondary historical accounts to closely re-read the July 12, 1979 Disco Demolition and offer a biographical sketch of longtime White Sox owner Bill Veeck. From these foundations, I draw out three important organizing themes that provide critical context for the development of house music and culture in Chicago: first, Chicagoans engaged in racially-charged spatial contestations around sites of culture and commerce well into the post-Civil Rights era, second, Chicago radio personalities used disco as a target for barely-sublimated anti-black rhetoric and activism, and lastly, this anti-blackness forcefully called out queer people, and queer people of color in particular, via their social proximity to spaces of black, and queer, cultural development, the very spaces that fueled disco’s initial underground popularity. 12 Readings of the Disco Demolition that emphasize its connection to rising homophobic and racist cultural tides on a national scale risk covering over the ways that the promotion was a local flashpoint shaped by the historical overlap of segregated, non-white, and queer commercial and residential space in Chicago.19 Looking both at disco demolition and the longue dureé of cultural development in queer, black, and Latino Chicago opens up space for thinking through the ways that house communities have built oppositional underground club cultures to meet the psychic needs and reflect the sonic proclivities of their neighborhoods.20 I connect disco demolition to a local history rooted in the city’s hyper-segregated black South and West Sides and to the liminal queer, black, and Latino geographies of Chicago that cultural historian Kevin Mumford has called the city’s interzones.21 Using a deeply contextual approach to the Demolition helps me explain how it became a ritual purge of black culture; a way for segregationists to contest the integration of the airwaves when the law said that they could no longer legally segregate their neighborhoods. By connecting the sacrifice of material artifacts that represented, indeed physicalized, minoritarian cultural incursions on Chicago radio to pro-segregation terrorism, I show that both the spatial containment and rapturous congregation of queer, black, and Latino Chicagoans played critical roles in post-demolition development of house music and culture in Chicago’s West and South Loop neighborhoods.22 13 1.B - Disco Demolition Night To begin to comprehend the impact of disco demolition on Chicago, one must first examine Comiskey Park’s history as a site of black cultural memory, as well as the shifting racial politics of longtime White Sox owner Bill Veeck. Veeck’s mentor, Abe Saperstein, was a man adept at making spectacles of black athletes in a variety of interracial contests. A major promoter of the Harlem Globetrotters and manager of the American Negro Leagues, Saperstein famously said that if he couldn’t develop an audience of ardent ball fans, he could always fill seats with “bread and circuses.”23 Following Saperstein’s lead, Veeck developed countless tricks to entertain his patrons. Some of his promotions featured exploding billboards and surprise giveaways. His most famous were predicated on the spectacular exposition of black athletes. Jewish entrepreneurs, like Saperstein, flourished in the worlds of early 20th century popular amusements, in part because they valued their own experiences with racial mutability and humor.24 Jews had brought, and learned to sell, their own popular forms, such as Yiddish theater, when they emigrated from Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century. Subsequent generations elaborated upon these promotional skills to profit from the promotion of black entertainers, often inadvertently advancing black social and economic mobility. Even before he bought The White Sox in 1959, Veeck used the controversial politics of racial integration as a promotional lever in his work as a team manager. In 1942, with Saperstein’s ideological and material support from Chicago, Veeck began putting Negro league star Satchel Paige in as a pitcher for his minor league Milwaukee Brewers. Later that year he made an unsuccessful offer to purchase the Philadelphia Phillies, fully intending to integrate the team. To cap off the decade, Veeck brought on Larry Doby to play for the Cleveland Indians, becoming the first American League club owner to hire a black player.25 14 Baseball’s most famous white integrator, Branch Rickey, who signed Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945, claims that Veeck had no special interest in racial justice, but rather that his promotional work with black players was all business.26 Dan Swanson, a sports commentator for Massachusetts’ black newspaper The Bay State Banner, remembers that “a large number of black people were at the ballpark, cheering the White Sox on” during the 1950s, and that Comiskey Park had once been “one of the most integrated places in the City of Chicago.”27 Whether or not Veeck harbored anti-racist intentions, his promotions and hiring decisions helped fortify Comiskey Park as a site of black cultural memory and interracial contact, but they did not prepare him to manage a 1979 eruption of Chicago’s barely contained anti-blackness. After the Disco Demolition promotion Veeck said that he never thought anyone would “demonstrate” for a “cause like hating disco.”28 His subtle invocation of 1960s civil rights activism by way of explaining how his own promotion could have gone awry shows how very out of touch he had become with the struggles of those living in the shadow of his team’s stadium. His son’s partner in the affair was just as clueless. Days after the Disco Demolition, Steve Dahl, echoing Theodor Adorno’s well-known critique of industrially produced jazz, defended his right to purge the world of disco, calling the music “surreal, insidious and weirdly oppressive.”29 This language appears to be race-neutral when taken at face value, but it in fact relied on what Ian Haney López has called a “dog whistle,” or a carefully coded appeal to racial tension or animosity.30 Dahl even went so far as to decry the oppression that he was subjugated to by the genre, and by extension its audiences. For queer, black, and Latino spectators, and others listening to the subliminal sounds of disco’s pre-history still audible, the destruction of disco records was clearly an indictment of 15 their culture. Rusty Torres, an Afro-Latino White Sox Outfielder during the 1978-1979 playing season, said of the patrons at Disco Demolition night: “They’re going ‘Rusty! Disco sucks!’ real loud and ‘we gonna kill disco today, disco is dead!’ and I’m going, ‘no, I was just in a discotheque last night, how you gonna achieve that?’”31 Torres points out that for blacks and Latinos the sound and space of disco showed no signs of diminishing in importance; in fact, Disco Demolition night confirmed the discotheque’s value. Disco’s ambiguity as a generic category made it a useful, and even covert, surrogate for blackness (not to mention queerness and Latinidad).32 This surrogacy helps explain how disco music became a convenient target for Dahl and his followers: it enabled them to assert dominance over queer, black, and Latino cultural influences under a banner of race-neutrality. Chicago house music producer Vince Lawrence corroborates this reading of disco demolition night from his vantage point as a teenage usher at Comiskey Park: “What I noticed at the gates was that people were bringing records ... some of those records were just black records. They weren’t disco. They were just black, r&b records … It felt very racial to me.”33 While the Veecks may have been tone-deaf to the changing social and political cues sounding in post-civil rights Chicago, it seems impossible that they couldn’t have seen how Disco Demolition Night connected to recent anti-integrationist violence in and around the city, especially that which took place in Cicero, Illinois. Cicero is a near-west suburb of Chicago that first came to national prominence in 1951 when the national guard had to be called in to protect a black resident, Harvey Clarke, and his family, from an estimated 3000 white, anti-integration terrorists. Known at the time as “the Selma of the north,” the town was only several miles west of South Armour Square, well within the reach of Steve Dahl’s WLUP radio show and Comiskey’s promotions.34 Dahl’s followers 16 were the cultural descendants of Cicero’s anti-integration terrorists. They may not have hurled stones and firebombed homes, but they came to Comiskey to defile the interracial space of the playing field and sacrifice material artifacts representing queer, black, and Latino culture. Disco demolition helped attendees and observers ritually manage the cognitive dissonance produced by the threat of cultural integration against a backdrop of civil rights victories, like the 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act, even after these victories failed to integrate the suburbs or alleviate racial segregation and consolidated ghetto poverty on Chicago’s South and West Sides.35 If these sons of Cicero couldn’t refuse the queer, black, and Latino sounds of the city by keeping them from filtering onto their airwaves, and they couldn’t blame sonic contagion on the physical occupation of white space by black and brown bodies, then they would resist cultural integration by traversing a site of interracial contact and burning an effigy that physicalized queer, black, and Latino sounds.36 As a primary mouthpiece of disco discontent in Chicago, Steve Dahl wasn’t only speaking to and for mostly white, middle-class, straight men, he was also managing personal fears and self-doubts about his value in an increasingly urbane, cosmopolitan, and racially- integrated labor force.37 Formerly a flailing album-oriented rock station, WDAI had plucked Dahl from Detroit in early 1978 with hopes that his bawdy on-air personality could lift its moribund Arbitron ratings. According to Chicago Tribune TV-radio critic Gary Deeb, the station’s audiences, and management, found his off-color patter, like a dedication of the song “Spinning Wheel” to a man who fell off a Ferris wheel, offensive. Most significant, however, was the fact that despite its integration of Dahl’s incendiary commentary, WDAI remained mired near last place in the ratings game.38 17 WDAI’s abandonment of album oriented rock (AOR) and Steve Dahl were indicative of a larger national trend in which struggling-to-middling radio stations attempted to jump on a “disco bandwagon.”39 Station owners reformatted WDAI as an all-disco station, hiring DJs Peter Lewicki, Lou DiVito, and Kenny Jason, who would later join WBMX’s immensely popular Hot Mix 5 show. These new DJs not only avoided contentious on-air patter, but also helped lay the groundwork for house music’s explosion in Chicago by introducing radio audiences to the seamless blending techniques used by DJs in the city’s discotheques.40 Disco’s rise coincided with about 10% growth in profits for the recording industry overall between 1975 and 1976, and a nearly 20% surge between 1976 and 1977.41 The music’s popularity became yoked to the industry’s overall good fortunes, but its visibility also made it an easy target for rock devotees, who had previously held on to an unassailably lucrative slice of the overall radio market.42 As resources and cultural visibility for disco grew, it meant, perhaps, just a little less a&r attention and money for rock, and in some cases professional slights against rock music radio’s egocentric DJs. That said, even after WDAI switched to an all-disco format, Chicago still had WXRT, WMET, and WLUP programming rock music. The station joined WGCI as only the second all-disco station at the time, though black independent WBMX-FM also featured disco, and seven other black or rock-oriented stations incorporated some disco sounds.43 After Dahl was hired by WLUP, he fretted obsessively on the air about disco music’s threat to American culture, in part because he blamed it for his embarrassing failure to revive WDAI’s ratings. Rather than critique the capricious industrial practices adopted by ratings- obsessed marketing executives, he picked on a sound, and a culture, he knew little if anything about, and, vicariously, the marginalized people for whom it was a fundamental source of 18 pleasure and possibility. Dahl played explosion sound effects over Bee Gees songs, recorded a parody version of Rod Stewart’s 1978 “Do Ya’ Think I’m Sexy,” and held mini disco demolitions at malls and “Disco Dystrophy” club promotions in Chicago’s white, far-west suburbs prior to his crowning achievement at Comiskey Park. The DJ’s sense of his own victimhood, as well as his displays of anxiety about the endangered future of proper white hetero-patriarchal rock music, fueled the racial anxieties of his listening base and launched his WLUP morning show to within striking range of Chicago’s number one Arbitron-rated program in its category.44 Disco had at first been a genre-defiant sonic alternative to straight, white, cultural hegemony.45 The majority of records played by disco DJs at clubs during the early 1970s that weren’t weird imports from Europe, or in some cases Latin America and Africa, were simply danceable r&b and funk pressings produced at black and Latino-owned and operated record labels like Philadelphia International, and New York’s Scepter and Salsoul Records.46 As Chicago DJ Michael Ezebukwu says, “for us it was just dance music; a lot of it was r&b-based. We played a wider range of music back then.”47 Major label investment and disco’s remediation as a radio format brought the music to countless young listeners unable to hear it in the clubs, but it also reduced the inchoate format’s musical complexity, opened up more opportunities for established white rock and pop artists to release and promote kitschy novelty records, and drowned out the black and Latino artists who had inaugurated the disco sound and scene.48 Following the explosive success of Saturday Night Fever’s soundtrack, and emboldened by the cheerleading of Billboard magazine, labels like Warner Bros. over-saturated urban radio markets with new “hard disco” acts, and enticed stations like Chicago’s WGCI, and Dahl’s previous employer WDAI, with the sounds of reductive white performers interpolating a sonic 19 space once dominated by avant garde black and Latino artists.49 By July of 1979, “disco” was no longer a vernacular catchall used to describe the unstable musical intersection of queer, black, and Latino social dance communities assembled under the aegis of thoughtfully curated DJ sets. It had become a pejorative slur used to deride hyper-commercialized, danceable pop music, as well as the queer, black, and Latino cultural contagion this music represented.50 As one of disco historian Tim Lawrence’s interviewees puts it, the sound of “disco that did not know it was disco,” had been codified and domesticated - it had become too well known.51 By 1980, even black Chicago stations like WGCI were moving away from an all-disco format in favor of the sonic diversity that had been central to the social experience of disco from its inception.52 The music’s consolidation as a hyper-commoditized genre had masked over the ways its initial popularity and circulation had been predicated on its bringing together of heterogeneous danceable sounds; sounds developed by DJs presiding over dance floors with heterogeneous dancers. Disco’s meteoric rise and fall on Chicago radio can in part be attributed to the liminal nature of its original cultural context, and in part to the sonic texture it took on in its highly commercialized form. Driving rhythm tracks, ethereal vocals, and saccharine orchestral arrangements could be fun and even inspired when blended with other sounds, but distilled “hard” disco bored radio audiences when DJs spun it incessantly. According to Mel Cheren, who worked for independent New York disco label West End Records, the majors began to move on by the early 1980s, pulling resources from disco a&r departments and reorganizing their staffs to support newly diversifying rock markets.53 20 Radio stations in Chicago dumped or minimized hard disco during this period as well, even as they continued to add danceable black music suitable for club play to their playlists.54 WGCI saw rapid jumps in its Arbitron score when it incorporated jazz, rock, and new wave in 1980.55 WDAI dumped disco entirely for the appropriately white “adult rock” category just sixteen months after firing Steve Dahl. The station’s manager, Larry Divney, cited disco’s diminishing popularity with all demographics except its original black and Latino audience to explain his station’s swift abandonment of its format.56 DJ Frankie Knuckles interpreted Disco Demolition Night as a harbinger of major label abandonment, saying that he “witnessed that caper that Steve Dahl pulled at Disco Demolition Night … and it didn't mean a thing to [him or his] crowd ... But it scared the record companies, so they stopped signing disco artists and making disco records … we created our own thing in Chicago to fill the gap.”57 One of those who helped fill the gap was Jesse Saunders, a house music producer who, along with Vince Lawrence, recorded some of the Chicago movement’s earliest original tracks in the first half of the 1980s. He describes the night of the demolition in black Chicago, perhaps somewhat hyperbolically, as one in which the children of disco re- asserted the primacy of their music and their cultural spaces: We played disco that night, and we played James Brown and we played r&b that night. I was the DJ, and we held that party for all the broken hearts and bloodied noses that came in from the hostility outside. And the strangest thing occurred. There in the room the crowd felt safe and at home in the vibe; the music seemed to protect them. Like a song from the underground railway, it kept the people in its bosom and allowed it freedom from the cold outside. I protected them that night, when I was seventeen and felt the pressure of racism's Goliath loading itself onto my shoulders.58 While they may have been ambivalent about the changes in disco formatting on local radio, queers, blacks, and Latinos in Chicago continued to rely heavily on underground discotheques long after disco demolition night. The predecessors of these spaces were born in the 21 crucible of prohibition-era black and queer spatial containment on the South Side. They had for decades been critical sites of congregation where queer, black, and Latino people managed the stresses they faced in their everyday lives. Comprehending the spatial continuity of Chicago’s early queer of color cabarets, doo wop street corners, blues, r&b, and soul labels, 1970s discotheques, and its house music scene is critical to understanding the ways that house is, as Chicago house producer Jere McAllister puts it, an “evolution” of a long-standing cultural and economic constellation in the city.59 This continuity is rooted in nested spaces: Chicago as a node in a national and increasingly international economy; its community areas and neighborhoods; its blocks and cultural clusters; its particular sites of musical consumption such as bars, clubs, parks, schools and private residences; the contained, acoustic environments of its dance spaces; and on an almost subatomic level, the intimate spaces, and spatial scales, of bodies on its dance floors.60 22 1.C - Urban Renewal, Deindustrialization, and Top-Down Development Chicago’s dense urban core, the Loop, was its original settlement, and during the 1960s and 1970s it was still a central zone of commerce, with retail sales in 1977 nearly equal to those of all the city’s other shopping districts combined. By 1970, however, round-the-clock activities offered by restaurants, theaters, and nightclubs in the Loop began to give way to the 5pm shutdown culture of corporate America. This was in part due to the fact that the Near West Side’s population had declined by almost half, with nearly 30% less housing stock available. There were fewer people spilling over into the Loop in general after suburbanites returned home.61 Despite the fact that housing was disappearing on its western edge, the Loop still had one of the highest concentrations of public housing stock in the city (nearly 20 percent), as well as health care facilities, light industry, manufacturing, railroad yards, and wholesale houses. The city center’s “entry-level” neighborhoods had welcomed new immigrants since Chicago’s earliest days, but urban sociologists studying black Chicago have shown that patterns of residential succession for white ethnic immigrants to the city never proved to be salient for black folks.62 For a century, African American migrants were legally pressed by white segregationists into Loop-adjacent slums on the South and West Sides as their numbers swelled in conjunction with higher needs for industrial labor.63 Hemmed in by the virulently racist stronghold of Bridgeport on its western border, and the city’s dilapidated train yards to the north, residents of South Armour Square, for example, had no option but to turn eastward towards the Loop to meet their daily shopping and entertainment needs. By the late 1970s, elites who owned property or had business interests in the Loop were increasingly worried about the majority-black and Latino commerce that took place in the 23 neighborhood after dusk. According to Lois Willie, who chronicled the development of Dearborn Park, a controversial, middle-class housing development in the Loop, the rise of Blaxploitation cinema in the North Loop movie palaces typified the black and Latino spillover perceived to be threatening the neighborhood as a whole: Whites began to fade from State Street when the sun went down. Good restaurants folded and big retailers trembled. Young black men in four-inch heels, coats of checkerboard fur and silver lamé, huge Aussie hats and enormous berets with flopping pompons—the Super Fly outfits of the era—promenaded along the sidewalks.64 Rather than imagine the potential vibrancy of mixed-use, racially and class-diverse spaces, advocacy groups like the Chicago Central Areas Committee (CCAC) considered the Near South Side, in particular, to be a “threatening sea of residential blight” that needed to be eradicated to protect property values and investments farther north.65 The Committee skillfully wielded its collective political power to trump the desires of community-based planning groups like the Near West Side and South Side Planning Boards, which were organizations formed by neighborhood stakeholders to advocate for what today might be called mixed-use development rather than middle-class residential projects.66 Elites ignored or placated these neighborhood activists and crafted the Development Plan for the Central Area of Chicago, a blueprint for consolidating Loop-adjacent social, economic, and cultural power. The CCAC’s vision for a revitalized city center was predicated on strategic neighborhood abandonment, government-abetted land grabs, and boom and bust cycles of investment that worked to benefit speculating investors over poor residents. It proposed using large-scale development to shore up the value and safety of dilapidated train yards, the worn-out hulls of the printing industry, and areas where there had once been boarding houses and working class residences on the southern edge of the city’s financial district.67 Radio pioneer Richard Stamz, who had lived at one such boarding house at 11th and State at the time, says that developers 24 moved “black people out because State Street business from the Loop was slowly moving South.”68 Large private institutions had begun plotting grandiose development projects in the South Loop even prior to the Illinois State Legislature’s passage of the 1947 Blighted Areas Redevelopment Act. The Illinois Institute of Technology (ITT) and Michael Reese Hospital, in particular, used loans provided by the New York Life Insurance Company to expand their footprints, obliterating properties that had sheltered new immigrants for decades.69 New York Life also invested in new middle-class housing in the area, developing the fourteen-hundred-unit Lake Meadows residencies on sixty acres of land cleared through federally subsidized urban renewal.70 Fig. 1.2 - Near South Side Large-scale Development. Illustration by Julia Gualtieri. By the 1970s, strategic abandonment and new investment south of the Loop had become a hotly contested topic of public debate in Chicago’s newspapers. Urban sociologist, and frequent Tribune columnist, Pierre De Vise, suggested that although black and Latino 25 Chicagoans had lost their jobs to southern, and off-shore, laborers, and their housing to the proverbial wrecking ball of slum clearance, the dearth of investment in segregated non-white neighborhoods could still be explained by the fact that developers had “overbuilt” in the white suburbs. De Vise misconstrued suburban investment as a cause for, rather than by-product of, racist economic restructuring.71 Counter-critiques of structural racism and red-lining by activists like Gale Cicotta and scholarly consortia like Northwestern University’s Urban-Suburban Investment Study Group dismantled De Vise’s specious assertions and directed the public’s attention to the discriminatory practices of The Federal Housing Authority, the savings and loan industry, and local real estate boards, all of which had been propagating harmful cycles of boom and bust in neighborhoods like those south of the Loop.72 According to a labor study cited in the Tribune, between 1972 and 1981, Chicago lost 123,500 jobs, or 10 percent of its private sector employment. As these losses took place, the city’s metropolitan area experienced a 25 percent employment increase, largely due to big gains in white suburbs like Schaumburg, Northbrook, and Naperville. The disparity between a “frontier of growth” and a “frontier of decay” could be mapped onto the city’s strictly enforced racial geographies, with black and Latino neighborhoods like East Garfield Park, South Austin, Pilsen, and the Near West Side seeing the steepest employment declines.73 The Near South Side’s population had already dropped precipitously at the beginning of the 1950s and by the early 1970s it housed just 7,000 people. The neighborhood had also become almost entirely renter-occupied, with 83% of residents living in what remained of its large public housing blocks.74 26 1.D - Bottom-Up Cultural Development South of The Loop Prior to the 1970s, the Near West and South Sides were home to Chicago’s independent recording industry. The presence of many small labels, as well as other spaces of musical congregation, allowed black music entrepreneurs to track subtle changes in their audience’s sonic predilections in localized markets while experimenting with new recording technologies.75 One of the most well-known black-owned independent record labels, Vee-Jay, opened its first Chicago headquarters in 1954 on the city’s first, southerly, “record row” – a strip that was already home to Chess Records, Parrot/Blue Lake Records, and United Distributors.76 Soon thereafter, Vee-Jay moved to the corner of 47th and South Martin Luther King Drive (formerly South Park Way), where its artists benefitted from the label’s close proximity to South Side performance halls like The Savoy and The Regal Theater. Fig. 1.3 - Record Row 1 and Vee-Jay 1 and 2. Illustration by Julia Gualtieri. 27 During the 1940s, distribution, a&r, and other functions of Chicago’s independent recording industry began to consolidate closer to the Loop on a strip of South Michigan between Roosevelt and 16th Street. By the mid-1960s, the South Loop’s second record row became home to no less than 17 distributors, and half a dozen independent record labels, including Decca, Capitol, Constellation, and Mercury Records. Vee Jay had benefitted from growing its business near vaudeville-era spaces of musical exhibition, but a decade later owners Vivian Carter and James C. Bracken saw that the benefits of being in a centralized cluster of recording, a&r, and distribution were worth losing their proximity to the big nightclubs. According to musicologist and historian Portia Maultsby, close proximity created key points of access for black entrepreneurs to enter into professional careers as accountants, salesmen, and promotions directors in Chicago’s independent recording industry. The density of black musical creativity and commerce on the row during the 1960s was a great boon to artists as well. Studio musician Phil Upchurch says that, “in those days you could come and hit every major company in the world in two blocks.”77 Fig. 1.4 - Record Row 2. Illustration by Julia Gualtieri. 28 The South Loop became the nerve center for Chicago’s black music business, but spaces of musical creativity and experimentation remained somewhat evenly distributed across the city’s Loop-adjacent neighborhoods. The Cabrini Green projects on the Near North Side, in particular the community building on Seward Park, served as an important site for the development of doo-wop aesthetics during the 1950s. Artists like The Impressions, fronted by Chicago soul pioneer and Curtom label president Curtis Mayfield, wrote and performed their early repertoires in and around the Cabrini projects before making it big with crossover pop hits for Vee Jay.78 According to legendary r&b singer-songwriter Jerry Butler, who grew up in a Cabrini high rise with his mother and two brothers, music was everywhere around the projects, and on the street corners.79 Beyond the fact that black musical creativity was consolidated in the large blocks of housing projects, the more compact physical spaces of the project recreation rooms, which were said to have been excellent acoustic containers for a cappella singers, played a large part in the development of doo wop aesthetics.80 While the secular sounds of doo-wop filtered from Cabrini’s street corners and rec rooms to the studios of record row, many Cabrini residents, like Jazz pioneer Ramsey Lewis, were also regularly singing, or performing, songs of praise at the nearby Wayman A.M.E. Church.81 Following music historian Nelson George, philosopher Joel Rudinow characterizes the relationship between African American church communities and the union of r&b and gospel musical traditions as deeply ambivalent.82 George says that even if their church-going families didn’t approve, Chicago musicians who landed contracts on record row were often bringing the subject matter of r&b and the feel and musicality of gospel to the studios where they created fresh takes on soul music.83 29 Fig. 1.5 - Cabrini Green and AME Church. Illustration by Julia Gualtieri. Near North Side residential and sacred spaces were important to the development of black music in Chicago, but it was mostly the sites of queer, black, and Latino musical congregation on the Near South and West Sides that would undergird the spatial ecologies of house. Sonorous queer, black, and Latino spaces, with their mutually dependent residential and commercial characteristics, were particularly susceptible to external structural pressures, such as those put upon them by the wrecking balls of urban renewal, because they were not owned by individuals with meaningful ties to the groups who were making use of them. When housing projects disappeared, so too did Chicago’s independent soul and r&b recording industry. 30 However, according to Richard Stamz it wasn’t merely the adjacent urban renewal that did Chicago’s independent recording industry in, although residential displacement certainly destabilized the lively mix of local musicians, bar patrons, and music entrepreneurs that amplified Record Row. It was, in fact, the proliferation of racist payola scandals and the creaming of top-selling artists by the major labels.84 Large record companies like Atlantic and Columbia/CBS scooped promising black executives with ghetto bona fides right off southern college campuses during the late 1960s and early 1970s, hoping they could woo top-selling black indie artists away from the small labels that had nurtured their early careers. While integration of the majors was undoubtedly a symbolic win for striving middle class music entrepreneurs, it also had a deleterious effect on the segregated world of black independent labels, whose “primary constituents remained rooted in segregated communities.”85 Having witnessed the power of the crossover market, in particular the enormous successes of Motown artists, Chicago’s best-selling soul and r&b artists jumped at the chance to benefit from the greater distribution and promotional muscle promised by the majors. To add insult to the injury of this indie abandonment, the FCC launched a series of investigations into the business practices of r&b and soul record executives around the country, including those at Chicago’s Brunswick Records.86 Even though Brunswick beat the FCC’s case in 1977, the legal fees incurred by the label, on top of its losses of marquee talent like The Chi-Lites to the majors, forced it to go out of business.87 Black cultural preferences helped shape the national crossover popularity of black music, and other black cultural products like Blaxploitation films during the 1970s, but these forms were often more indebted to white ideas about blackness than actual everyday experiences of black diversity than ever. Increasingly marketed to white suburbanites, Blaxploitation films, in 31 particular, traded almost entirely on hyperbolic images of black hyper-masculine brutality and oversexed femininity. Alternately thrilling and lurid, some of these films were even sound- tracked by newly nationally prominent Chicago artists like Curtis Mayfield.88 The representations of black masculinity and femininity elevated in films like The Mack, Coffy, and Shaft complemented those circulated by performers of urban blues music, a form that might be though of as the obverse of major label disco, and a sound of the black authentic that continued to fill live music clubs after Chicago’s indie recording industry collapsed.89 Reggio McLaughlin, an acclaimed bass player and tap dancer, as well as a regular at blues clubs like Pepper’s Hideout on the Near South Side, says that by 1977 DJs had come to supplant nearly all of the paying gigs for funk and soul artists, as well as cover bands: “The music scene was gone. Everybody started jumping … Even some of the other guitar players that were playing funk and all that, pretty soon they all switched over to blues too.”90 McLaughlin suggests that urban blues became an elevated, indeed mainstream and marketable, soundtrack for integrated Chicago during the same years that disco became a thorn in the music industry’s side. 32 1.E - Queer of Color Cultural Antecedents The cultural transformation of the South and West Loop neighborhoods during the 1970s and early 1980s was preceded by southerly queer, black and Latino cultural development that had been taking place since the pre-war years, an era during which the black belt became Chicago’s primary vice district.91 Queer of color scenes transcended some of the same demographic categories that audiences at the pre-war queer of color cabarets did, in part because queer, black, and Latino people were often pressed by moral reformers into the same dense, overlapping neighborhoods. Bronzeville didn’t just become queer, black, and musical overnight. It had a vibrant queer of color musical culture dating back to the 1930s.92 Along East 55th Street, which bisects the once notorious gay cruising grounds of Washington Park, one could enjoy a live jazz band and the bawdy cross-dressing stage show at Joseph “Joe” Hughes’ Joe’s De Luxe at the corner of State from 1938 to 1954, and performances by Club DeLisa’s drag acts between the years of 1941 and 1958. During the 1930s, just a block or so away from Washington Park’s eastern border, at 55th and South Drexel, black spiritualist Madame Block ran an interracial brothel where mostly well-to-do white men sought out black male companions. On the west side of Washington Park, at 5228 South Parkway (now MLK Jr. Blvd), The Southside Workingmen’s Club became a refuge for an interracial cohort of “homophile” men and women before being shut down by police in 1951 for operating as a den of iniquity.93 Although spaces like the Workingmen’s Club provided safety and support for queer people of all ages, they were situated in residential rather than commercial areas and typically did not have the support of their mostly black neighbors. Unlike the white moral reformers who helped push vice out of the Near North Side, black Chicagoans on The South Side had little 33 choice of whether they wanted to live in close proximity to sex workers and shake dancers.94 Despite the wishes of some black moral reformers, the queer of color cabaret culture inculcated deep in Bronzeville during the pre-war era persisted and expanded, even influencing the 1970s blues spaces of the South Loop. Michael Abramson, a white photographer earning an MFA at the Illinois Institute of Technology, documented the lively club scenes of two preeminent South Side nightclubs, Perv’s House, a disco, and Pepper’s Hideout, a blues club. His photos attest to the unexceptional presence of transwomen and female impersonators at both venues. Unnamed club divas perform for Abramson’s ethnographic lens, twirling fabric with defiant glimmers in their eyes, lips pouted, in radiant splendor. According to Reggio Mclaughlin, who appears in some of Abramson’s photographs too, the photographer posed and provoked his subjects, indeed they were staging contrived portraits for his camera. And yet, in spite of this explicit framing, his images provide evidence that black clubs in the South Loop retained many of the sexually mixed social elements of their pre-war antecedents in deeper Bronzeville.95 As McLaughlin says of Abramson’s queer subjects, “it was just normal to see them around.”96 In addition to this somewhat normalized, though still marginal, presence of queer people of color in the straight world of Chicago’s late 1970s blues scene, gay black men had a lively party scene in the South Shore neighborhood beginning in the late 1960s. Craig Cannon, a popular disco DJ who still spins club music for queer audiences at Jeffrey Pub on the South Side, says that between 79th and Yates and 67th to the Park was the center of a private, invitation-only, scene that flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Cannon credits the enormous horse-shoe- shaped garden apartments of the South Shore neighborhood, originally built for large families, with helping his community develop its party culture: “When we had those parties at people’s 34 apartments, we tried to make the apartment environment very club-like. So they would take out the furniture, we would have strobe lights, a DJ, just like it was in the club.” Cannon even connects the term ‘house’ to the gay, black scene’s house party origins.97 On the east side of Washington Park during the early 1970s, 56th and South Drexel became home to a very different type of gay collectivity: a burgeoning interracial gay liberation movement. Lesbian activist Vernita Gray, working alongside a white, gay undergraduate attending the University of Chicago named Henry Weimhoff, hosted meetings for gay rights groups and ran an ad hoc hotline for gays and lesbians in need using her home phone. Gray and Weimhoff helped create more public social spaces for queer Chicagoans, at first through the University of Chicago’s nascent Gay Liberation Front, and later through the Chicago Gay Liberation.98 Fig. 1.6 - Queer Bronzeville. Illustration by Julia Gualtieri. 35 According to Gray and Chicago activist Max Smith, black activism on behalf of gay liberation on the South Side accelerated the development of public spaces for queer conviviality on Chicago’s North Side. As white gays and lesbians began to fight for and gain access to their own commercial spaces there, black gays and lesbians with cultural capital and social and economic mobility were at times welcomed to join them. Black lesbians may have been more likely to stay on the South Side, while black gay men may have been more likely to move north to escape homophobia, but it is likely that economic factors, such as the higher cost of renting in the gentrifying Old Town neighborhood, influenced the re-formation of white, masculine, queer spaces up north as well. Old Town was hardly a place of plenty and promise for black and Latino queers, despite the fact that it was black activists who often fought hardest for gay liberation. Sometimes black queers were subjected to personal violence and racial epithets, but more often the mistreatment was much more covert and insidious. In the summer of 1975, black lesbian Jackie Hamilton was, as she puts it, verbally abused by a white bartender at Old Town’s popular interracial gay bar, Den One, and violently removed from the premises by staff when she tried to collect her belongings.99 Near North Side bar and club owners were less often accused of such aggressive racial bias, and more often maligned for forcing non-white gays and lesbians to produce multiple forms of ID if they arrived after a “racial quota” was reached in a venue.100 Ray Thomas recalls that the scene there in the early 1970s was profoundly discouraging for black gay men, even when the door person was black: “we went to the Bistro a few times and then it became such a big hassle just trying to get in that in October of ‘73 the underground parties started, which was the original Warehouse.”101 Racial quotas effectively re-segregated Chicago’s queer commercial spaces even as gay liberation promised new, less contained, possibilities for queer congregation. 36 They also echoed “common-sense” understandings of racial tipping points decried by developers of “model” interracial residential neighborhoods like Dearborn Park in the South Loop.102 In addition to discrimination at the door, queers of color partying on the North Side were often the victims of anti-integration violence. Arsonists attacked the Ritz nightclub at 937 N. State, a mostly black and gay discotheque, in both early June and September of 1981.103 Bar owner Fred Morris opined that the fires may have been set by his competition, or because someone had a personal vendetta with him, but it’s not difficult to see how the mere presence of a majority-black gay pub and disco on the Near North Side represented a threat to the neighborhood’s white spatial imaginary.104 Racist discrimination not only inspired queers of color to organize in protest, boycotting gay bars like Auggie’s and CK’s, Den One, and the Bistro, but also magnified the importance of developing Near West Side and Near South Side queer of color events, like promoter Robert Williams’ seminal US Studios parties, which he was in part inspired to produce after witnessing the mistreatment of black patrons at The Bistro.105 Fig. 1.7 - Near Northside Discotheques. Illustration by Julia Gualtieri. 37 Although he was critical progenitor of early house music culture, with its aesthetics and acoustics modeled after New York City’s underground gay discotheques, Robert Williams was hardly Chicago’s only pioneering music entrepreneur experimenting with non-commercial, genre-crossing dance music targeted towards racially and sexually-mixed audiences.106 Disco DJ Michael Ezebukwu was already spinning at Jeffrey Pub in the Jackson Park neighborhood in August of 1978 after spending the second half of the decade learning his trade in small venues like The Private Sculpture Room at 64th Street and King Drive. Sculpture Room was just several blocks away from important sites of black queer memory: the old Joe’s De Luxe Cafe at South King and 63rd, and the Grand Ballroom, where legendary drag performer Jacques Cristion held his famous Halloween Balls in the 1970s.107 Fig. 1.8 - South Side Queer of Color Spaces. Illustration by Julia Gualtieri. Ezebukwu also DJ’d at the original Martin’s Den in the early 1980s, just a block away from the former Joe’s De Luxe, and went on to play nearly seven nights a week at venues all across the city.108 He eventually landed a residency at Dingbat’s on the Near North Side, where he spun for a predominantly gay, black audience that became an important part of the house music community in the city during the 1980s. The parties he spun at Jeffrey Pub, in particular, 38 have been cited as revelatory for young straight house music entrepreneurs like DJ Alan King, of the Chosen Few Collective, who remembers walking back and forth in front of the South Side’s longest running gay bar to hear the sounds emanating forth.109 Ezebukwu’s sets at Dingbat’s also came to influence intrepid young house producers like Vince Lawrence while earning him the respect of his fellow disco spinners for being, as Frankie Knuckles said, one of the most humble guys in the world of disco music.110 By 1981, Ezebukwu left Martin’s Den to spin disco records at a gay bar called Rialto Tap (14 West Van Buren) on the weekends and stayed on as a resident DJ at Dingbat’s during the week. In Chicago, nightclub investment capital was funneled to white entrepreneurs in majority- white neighborhoods, even though majority-black collectives were testing cutting edge business models in the city’s liminal post-industrial interzones. By the mid-1980s loan recipients in the Lakeview community area, where popular gay clubs servicing large black queer clienteles like Dingbat’s and Club La Ray were located, were still receiving nearly eight times the investment and credit of their counterparts on the Near South Side.111 Ezebukwu’s move from his DJ residency in the Washington Park neighborhood north past Roosevelt Boulevard, a line often used to demarcate the black South Side from the Loop, shows how early 1980s disco became embedded further and further within neighborhoods that had once been clearly demarcated as commercial, and/or socially white. The processes of gradual territorial expansion that brought Ezebukwu north helped extend disco’s cultural reach there, where it would be more readily available to white dancers. 39 1.F – Conclusion House is a retrospectively coined generic term - its etymology tied to the black, gay house party scene in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, as well as the dance floor at The Warehouse on South Jefferson and Frankie Knuckles’ legendary sets there.112 DJ Leonard “Remix” Rroy makes a compelling case for having coined “house music” while holding down a residency at the South Side juice bar, The Bitter End too. While I sympathize with the desire to have a definitive answer, it is likely that “house” circulated as a sonic signifier in various black party scenes for years before being codified through the marketing efforts of the record store Importes Etc., since so many Chicago house artists remember the South Loop music emporium started by Paul Weisberg out of his father’s auto repair business as being the place they first saw the term house used to describe the sound of the clubs that sprung from the scorched earth of Disco Demolition Night.113 The newly coined genre’s development was tied to disco and progressive New York-derived club styles, spatial practices, acoustic technologies, mixing techniques and sonic repertoires, but, most importantly, it spoke to Chicago’s particular queer, black, and Latino traditions of musical experimentation and entrepreneurship, and the spaces that helped these traditions to flourish. Although house music has moved from The Windy City to the world, it is irrefutably Chicago music - it cannot be untethered from the spaces of its genesis there or the people who shaped them. While I sympathize with artists and scholars looking to honor house as a cultural product for and by Chicago while managing their relationships to its wide range of aesthetic influences, as well as its far-reaching international circulation, the music cannot be understood as intrinsically “nomadic.”114 Even as house absorbs and re-contextualizes a variety of sounds from a variety of places, in its earliest moments punk, Italo-disco, Detroit funk, and Philly soul, to 40 name a few genres, it has always been rooted in the experiences of the queer, black, and Latino dancers, and dance halls, of Chicago. By the mid-1970s, queer, black, and Latino house music entrepreneurs were regularly hosting un-licensed parties in under-used and undesirable spaces in the West and South Loop areas, building bottom-up value through their sweat equity in ways that paradoxically complemented the top-down center-city development agenda of the CCAC. They used the abandoned sites of the independent Chicago soul and r&b industry, and the mixed light industry and manufacturing spaces adjacent to these entrepreneurial/musical spaces, as stages for their cultural labor. 115 Robert Williams, for one, set up the second iteration of US Studios at 1400 S Michigan Ave in a space he believed to be the former recording studio of Chicago soul legend Jerry Butler.116 Indeed, Reggio McLaughlin corroborates that Butler’s Songwriter’s Workshop occupied the second floor of a building at 14th and South Michigan.117 Williams was mostly concerned with the size and scale of the loft spaces he was renting, but he also believes that abandoned sites of black musical creativity influenced his entrepreneurial work.118 It is not just the musical features of house, like structure, rhythm, and timbre that define it, but a deep and abiding sense of historical connectivity to the music and cultures it grew out of.119 As house pioneer Jesse Saunders would later note, 1980s Chicago was a place deeply influenced by jazz and blues in particular: “The ghosts of music's past all congregate on the streets of Chicago. Louis Armstrong can still be heard trumpeting in the alleys and Muddy Waters can be heard strumming from the roof tops.”120 The city is a palimpsest of musical expression and entrepreneurship. Reading Chicago house music as an evolution rather than an aberration by interpreting the sonorous geographies of queer, black, and Latino Chicago trans-historically frames a more 41 nuanced conversation about the ways that spatial and social structures developed alongside the music’s aesthetic contours. Its production requires producers and DJs to sample from the entire history of 20th century black urban music – disco, soul, r&b, funk, jazz, blues, and gospel music produced in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore and other sites of promise and possibility for southern, black migrants. The reverberation of these sounds in specific sites of underground consumption yokes them to acute spatial legacies shaped by black queer sociality. These are the South Side buffet flats, the repurposed industrial lofts, and the queer of color juice bars that are, as music critic Ernest Hardy puts it, “unmistakably hot.”121 In the following chapter I examine US Studios/The Warehouse and The Music Box, two legendary Chicago house music spaces frequently described as being so hot that steam would pour out the windows and sweat would drip down the walls.122 I draw out the ways that rooted yet innovative queer, black, and Latino musical practices coalesced within these venues and examine how they, under the influences of their respective resident DJs, Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy, came to define the nascent genre that rose like a phoenix from the ashes of Disco Demolition. 42 Chapter Two - The Warehouse and The Music Box: House Music’s Social and Aesthetic Priorities 2.A – Introduction The very etymology of the term “house” remains at the center of ongoing debates about what does and does not count as or constitute house music and culture. Music journalists and scholars have fretted for decades over whether it was Farley “Jackmaster” Funk working at Importes Etc., or Leonard “Remix” Rroy in conversation with his mother who first used the term “house music,” as well as whether the turn of phrase referred specifically to the live performances and embodied aesthetics of DJ Frankie Knuckles’ US Studios/The Warehouse parties, or whether it was a broader category indexing long-standing black, gay house party culture in Chicago. I recognize the value of this etymological debate in terms of its capacity to empower various stakeholders in Chicago, but my project is not about etymology. Rather, in this chapter I enumerate and contextualize the aesthetic priorities, technological innovations, and progressive musical programming of the DJs who lived the spirit of house while locating the music in a pantheon of black musical interventions connected to what Amiri Baraka famously called Afro- America’s “changing same.”123 I also acknowledge the ways that house marks a break with previous black cultural styles in terms of its creolized, sample-based, and punk aesthetics. House music is the soundtrack of house music culture. The story of house music culture begins at 206 South Jefferson in a venue called The Warehouse. A narrow building made of cream brick accented with green art deco diamonds, 206 South Jefferson hosted an all-night, members-only juice bar between 1977 and 1982. Promoter Robert Williams, as well as a team of financial backers and co-promoters, produced the parties there in concert with DJ Frankie Knuckles (née Francis Nichols) and his primarily queer, black, and Latino audience.124 After 43 parting ways with Knuckles in 1983, Williams developed The Music Box with Ron Hardy as his new resident DJ. His second venue became a similarly influential sonic and social space for a straighter, though by no means narrow-minded, tribe of aspiring DJs and dance music producers who would come to codify the local sound of Chicago house with their original productions and DJing during the mid-1980s. Hardy’s commitment to integrating melodically and harmonically minimal, but rhythmically complex, home-made “beat tracks” into his Music Box sets exemplified the non- egoistic, intra-artist support that allowed Chicago’s house music culture to flourish. However, that Hardy programmed unfinished and unreleased productions by young dance music producers does not mean that his cultural labor was more important or influential than that of Knuckles. Knuckles continued to develop a lyrical, sensuous mixing style well into his tenure at his second Chicago residency, The Power Plant. He too provided space and time for aspiring DJ/producers, many of them black and queer, to develop their skills producing with, opening for, and filling in for him at his club. Warehouse narratives, and DJ sets, are much harder to hear than Music Box ones, in part because large numbers of Warehouse/Power Plant patrons died of complications related to HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, but also because the use of cassette tapes to record live sets became popular during the zenith of The Music Box. Straighter, more masculine Music Box patrons have become ever more visible as trusted authorities on Chicago house authenticity as a result. By analyzing recordings of live sets and original remixes by DJs Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy, I resist this asymmetrical circulation of narratives and show that the two artists built the foundations of Chicago’s house sound and social worlds together, even as they also presided over their bifurcation along classed and gendered lines during the 1980s. 44 Born in spaces of queer, black, and Latino maroonage, house has been imbued with underground and fugitive characteristics since its earliest instantiations.125 While defined in part by the constrained physical spaces where it resounded in its early years, it has a seemingly boundless capacity to foster new psychic spaces, sonorous utopias where boundaries break between all kinds of social subdivisions. I borrow cultural historian Shane Vogel’s concept of “loose spaces within tight structures” to describe the ways that house music culture developed as the social horizon of expansive, genre-defiant crossover communities. In this chapter, I begin to explain this genre-defiant, inclusive ethos through an analysis of the multiple ways house music’s earliest progenitors performed it in situ. The sociality of black, gay spaces shaped the ways that DJs used, and adapted DJ equipment in Chicago. Building off of psychologist James J. Gibson’s theory of affordances, ethnomusicologist Will Gibson says that, “emergent ‘logics of use’ themselves form an important aspect of how musicians experience and conceptualize improvisation.”126 Applying Gibson’ framework for ‘emergent logics of use’ in disco and proto-house assumes that 12” records, turntables, and mixers are already understood to be musical instruments and that the DJ’s artistic labor takes place in a rich field of improvisatory exchange with audiences.127 I show that club-based sonic interventions, which influenced house music’s production, were heavily indebted to the affordances of emerging, and newly affordable, recording and amplification technologies.128 Knuckles and Hardy incorporated body-quaking bass frequencies and powerful high-end amplification indebted to deeply grooved 12” dance singles and remixes, magnetic reel to reel and cassette tape edits, and, later, synthesizers. These innovations were as much social and cultural moves as they were technological and musical ones. 45 Finally, I argue that house is an affirmative culture born from a trans-local queer, black, and Latino musical vocabulary, inclusive of, rather than in opposition to, those of disco and hip hop.129 I augment Brian Currid’s 1995 definition of house music, in which he emphasizes the critical importance of the house DJ’s dance floor, “rather than [house music’s capacity to answer] specific questions of chordal structure, rhythm and timbre.”130 Currid’s non-musical definition of house-as-articulated-in-performance, as well as his assertion that house tracks are not merely tools of nostalgia, help to frame a context for understanding Chicago house music’s repertoire in motion expansively, as does my insistence that it is a rooted cultural form connected deeply to its antecedent and coincident queer, black, and Latino musical styles and social structures. 46 2.B - The Development of The Warehouse Before The Warehouse, there was US Studios. US (pronounced like bus) was a non- profit, membership-driven social club formed by a small group of young people based in Chicago. Its success, and its role in the development of The Warehouse, were predicated in part on the fact that it wasn’t originally oriented towards generating surplus capital, but towards collective mutual aid and gifting. For the promoters behind US events, shared cultural labor was as much about what happened before or after the party as during the party itself, and many hands made the labor of DJing, hanging decorations, and setting up fruit and other snacks into lighter work. According to those who were close with the US Studios clique, such as apparel designer Larry Hope, the group came together with the explicit intention of adapting New York’s underground dance party culture in Chicago. Michael Matthews, Benny Winfield, Benny’s wife April and brother Greg, Fred, PJ, Donald Crossly, and Vicky, had been flying to The Big Apple whenever they could, crashing with friends after dancing all night to the sounds of Larry Levan at The SoHo House, Nicky Siano at The Gallery, and David Mancuso at his Loft. Each time they returned to Chicago lamenting that nobody at home partied like they did in New York.131 In the early 1970s, Robert Williams became the US clique’s concrete link to the east coast underground. A social worker-cum-nightlife entrepreneur, Williams had moved to Chicago, where he had family, because he could no longer afford to stay in New York. He knew Matthews and Winfield from partying in NYC and they pumped him for direction and guidance, ultimately thrusting him into a leadership role on their US project. According to disco and house DJ Craig Cannon, Robert Williams was already promoting house parties for black, gay men in the expansive courtyard apartments of Chicago’s South 47 Shore neighborhood when the US collective tapped him for guidance.132 Having little idea of what else he might do for work, and loving a good night out, he agreed to help them produce a recurring loft party closer to the city center. The group got Winfield’s lover, Sigfried “Ziggy” Schuh, a luthier of German descent, to help out too. Schuh rented and later purchased the ALTEC Lansing Voice of the Theater speakers that US used for sound at its early parties.133 In the beginning, US was transient and moved to various spaces around the outskirts of the Loop. Its first official party took place in fall of 1973 in Michael Matthews’ East Belmont Ave apartment. According to Robert Williams, the police broke things up within a half hour because of noise complaints from neighbors. By the time US Studios threw its next event in the private live/work loft space of a black revolutionary haberdasher named Maxine at 116 South Clinton, it would have no trouble filling the dance floor. High on the buzz it was building, the US collective was eager to keep the momentum going, but Winfield and Matthews still had much to learn about party economics. Max had asked the US collective to pay 50% more to rent her space for its following party and Williams knew they could do even better if they had their own space. He implored Winfield and Matthews to rent a former feather factory just bellow Max’s loft rather than sublet at her jacked-up rate. The collective was skeptical, but Williams already had plenty of experience making do with less, and the other members ultimately relented. He commandeered an aesthetic overhaul of the new space, spray-painting the walls, ceilings, windows, floor, and even the toilet and sink, solid black. The next party, at which US raised admission from 2 to 4 dollars, was its most successful yet. US Studios’ almost instantaneous popularity with Chicago’s queer, black, and Latino dancers was fueled by its integration of familiar and novel production elements and promotional 48 strategies. As Craig Cannon says, Chicago’s gay, black community had already been throwing down together to continuous DJ mixes on the South Shore since the late 1960s. By hosting parties near the Loop, US had made the underground black, gay scene more accessible to people living on the North and West Sides of the city. Further, by using membership sales to help decentralize audience development while simultaneously integrating decorations and lighting inspired by New York’s underground discotheques, as well as live DJ mixing and down-home hospitality, US expanded the scope of the South Shore house party model, keeping some of the buffet flat’s comforting elements, such as food, while emphasizing the sonic capacities of disused industrial lofts. Technically a members-only social club, US Studios’ parties were functionally accessible to a broad range of curious music lovers, even underage ones. US Studios members brought new audiences into the fold by selling memberships, and members could bring friends, so while there was a stable, established cohort of dancers at the parties, the model was flexible enough to accommodate curious new ones as well. According to underage Warehouse patrons like Reggie Corner, doorman and host Ron Braswell would sometimes let in unaccompanied youth who were exploring the “alternative” scene, even if they weren’t guests of members or of age.134 This flexibility, indeed this flouting of the law, helped set the stage for the explosion of the teen house scene in the South Loop during the early 1980s by socializing a cohort of sexually mixed teenagers who would go on to produce parties there. As the audiences expanded, the US cohort sought out new spaces. A fire at 116 South Clinton destroyed the crew’s ALTEC sound system and Robert Williams moved the party to 1400 South Michigan, the former home of Impressions front-man Jerry Butler’s writer’s workshop. Unfortunately, the venue’s proximity to a firehouse across the street lead to growing 49 animus between local firefighters and the club’s queer clientele. Williams recalls coming in to work one day and finding the front of the South Michigan property riddled with bullet holes. He assumed that the violation was the work of the firefighters or their cronies. Ultimately US was cited for building code violations and the group moved back to the West Loop, settling into a large fifth floor loft at 555 West Adams.135 The US Collective split up eventually because of clashing personalities and priorities. Williams says he was, from his first involvement with Winfield and Matthews, perpetually confounded by their group’s erratic and self-destructive infighting. Ironically, the clique seems to have seen him as a cure-all for its drama, electing him to replace April Winfield as board president of the 501c3 arts organization he had helped them establish. Williams saw that he would burn himself out if he had to constantly put out the fires fanned by the US collective. He filed a legal injunction against all but four of the group’s members, eventually firing them from the board for being behind on their membership dues. Those dispatched by Williams brought everyone except for Benny Winfield and Ziggy Schuh with them to a new loft space on printer’s row to rival US Studios/555 West Adams. They called it The Bowery, conspicuously nodding to their New York influences. After the split, Williams lost momentum and the ex-US Studios members almost took over the black, gay loft party scene. They might have had their new rival not secured a new venue, a new maestro, and a killer sound system. According to Williams, the building he leased at 206 South Jefferson was perfect for an underground dance party because it was unassuming but spacious. Dancers entered and ascended its narrow staircase to reach a ticketing booth where a door person, often Ron Braswell, would greet them. This second floor vestibule spilled into a lounge and coatroom from which patrons could cross back to the front of the space and then 50 walk downstairs to the first floor to dance. If they needed a break from dancing, they could ascend to the coatroom or descend to the basement for refreshments. By the time he opened US Studios at 206 South Jefferson, Williams wasn’t just tired of interpersonal drama, he was tired of moonlighting as a DJ. He knew that if he wanted to compete with his rivals at The Bowery he needed a seasoned professional versed in the musical repertoire of New York City’s underground. Williams flew to New York and offered the US Studios residency to Larry Levan. After Levan declined he asked Tee Scott. Scott was the hugely popular DJ at the Better Days disco on 49th street and Levan was already a minor celebrity with an established New York following. Frankie Knuckles, née Francis Warren Nicholls Jr., was Williams’ third choice. The young, Bronx-born DJ was mostly known as Levan’s best buddy and sidekick DJ/light man at the Continental Baths, a small, gay bath house with a disco in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel at Broadway and Amsterdam, but he had also played at Nicky Siano’s Gallery. Not having much to lose, Knuckles accepted Williams’ invitation. Frankie Knuckles succeeded in galvanizing black, gay audiences in Chicago by adapting a fluid, vocal-laden playing style to their existing sonic preferences. According to Robert Williams, about twenty people showed up for 206 South Jefferson’s opening and they “read Frankie” for playing music they didn’t know.136 Knuckles, realizing that he would need to meet them where they were, played a canny surprise set at The Bowery soon after, ultimately enticing its audience to regroup at The Warehouse the following weekend. It was only after this promotional sleight of hand (Williams offered up his resident DJ free of charge) that Williams was able to re-establish his preeminence as black, gay Chicago’s most popular underground party promoter. 51 The sound that Frankie Knuckles became known for during his half decade at The Warehouse has been described as equal parts New York “disco classicism” and Chicago “drum- machine enhancements.”137 He developed a trans-local black musical vocabulary in his DJ sets that reflected both his youth in the pioneering clubs of Manhattan, and his post-adolescence in the Windy City. This sound wasn’t so far apart from that which had already been developing in Chicago’s South Shore house party scene, or mixed-race, gay bar/discotheques like The Bistro and The Rialto. It was distinct, however, in that it reflected Knuckles’ extant connections to Larry Levan and NYC’s musically omnivorous DJ culture, as well as his access to the musical selections of pioneering disco DJ, David Mancuso. 52 2.C - NYC Antecedents Chicago became the place where Robert Williams, Ziggy Schuh, Benny Winfield, and Frankie Knuckles built The Warehouse, but the template these Chicago entrepreneurs were adopting was based on New York City’s established promotional systems, musical programming, and mixing styles. Williams claims he first met Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan while working as a truancy officer uptown, but that the trio became friends while dancing in the mostly white gay disco scene centered around midtown Manhattan.138 They developed their deep affinities for underground disco culture farther downtown at David Mancuso’s Loft. Beginning in the early 1970s, new age hippy and audiophile David Mancuso turned the industrial loft where he lived into a private haven for musically omnivorous, queer men of color and their friends. Renowned for creating the musical and social template for underground disco, he experimented with the ways that sound, lights, and other ritual elements like incense could be combined to create what Tim Lawrence, following Hakim Bey, calls a “temporary autonomous zone” unmoored from the space/time of hetero-patriarchal white supremacist sociality.139 According to Robert Williams, Frankie Knuckles or Larry Levan would have been too young to get into David Mancuso’s famous loft parties at 647 Broadway.140 Regardless of whether they were there, Mancuso’s party would have been well known to the two DJs as underground disco’s gold standard. With the support of his co-promoters and Knuckles, Williams adapted Mancuso’s Loft template for Chicago’s more parochial audiences.141 Like Mancuso, Williams engineered US Studios parties for a class-diverse coterie of racially and sexually marginal people and promoted Knuckles’ meticulous style of emotive, narrative DJing. He also constructed stark yet emphatic lighting schemes and studiously stretched the affordances of his Richard Long (Richard Long Audio/RLA) sound system.142 53 During his years in New York, Williams attended and was influenced by not only David Mancuso’s parties, but also Nicky Siano’s. The success of Siano’s themed weekend parties at The Gallery club in SoHo relied, like Mancuso’s, on the creative mixing of genre-defiant, yet danceable, music played at high decibel levels to primarily queer, black, and Latino audiences in a resonant space that accommodated their sexual fluidity, racial diversity, and needs for spiritual ecstasy.143 Williams’ studious attention to his promotions helped him develop an understanding of the intimate relationships between social vibes and sonic vibrations. This intimacy drew from the pleasurable sensations great music could stimulate in the erogenous zones of multiple bodies pressed together in motion. As sound studies scholar Steve Goodman has noted, precisely targeted low bass and sub-bass frequencies have the potential to elide distinctions between not only between dancing subjects, but also a collective experience of “mind and body, subject and object, [and] the living and the nonliving.”144 Siano, Mancuso, and later Williams, attended to and accentuated these affective elisions, in some cases re-tuning sound systems after events to maximally stretch their vibratory affordances. Not all club sound systems were created equally, however. By the late 1970s, a custom system designed by audio engineer Richard Long proved to be a critical component of a superlative underground dance club’s acoustic environment. An obsessive audiophile, Long worked with Larry Levan to reimagine the possibilities of club sound, primarily at Michael Brody’s Paradise Garage during the early 1980s. RLA provided ongoing service to Levan and Brody’s sound system, tweaking it frequently in collaboration with the DJ over the course of years. This constant tinkering and tuning was necessary in part because the cost of developing such a unique and powerful sound system was too much for Paradise Garage’s financial backers 54 to pay in a single lump sum. Constant technical maintenance helped The Garage RLA system harness, and retain, its precision and power. Long used The Garage as a massive showroom for his incredibly powerful yet subtle cross-over system, a tool that allowed DJs to amplify low, medium, and high frequencies in separate speakers. He also developed high-quality sub-bass woofers in dynamic collaboration with Levan, claiming they were capable of “awesome reproduction at very high sound pressure levels down to 30 Hz.”145 The crowning jewels of Long’s system at The Garage were its large arrays of mounted tweeters hovering several feet above the heads of dancers. These tweeter racks could be isolated and used for what Long, in a detailed description of his RLA system, described as “special effects.”146 Indeed, the affordances of the RLA crossover helped DJs like Levan develop new sonic approaches and performative techniques. According to West End Records executive and Garage regular Mel Cheren, the tool “lent an eerie element to the music. With the flick of a switch, Larry could bathe the vocals in a tinny reverberation or make them sound like an echoing jet soaring overhead or a subway train rumbling below.”147 Levan, in other words, could stretch the affordances of the RLA system to create layered sounds within the sonic tapestry of his mix that mimicked or alluded to the aural backdrop of daily life in the city. This sonic trickery helped distinguish the sound system of The Garage from those used by other New York venues. It was peerless. RLA’s major innovations in club sound were not merely technical, they were social. Long developed a close relationship with Larry Levan after wooing him away from his residency at The Continental Baths, but prior to the opening of The Paradise Garage, when Levan DJ’d at a club called SoHo Place. Long and Levan became creatively intertwined there, with Long’s 55 acoustical engineering fueling Levan’s sonic experimentation and Levan’s sonic experimentation, co-authorized by his performing audiences, stretching the affordances of Long’s sound system.148 According to Mel Cheren, Levan and Long eventually co-developed a 5-way crossover system that revolutionized the administration of precise highs and lows to the massive dance floor at The Garage: “Larry used the crossover to communicate with his crowd, his flock. It came to be known as ‘disco evangelism:’ preaching through the mix.”149 This sermonic function, especially meaningful for queer folks alienated from the black church because of their sexual preferences or non-binary gender affiliations, would be further developed by house music’s progenitors in Chicago. 56 2.D - Chicago’s Proto-House DJs Although Robert Williams’ RLA system may have been less precisely tuned to the acoustic environment in which it was installed, its power and precision were still revolutionary for the Warehouse patrons.150 Frankie Knuckles, undoubtedly influenced by Levan’s Garage sonics, used 206 South Jefferson’s crossover expertly - accentuating vocal lines by dropping out the bass frequencies entirely and smothering the dance floor in waves of bass so deep and dense that his audience would shriek with pleasure.151 According to Warehouse regular Roy Bryant audience participation became part of the overall sonic event at the venue. He says the ecstatic performance of Gentle Lee, another Warehouse regular who “had a window that he would stand in and scream like a white lady in church,” was not uncommon: “[Lee] would scream at the top of his lungs - when the songs would come on you could hear him screaming.”152 Proto-house culture was grounded not only in the technical and social innovations of artists and nightlife entrepreneurs in New York City, but also in the aesthetic priorities cultivated by South Side disco DJs like Michael Ezebukwu, Dana Powell, and Craig Cannon. Black, gay disco DJs had prepared some of the audiences that came together at The Warehouse to hear a particular non-commercial disco repertoire performed in particularly queer ways for years before US Studios started throwing parties in loft spaces around the Loop.153 Ezebukwu recalls learning to count beats and juggle records to extend a particularly resonant musical motif in The Emotions’ “I Don’t Want To Lose Your Love,” an anthem for his black, gay audience at The Private Sculpture Room.154 He says that the first time he mastered what is often called the “merry-go-round” technique, he spun that track for nearly an hour, in effect treating the static 12” record as though it were a plastic, unsettled text: “I played it and I kept starting it again … I kept playing the beginning … I didn’t even let the vocal start. And then I started playing the vocals. I played the vocals ... the chorus would start, start again155 …” 57 The 12” dance single became central to creative disco mixing like Ezebukwu’s because it could contain longer tracks and more dynamic sounds. In emphasizing non-teleological circularity in his approach to a track’s rhythmic and melodic structure, as opposed to its imposed linearity as a commercial product, Ezebukwu stretched the affordances of the 12” record and elevated the cultural value of building intensification over time for his audience. He also made use of the farthest-out affordances of the acoustic equipment that he used to facilitate the record’s manipulation.156 Unlike most commercial musical products, the uses of which are pre-determined before they reach the market, the 12” format was a happy accident indexing a nonlinear reciprocity between club and studio spaces in New York. Tom Moulton, a disco remixer, couldn’t get his hands on a 7” blank vinyl to do a test pressing of a new edit. His mastering engineer suggested spreading the groove out on a 12” disc. Following Moulton’s lead, the disco label Salsoul released Double Exposure’s “Ten Percent” on 12” single in 1976.157 As Will Gibson says from his vantage point working with jazz instrumentalists: “Through alterations in technique or indeed the objects themselves, new sets of action possibilities [were] realized and the boundaries of possible musical action [shifted].”158 During the peak years of disco’s mainstream popularity, record companies pressed fewer 7” dance singles and began pressing more 12” vinyl records. The move towards promoting singles with 12” records, on which analog sounds can be inscribed over more generous amounts of vinyl, and thus with more expansive dynamic ranges, took place largely because pioneering DJ/producers in New York City like Moulton proved that extended dance mixes were necessary for proper club promotion. As dance music historians Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton 58 emphasize, the commercial 12” single was, until the MP3 perhaps, the only format introduced because of “consumer demand rather than record company marketing guile.”159 By the time the commercial 12” single became a commonplace tool used by disco DJs, it was already affording artists new and unexpected ways to be musically expressive. These new affordances were bound up in a queer spatio-cultural confluence, a non-linear feedback loop between the American recording industry and dance DJ/producers, and the interpersonal and professional ties between nodal points of Afro-Diasporic cultural efflorescence in Chicago, New York, and Jamaica, where remix/dub culture has its early roots. According to Michael Veal, the Jamaican traditions of creatively misusing sound technologies in dub and sound system cultures amount to a “shadow history” in global popular music.160 Gibson’s analytic helps collapse notions of acceptable and unacceptable/unanticipated use, opening space to consider the important aesthetic transformations taking place in Chicago as 1970s disco morphed into 1980s house.161 59 2.E - Tight Spaces, Expansive Vibes According to longtime Chicago resident and disco historian/archivist Daniel Goss, The Bistro, a celebrated racially mixed disco on the Near North Side often derided by blacks for its racist door policies, was so packed in the mid-1970s that there would often be a queue extending down the block.162 The Warehouse was even more crowded. At the venue’s peak, Williams would squeeze around 2,000 patrons into just 3,000 square feet - a space roughly the size of a suburban home - and two thirds of the venue’s real estate was above or below the dance floor. Despite its relatively small size, Warehouse patrons remember the venue as being a space of immeasurable social expansiveness, more than suitable for the cultivation of queer, black, and Latino cultural responsiveness and vitality. In fact, Warehouse dancers experienced the physical crush of being packed in, as well as the congestion and discomfort of confinement, as freeing. Cultural historian Shane Vogel says that “loose spaces within tight structures” animated an analogous cultural vitality experienced by mostly black audiences in Harlem jazz clubs during the 1920s. He emphasizes the ways that the cultural labor of performers in “black cabarets” differed from that of black performers in venues hosting spectacles designed for white consumption. Black spaces were smaller and more physically confined, but the artists performing in them were able to focus on the “production of sound and a reciprocity between performers and audience.”163 Vogel’s tight/loose frame is useful for thinking through the ways that Chicago’s underground loft parties became spaces of cultural efflorescence despite being overcrowded and even uncomfortably hot.164 According to Chicago house producer, DJ, and promoter Jesse Saunders, the aesthetic priorities of The Warehouse audience developed under the influence of the venue’s physical confines, but perhaps more importantly, in response to the ways those confines were animated by 60 its RLA sound system’s booming acoustics. It wasn’t just that The Warehouse dance floor was compact, but that the bass frequencies pulsating from the huge stacks of subwoofers there were so deep and intense that they created resonating chambers out of the dancers themselves: The place was narrow with seven-foot sub-woofers lining the walls, tweeters hanging. The sound system was big enough for 5,000 people—outdoors. But it was in this little room, pounding through your system. It was like the bass filled up your entire body.165 The Warehouse sound system shaped audience expectations that house would be both a sonic experience and a “vibrotactile” one operating on several spatial scales.166 Punk singer and house diva “Screamin’” Rachael Cain characterizes the whole spectrum of house sounds as relating to “a full body experience, it’s not just your head, it’s not just your ears, it’s your body.”167 Modern Dance Music Archiving Foundation Director, Charles Matlock, similarly remembers feeling the intensity of a sound so big that it made the hair on his arms shake.168 These impressions corroborate the idea that house music grew from a musical culture in which the “soundscape [became] more than auditory, or even haptic.”169 The vibrotactile experience of The Warehouse was built on the power of the venue’s sound system and its sonic capabilities, the corporeal density of its dance floor, and the materiality of the building itself. The size of 206 Jefferson significantly affected its capacity to become a resonating chamber larger than that of the body, a space in which Knuckles’ performing audience could be synchronized through its DJ’s approach to song selection and sequencing, or what house DJs call musical programming. Sound waves emanating from the RLA sound system reflected back off 206 South Jefferson’s narrow brick walls, causing bodies to pulsate in concert, and contributing significantly to the circulation of affective joy recounted by dancers there. Elements such as a buckling wooden floor, which many dancers remember as a definitive element of their experiences at 206 Jefferson and other house spaces, enhanced the 61 capacity for house audiences to tune into what Omi Joni Jones has called “resonant frequencies,” or the pleasurable sensations of collective effervescence, afforded by new acoustic technologies.170 Resonance in underground club spaces was also predicated on the synchronicity and asynchrony of internally regulated and externally imposed vibrations. Internal vibrations, both those vibratory processes affecting auditory stimulation and those working on other somatic processes, become enveloped within a wider affective scope of sonic pressure that might incite contradictory emotional states, alternately pleasurable, painful, and cathartic.171 As Henriques points out, a body under pressure from powerful bass frequencies is always already pulsing.172 He posits that a dancer’s internal vibrations might be synced up pleasurably in the club space under the influence of a captivating DJ and a robust sound system, such as the RLA setup at The Warehouse. Often DJs and dancers associate the pleasure induced by heavy bass with the general 120 BPM tempo of classic disco and house, roughly the average rate of a healthy adult’s heart rate during the peak intensity of sexual intercourse.173 In addition to the very size and materiality of The Warehouse space and the precision of its sound system, the expansive grooves of new 12” dance singles, with sounds spread across greater dynamic ranges than their 7” predecessors and 331/3 RPM LPs, augmented the affective possibilities experienced by audiences at the venue. With higher highs and lower lows at his disposal, Knuckles could respond to and accentuate his performing audience’s affective states with more precision. Thus the affordances of the new media artifacts, and the high bias affective states they enhanced, were critical to the ways that the Warehouse came to be defined as a space of ritual communion for its queer, black, and Latino patrons as well as how those patrons defined their aesthetic priorities. 62 2.F - Sacred Ground, Spiritual Practices The Warehouse was a space where Frankie Knuckles and his performing audience co- created the conditions necessary for queer, black, and Latino patrons to come together in rapturous congregation. Interventions made by scholars theorizing queer of color subjectivity stabilize a grounded analysis of the venue as a refuge or haven - a space that the late José Esteban Muñoz might have described as a queer utopia.174 Building on Muñoz’ work, as well as the aforementioned spatial interventions by Shane Vogel, Tavia N’yongo uses Freud’s concept of the “feeling tone” to explain how interracial, and polysexual, New York disco audiences experienced the womblike crush of spaces in which they danced.175 Jafarri Allen further queers the scope of the night club/loft party, connecting house to a genealogy of earlier Afro-Diasporic cultural formations such as lime, ring shout, and bembe.176 Majority queer of color loft parties in Chicago functioned differently from the tighter spaces of mid-century drag balls and cabarets because they were mostly invisible to straight interlopers. Sexually mixed audiences that patronized pre-war cabarets on the South Side, like the Club De Lisa and Joe’s Deluxe, often came to venues with calcified expectations of queer performance that emphasized one-dimensional spectacle over representational diversity.177 Performances at these venues were made static yet again through their mediation and circulation beyond primary audiences via black appeal publications such as Jet and Ebony.178 Warehouse patrons might have been ogled, especially after more straight folks found out about the party in the early 1980s, but spectacular spectatorship was not the dominant mode of looking taking place at 206 South Jefferson. Rather, patrons made ritual performances out of self-fashioning and ecstatic communion with the DJ together, rooting the optics of the venue in what DJ Craig Cannon describes as mutual respect and a shared love of the musical experience: 63 “You could be naked next to [straight patrons] and it didn’t make any difference. This was the time when DJs ruled the earth, before the dinosaurs came.”179 Ecstatic performing audiences turned The Warehouse dance floor into what Bernice Johnson Reagan has called “sacred territory,” experiencing freedom of expression that was inconceivable in most sanctified black spaces.180 As Knuckles himself put it: “for most of the people that went to The Warehouse it was Church.”181 According to attendees, there would usually be a nadir in the secular pulse of Knuckles’ Warehouse mix around 6am. He would drop some of the insistent bass out with the club’s RLA crossover and play the soulful, gospel-tinged sound that he has since become famous for, hailing the anti-oppressive cultural practices of the black church as opposed to the hetero-patriarchal ones. Roy Bryant recalls that, “It would just really hit you. Then he would take you right back up again after that. So from like 6 to 7 or 6 to 8 he would church you with the church vibes, the gospel tracks, then at 8:00 it was like the party started all over again.”182 Craig Cannon says that the older generation of Warehouse patrons, many of them WVON AM listeners, were used to hearing the legendary black appeal DJ Herb Kent play gospel songs, like “Open Our Eyes,” at the end of the night before the station would go off the air.183 This familiar, close juxtaposition of the sacred (gospel) and the profane (r&b) became central to the way that house people were worshiping under Knuckles’ musical supervision, coming together and creating a newly vibrant church of their own.184 Church practices, which worked against “categories of oppression” in the setting of the black church, were reclaimed and extended by Knuckles and his congregation in the space/time of their underground loft party.185 The process by which Knuckles and his flock elided the sacred/profane divide was the inverse of that which had taken place for gospel innovator Thomas Dorsey and parishioners at 64 AME Baptist Church decades prior. As Knuckles put it, “you had these down-to-earth, corn-fed mid-western folk, and yet the parties were very soulful, very spiritual.”186 Dorsey brought the secular life of the blues club, buffet flat, and rent party into the musical textures of the church, weaving the melodic and formal structures of secular sound with sanctified themes within sanctified spaces, but Frankie Knuckles was incorporating sanctified lyrical themes, and musical tropes, into the secular space of the underground club. As performance theorist E. Patrick Johnson might put it, Knuckles was taking on a sermonic function, dismantling “the meaning of gospel music and black sermonic rhetoric as one ‘truth,’” in favor of a polysemic set of truth-full possibilities.187 Knuckles says that his approach was shaped not only by his own desire to say something meaningful and uplifting, but also by the desires and embodied responses of his performing audiences, who he recognized as needing to be shepherded, indeed liberated, from the constraints of their oppressive everyday experiences. There was a critical dimension of dance floor spirituality that was connected to the cultural vacuum created when African American gay men who were raised in the city’s church worlds began exploring an array of non-normative gender identities and sexual desires.188 A club-based experience of individual and communal affirmation elevated at The Warehouse was not a “coming out,” per se, though it did often involve the recognition of same-sex desire, and/or the queering of gender expression. Rather it was, as Jafari Allen suggests, a stepping outside and turning inward: Getting your life means stepping outside of your current pretension to a life, to see where yours may be hiding—what grace you might imagine, then help others to see. I am not describing here what some simplistically call ‘‘coming out,’’ but rather coming inward: ‘‘going up’’ or, ‘‘going in’’ in black gay parlance. The club is one place where many have begun to feel the outer edges of this divine life.189 “Getting [one’s] life” queers the normative notion of coming out into a homogenous, or 65 prescriptive, gay culture, and challenges the somewhat uniform notion of sermonic rhetoric imbued in Johnson’s preacher metaphor. It also helps to explain the cultural specificity of the utopian horizon being reached towards by Warehouse patrons. While Johnson’s sermonic metaphor certainly lends itself to the spiritual quality of The Warehouse experience, midwifery better captures the intimately collaborative, divine feminine energy harnessed by house DJs in ways that Johnson’s preacher analogy cannot. Like midwifery, DJing house requires an appreciation for the transitional energies involved in the painful release of blood, sweat, and tears in the sacred home-space of the queer, black, and Latino club.190 Black midwives, in particular, have a long, rich tradition of working when and where white doctors would not. Much like underground house DJs, they have also often participated in informal, gift and barter economies while holding the spiritual, psychic, and physical wellbeing of their patients in high regard.191 Frankie Knuckles’ adventurous cultural midwifery grounded the spiritual ascension of his audiences in several complementary ways. First, he brought an ear for unfamiliar tracks to his musical programing, but he never played too far outside his audience’s comfort zone. Rather, he incorporated a novel, future classic repertoire of punk, funk, r&b, and disco with tracks that were already familiar to Chicago dancers.192 Second, Knuckles mixed these tracks seamlessly using his turntables, a rotary mixer, and a reel to reel tape deck, building off techniques developed in the disco scenes of New York and Chicago, as well as the South Shore neighborhood’s black, gay house parties. Finally, he used visual and aural effects to augment his musical programming, such as strobe lights, projected video, Martin Luther King speeches, and train sounds. These visual and aural effects augmented the altered states induced by the LSD-laced punch patrons found in The Warehouse basement.193 66 According to Jesse Saunders, Frankie Knuckles’ capacity to program unfamiliar, genre- bending recordings that could jump from the underground clubs to radio was another critical dimension of his musical and social influence on an entire generation of DJs and producers.194 Unlike other DJs performing in Chicago during the late 1970s, Knuckles still had a direct, privileged line to new post-disco sounds coming out of the New York club scene, and he infused his Chicago repertoire with them. Tracks like “Yellow” by Bostich, “Walk The Night” by Skatt Bros and “When You Touch Me” by Taana Gardner were at first unfamiliar to Chicago audiences. By breaking them at The Warehouse, Knuckles helped fuel an intense enthusiasm for non-commercial dance music in the city at large. Despite its popularity, much of Knuckles’ early repertoire, especially the punk records and European imports that pushed his audience in new, unexpected directions, was not available on commercial or promotional releases with appropriate long-form mixes. According to Knuckles, “By 1981 [the recording industry] had declared that disco was dead. All the record labels were getting rid of their dance departments, and there were no more up-tempo dance records. I realized I had to start changing things in order to keep feeding my dance floor.”195 Magnetic reel-to-reel tape, which had only in the last thirty years gained traction as a commercial recording and playback medium, would help him satisfy the voracious musical appetites of his dancers while pushing him into the world of music production. 67 2.G - Reel-to-Reel Remix Magnetic recording was invented at the tail end of the 19th century, but it wasn’t until the German military used plastic film coated in a magnetic iron oxide to reproduce high-quality audio during the 1930s that its current commercial use began to take shape. Allied forces seized the technology after WWII, and an American entrepreneur, John Herbert Orr, who had acted as a radio technician in London during the fighting, invested in its commercial production. Orr marketed magnetic tape in the US as an enhancement for radio that might enable syndicated shows to be pre-recorded and then distributed widely, rather than as a tool for home recording. Despite resistance from radio conglomerates, tape soon became a standard tool used by AM stations around the country. Recording on magnetic tape was simple; it offered greater editing capabilities than steel wire, and it eliminated the cost of multiple performances when a show was reprised. Tape recorders complemented the commercial production of phonograph records too, eliminating the need to make one perfect “take,” and making it easier to cut and splice sections of a recording together. By the 1950s inexpensive consumer reel-to-reel player/recorders rode a wave of popular enthusiasm for high-fidelity music to join the micro- groove phonograph record, FM radio, hi-fi amps and speakers, and televisions in the homes of the booming American middle-class.196 According to Craig Cannon, who filled in for Frankie Knuckles sometimes at The Warehouse, the use of reel-to-reel tape recorders in discotheques wasn’t a common practice before Frankie Knuckles came to town. On the South Shore party scene, a host might outfit one half of his sprawling six-bedroom apartment with a double-sided reel-to-reel, which would play a pre-recorded mix through a hi-fi system, but the playback equipment, which retailed for just under $500, was too bulky and expensive for most mobile deejays to bring around with them. 68 Venue owners at gay discotheques still had to be convinced to purchase high quality speakers, amps and turntables, let alone tape equipment.197 Despite reel-to-reel’s assumed incommensurability with club culture, Knuckles began to see it as a means of crafting signature edits of commercial music. Working with Loftis, who was taking audio engineering courses at Columbia College during the early 1980s, Knuckles began to learn how to physically splice tape. According to Loftis, he and Knuckles used a Pioneer 707 RT Tape Deck: You’d cue it right before the beat, you’d make your mark, then you’d take it and you’d splice it … with a straight cut you'll get an instant boom … You do the slanted, you actually ... cut the end of this bass frequency off, to meet with the end of this bass frequency and it blends it, it merges them together.198 The tape edits that Knuckles and Loftis produced fueled excitement about The Warehouse sound and enhanced Knuckles’ reputation as a DJ who was able to service the dance floor with novel versions of familiar repertoire. Ultimately, these remixes became stylistic and technical blueprints for younger house producers who would come to prominence in Chicago during the mid-1980s.199 When asked about making his own remixes, Knuckles said: “you have to think about things like continuity, you don’t want to be so repetitive that it’s boring. You have to give it something extra that’ll make it pop so it isn’t just one drone thing going on … I’m just trying to find something different to do to keep the dance floor interested so they’d keep coming back every week.”200 Chicago’s proto-house audiences were disposed to liking things that sounded new, but that weren’t totally unfamiliar. Knuckles and Loftis’ reel-to-reel mixes responded to these predilections by sounding musical novelty and repetition simultaneously. “Let No Man Put Asunder” was originally an album cut released by the vocal trio First Choice on their 1977 LP, Delusions.201 The affordances of magnetic tape helped Loftis and 69 Knuckles re-imagine the song’s structure by moving many of its melodic elements into the sonic backdrop while speeding up and intensifying the bass groove and atmospheric synth melody from its 30-second intro. The success of their unofficial bootleg remix on reel-to-reel set the stage for “Asunder”’s explosion on the Billboard dance charts after it was re-released as a commercial club track by Salsoul Records in 1983, complete with a licensed Frankie Knuckles remix. His official “Asunder” remix, with its nested 8, 16, 32, and 64-bar grooves, followed a traditional pop structure in many ways, and as such was in and of itself ripe for further sonic manipulation by artists who used tape editing to service their dance floors. In addition to its social and sonic affordances, magnetic tape technology also allowed for house to sound in new spatial configurations. For those that were too young, or too unsure about the in-your-face queerness of The Warehouse, bootleg cassette tapes, some recorded from the booth and others from the dance floor at The Warehouse, and later The Music Box, provided a window into a world apart. According to house producer Jere McAllister, who would go on to record house tracks under a variety of aliases: The music on these tapes was life altering and earth shattering to my young, impressionable psyche … Just listening transported you out of the hood, to a world where everybody was artistic, sophisticated, eclectic, and had already risen above the B.S. that our usual world presented—like the Harlem Renaissance or Paris in the jazz age. A place where things like race, creed, color and sexual orientation didn’t matter, and all that mattered was how fabulous you could be. Although this is an exaggeration of what the scene was really like, I believe it was this kind of aesthetic that was the ideal and inspiration to a lot of the people who were attracted to it.202 The Warehouse was a connection to a cosmopolitan black identity that transcended the parochial confines of hyper-segregated Chicago. The collaboration between Knuckles and Williams, made possible by the energy of countless dancers, set-decorators, costume-designers, projectionists and other artists who helped build the magic of the oft-mythologized loft at 206 South Jefferson, 70 birthed a movement and set the primary terms of inclusion for what would eventually come to be understood as a classic house repertoire. 71 2.H - The Twilight of The Warehouse, The Dawn of The Music Box The collaboration between Williams and Knuckles started to stagnate in 1982, with Williams claiming that Knuckles lost his support after bringing The Warehouse sound system with him to other performances, specifically to a party thrown by Dave “Medusa” Sheldon, a young white Warehouse fanatic who was starting to promote his own house events in the West Loop neighborhood.203 The Warehouse was at that point open on both weekend nights and had dropped its membership policy. It had become the place to go for music-loving dancers in Chicago. Unfortunately, being the in-place meant that the venue’s queer clientele were being pushed to the margins by a group that Frankie Knuckles described as infiltrating, hard-edged, and straight.204 Knuckles ended up parting ways with Williams and starting his own party farther north of the West Loop on a narrow industrial strip of Halsted, an area later re-branded as the “River North” neighborhood. The Power Plant at 1015 North Halted, formerly the Riverside Club, attracted and retained many of Knuckles’ most devoted followers - it also anchored a strip of black, gay house music venues that became central to Chicago house music’s development well into the new millennium. The Plant remained Knuckles’ primary DJ residency in Chicago until he left the city to return to play in London and New York in 1986; it retained The Warehouse’s identity as a space where doubly marginalized queers of color could commune under the musical supervision of an established local legend. But Frankie Knuckles’ dance floor was no longer the most important site in the city for breaking new sounds. After US Studios/The Warehouse ended, Robert Williams opened up a new venue for what would come to be known for its rowdier, more sexually-diverse (perhaps straighter, though by no means narrow) crowd of young people who had begun to, as dance music historian Bill Broughton says, “dilute” The Warehouse scene.205 72 2.I - Decoupling Proto-House Culture’s Polysexual and Cross-Class Mix To comprehend the moves that Robert Williams was making to spread house music beyond The Warehouse in the early 1980s, it is helpful to know that he was also exploring a new business venture with one of his fraternity brothers in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After a couple of rocky scouting missions, and one impressive exploratory event, Williams established a New Mexican 501c3 to incorporate The Music Box. Shortly after, the City of Chicago informed him that 206 South Jefferson was unfit for use as a social club - the building, inspectors told its owners, was not built to withstand the heavy impact of Warehouse dancers. At the time the city shut Williams down, his relationship with Knuckles was already on the rocks, and the collective of party promoters in New Mexico was falling apart too. He decided to keep the intellectual property from his Albuquerque venture, but transfer the 501c3 entity he had established to Illinois. As soon as all the paperwork was re-filed, Williams’ Music Box opened in a temporary gallery space on Michigan Avenue just a few doors down from a popular teen juice bar called The Playground. Soon thereafter the owners of 206 South Jefferson offered him a new lease at a space that would become the club’s most consistent home, 1632 South Indiana. Williams had a space, but he needed a maestro at least as talented as Frankie Knuckles to keep the momentum he had built with The Warehouse audiences. After some careful consideration he offered the residency to Ron Hardy, a young Chicago DJ who had recently returned from LA after the unexpected death of his brother. According to Frankie Knuckles, when Williams offered Hardy the gig, Hardy had approached him for advice, and perhaps his blessing, which Knuckles willingly gave.206 According to Williams, Knuckles was actually trying to woo Hardy to The Power Plant, his new venture on Halsted. Regardless of what 73 Knuckles’ intentions were, Williams’ offer of a residency was a tantalizing option, especially since Hardy would be playing on the RLA sound system transplanted from The Warehouse to The Music Box.207 At the time he joined Williams, Ron Hardy was spinning at a small venue called The Ritz, a black, gay discotheque at 937 N State that had been open since 1976, but had closed briefly after a fire in 1981.208 Hardy would go on to perform at other venues, including C.O.D. on West Devon, and a second Music Box at 326 N Michigan Ave, but the first Box, which stayed open through 1988, would become the party most associated with what house producer DJ Pierre would later call his fundamentally “energetic,” and often experimental, playing style.209 During 1982 and 1983, curious new teenage audiences were flocking to the cluster of all- ages, underground venues in the South Loop. Many of the most ardent house music fans continued to patronize parties played by both Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy even after The Warehouse closed. One could dance at The Box on Friday and The Plant on Saturday if they had enough time to recuperate in between, or enough vigor to run the weekend like a marathon. Excepting these hardcore house dancers, most of the gay patrons at The Warehouse moved on with Frankie Knuckles to The Power Plant, and most of the straight audience moved on to The Music Box. House music aficionados debate the primacy of Knuckles and Hardy’s playing styles as though they had been on opposing teams in a friendly cross-Loop rivalry. In these narratives, The Power Plant is feminized and queered, associated with the restrained musical sensibilities that Knuckles had been developing with his audiences at The Warehouse. Adjectives like “smooth” or “refined,” as well as the concept of “soulful fluidity,” dominate when house artists 74 and audiences are asked to describe the vibe of a Frankie Knuckles party.210 House producer Chez Damier characterizes the difference in terms of class, with The “Plant” representing aspirational middle class status and The Music Box representing the “ghetto” or “banji [banjee]” soul of house culture.211 Robert Williams agrees with Damier, saying that Hardy’s playing style at The Box was intimately connected to his “ghetto streak,” and crediting him with being the inspiration for original productions that heralded the “change in the music.”212 It is critical to hear and feel house in a post-1970s American cultural context where visual, sonic, and kinesthetic hip hop signifiers are often assumed to authenticate “real” blackness in ways that cover over the heterogeneity of black American, let alone Afro-Diasporic, cultures. Although house was hardly a fixed corporate genre at this time, it was already being positioned as the cultural antithesis of hip hop.213 Being forced into an either/or dichotomy with its Bronx-born twin (both genres were born from similar technological and social shifts in the late 1970s) has often put pressure on house audiences to dismiss house music culture’s queer, pro-woman, and middle-class dimensions. DJ/producers like New York’s Armand Van Helden and Chicago’s DJ Sneak, for example, distance themselves in interviews from the feminized and queer roots of house, describing themselves as masculine “house gangsters,” or making recourse to their hip hop bonafides.214 Anti-femme narratives minimize the fact that house had classed and gendered dimensions in and of itself, and that hip hop sounds, and poor and working class people, were always a part of house culture’s wild mix. 75 2.J - Ron Hardy’s Technological, Sonic, and Social Innovations By 1983 the cassette recorder, having dropped precipitously in price since its debut on the home audio market in 1974, began to replace bulky reel-to-reels in the home recording studios and DJ booths of Chicago’s underground.215 Thus, while turntables and mixers anchored the bulk of technical and sonic innovation in the first decade of Chicago house, cassette tapes became critical tools for disseminating it in its second and third. Cassette tape recordings of Hardy’s sets allowed for his sound to circulate, become mythologized, and ultimately, to be reproduced, archived, and disseminated promiscuously online. This capricious circulation, which moved the house sound favored at The Music Box from local circuits of exchange to national and international ones, has played an outsized role in enshrining The Box and its maestro in the pantheon of house music innovators. Ron Hardy’s influence on Chicago house music is connected to the affordances of cassette tape technology in three complementary ways: First, the dual-cassette recorder, in particular Sansui’s $450 D-W9 model, afforded Hardy the capacity to reconfigure recorded music during improvised club performances and in his home studio.216 Second, compact and affordable magnetic cassette tape technology enabled Hardy to preview and mix new, unsigned demo recordings produced by amateur artists during his live club performances. Finally the small size, portability, and re-configurability of cassette tapes allowed Hardy, as well as his promoters and fans, to record live mixes either from his DJ console directly, or indirectly via compact microphone recorders placed in and around club speakers. Inexpensive and disposable, the cassette afforded the development of “open” musical approaches to production; its revolutionary promise was in part predicated on its capacity to liberate recordings from industry control.217 Ron Hardy used tapes to speed up familiar disco and 76 Warehouse cuts, accentuating the EQ even more dramatically than Frankie Knuckles, and, as Music Box alternate DJ Lee Collins remembers, pushing the crowd harder towards the brink of exhaustion: “Ron used to say things like, ‘Stay on those motherfuckers, and if they look like they going to faint, hit them harder.’”218 By emphasizing the percussive elements that Knuckles minimized in favor of melodic phrasing, and de-emphasizing without abandoning sounds that hailed a local history of queer of color musical ferment, Hardy remained connected to house music’s queer, black, and Latino roots while forging his own path of innovation and influence. A wiz with a pause button, Hardy became known for his on-the-fly cassette tape edits, many of which were created live in the DJ booth. Jesus “Roy” Bryant, says Hardy: would take his headphones, plug it into the [Sansui] tape deck, and edit, while the party is going on. The song is on the turntable, he’s in the tape deck, pause-button editing: boom, boom, boom, boom. And he would turn the tape, rewind it, push play (boop!) and mix it in. In a live set archived first on the deephousepage, a site of on-going historical debate within the Chicago house music community, and later in dance music historian Jacob Arnold’s online Gridface archive, Hardy edits Walter Gibbons’ 1979 remix of Frankie Knuckles’ Warehouse anthem, “Let No Man Put Asunder.”219 His remixed version of this classic First Choice track illustrates the extent of his technical mastery of the cassette deck recorder, and also the often-underestimated influence of magnetic tape technology on the development of house music aesthetics. While the recorded mix incorporating Hardy’s bootleg of Gibbons’ “Let No Man Put Asunder (Disco Madness Remix)” captures neither the enormous sound of the RLA sound system installed in The Music Box, nor can it possibly give a sense of the energy of the live performing audience working with Hardy, one can still hear the ways the DJ/producer emphasizes singer Rochelle Flemming’s throw away lines, “honey, let me tell you something” 77 and “aw, shucks,” as he cuts them into the plaintive “baby … baby, baby” appeal of the song’s breakdown.220 Hardy appropriates the feminized vocal to frame his new musical narrative, queering a gap between what musicologist Barbara Bradby has helpfully framed as the masculinized technological, cultural, and linguistic frame of dance music production and the feminized embodiment, emotion, and nature hailed by many of its sampled feminine vocals.221 Lines that once moved linearly towards narrative and harmonic resolution now circulate endlessly, with the slight clip of the tape edit on the seam of the mix providing ghostly evidence that this sound is not the product of a looped 12” disco single, but a technical feat predicated on the affordances of the D-W9. After about a minute and a half Hardy releases his tape loop, letting Flemming move on to the song’s spoken/sung line: “I’ve got something for your mind, your body, and your soul.” Hardy interpolates himself and his dance floor in this live version of “Asunder” through his circular reformulation of the song’s most empowering lyrics, rather than those that decry the unexpected departure of a still-cared-for lover. In this way, he transforms the bittersweet proto- house anthem into an ecstatic invocation for a never-ending dance party.222 In another set from 1983 archived on the deephousepage and parsed for its track list expertly by Jacob Arnold at Gridface, Hardy segues from the instrumental “Use Me Lose Me (Reprise Me)” by Paul Simpson Connection into the spoken/sung lines of Shep Pettibone’s remix of “Asunder.”223 In this live tape edit he foregrounds the line, “You know what this means? This means that no man in the world can let go of this Aquarius. You dig where I’m coming from?” Singers Joyce Jones and Annette Guest respond to Flemming’s lead with melismatic “ooh baby” vocalizations before Hardy isolates the song’s “It’s not over” refrain and blends it out over a deceptively simple synth drum rhythm from Alesandro Novaga’s “Faces Drums 1.”224 Hardy hits 78 the various entrances and exits of “Asunder”’s (by then) iconic vocal cadence, vamping the echoic, stacked plea of the “over” line using what sound like improvisatory punch-ins from his tape deck, and underscoring secondary melodic textures as he segues into the next song’s isolated rhythmic motif.225 Hardy’s technical mastery shines beyond his edits of existing remixes. He was constantly pushing his audience into new sonic territory by integrating what Frank Broughton has called “bombshells and surprises.”226 In a 1987 set, Hardy opens with what sounds like a droning timpani dueling with an analog alarm bell. The timpani fades out as the sound of a chugging locomotive speeds forward on rails, a steam whistle announcing its arrival. Hardy blends the sound of the oncoming train into Stevie Wonder’s 1977 single “As” without so much as a hiccup in the beat.227 Wonder’s voice intones the first lyrics of the song, “As around the sun the earth knows she’s revolving …” The vocals are pitched up about a whole step; Hardy has warped the iconic singer’s vocal timbre and altered the feel of the song by pushing its tempo. According to Stacy Collins, a Music Box regular and a security guard at the second incarnation of the club at 326 N Michigan, Hardy’s signature train effect helped make the RLA system iconic: “You would hear the train getting closer, warning you that it was on its way, and then the loud, menacing sound of the train as if it were passing right in front of you. And, oh my God, the wind off the speakers. It was magnificent!”228 Much in the same way that Lumiére’s iconic Arrival of The Train amazed audiences in Germany during the 1890s, heralding the birth of cinematic spectacle and the celebration of realist images on the silver screen, Hardy’s sensational panning of the train across the soundscape of The Music Box stretched the affordances of Robert Williams’ powerful RLA crossover and sound system.229 79 The sound of the train was not only a technical effect that showcased the club’s sound system, it was a poetic gesture that abstractly hailed the past and present of “Up-South” Black culture in the urban north.230 By the late 19th century, the train had become an especially potent symbol of the newly compressed time and space of modernity for formerly enslaved African Americans seeking their fortunes beyond the confines of the rural south.231 Its sound stood in for the southern migrant’s journey north, as well as the very fact of physical and social mobility promised by new technologies in general.232 One might also hear the train sounds beyond the liberatory promises of new technologies. In the maroon spaces of underground clubs, trains could simultaneously link southern imaginaries, visions of modernity, and the limits of the social contract binding the children of southern migrants to life in the urban north. Beyond the train and its iconic whistle, Hardy developed a panoply of other innovative acoustic techniques to inspire his dance floor, many of them referencing Chicago’s specific urban soundscapes and local histories.233 In a mix thought to have been recorded live at C.O.D. in 1987, he layers a fragment of a Martin Luther King speech over a house beat. Combining King speeches and music was a technique developed first by black appeal/steppers DJ Sam Chapman and later adapted in a house context by Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, both of whom used MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech to accentuate the political potential of black sonority. According to longtime Chicago radio personality Richard Steel, the power of hearing Martin Luther King’s voice twinned with music, like Chapman’s favorite, Kool and The Gang’s “Summertime Madness,” and later in the live blended improvisatory performances of house DJs, or recorded house versions like “Can You Feel It” produced by Larry Heard as Fingers Inc., multiplied its affective resonance for audiences. In a conversation recorded about this practice for Vocalo community radio, Steel tells DJ Jesse De La Peña that using King’s voice over music 80 was an act of cultural integration: “its the integration of the music, the message, Dr. King’s delivery, the cadence.”234 Hardy layers an excerpted version of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “We Shall Overcome” sermon, likely recorded at a March 1968 rally on Wall Street just days before his death, over an early demo version of Gene Hunt’s “Living In a Land.”235 The cyclical acid melody of the backing track, produced by Hunt and influenced by writing partner Armando Gallop, is typical of the sound created by Chicago house DJs stretching the affordances of Roland TB-303 bass synthesizers. Hardy signifies on a popular local practice but makes it newly relevant to a post- Civil Rights generation of listeners. By layering “Living in a Land” and “We Shall Overcome,” he collapses what is often imagined as the past of Civil Rights era activism, as well as the more sublimated black women’s labor activism preceding it, into the present of 1987 Chicago house, connecting himself to a legacy of protest in the city, as well as a lineage of DJs who saw their cultural work as being implicitly connected to Dr. King’s legacy.236 Hardy’s use of King’s famous speech indexes the ways that house DJing developed in a constellation of queer remediation between Chicago’s radio stations, clubs, and domestic spaces of musical consumption. Playing styles and formatting traditions influenced each other across these spaces in anachronistic, cyclical trajectories, rather than linear, progressive ones. It also shows Hardy elevating the work of intrepid young DJs and producer who had been inspired by his sound.237 According to Chicago house producer Adonis, it didn’t matter who you were, Hardy would listen to your tape, and if he liked it, he would play it.238 He acted as a local a&r rep, using his access and visibility to disburse cultural capital laterally across the Chicago house scene. 81 While it is not entirely clear whose tracks Hardy played and didn’t play, apart from those that have clearly been archived on his surviving live mixes, many well-known Chicago producers credit him with giving them their first experiences of hearing their own music being played to receptive, adventurous audiences. These revelatory opportunities to beta test gave these artists opportunities to tweak and adjust their compositions to better serve Chicago’s dance floors – perhaps adding a vocal here, a new melodic motif or rhythmic element there. An examination of extant Hardy mixes corroborates claims that the DJ had no qualms playing multiple songs by Chicago’s amateur house producers in a single set, sometimes back-to-back. Marshall Jefferson, perhaps best known for his 1986 track, “The House Music Anthem” claims that during the mid- 1980s, he had as many as 15 songs in rotation during Hardy’s sets at the Music Box.239 Undoubtedly this exposure helped Jefferson craft compositions that were sure to delight local audiences. According to Frank Broughton, Hardy came to symbolize the Chicago house DJ’s aim to “be the first with a new song; to have the weirdest European import; to add the most elements to each evening.”240 By championing new sounds, as well as older, familiar tracks, Hardy demonstrated an avant garde, competitive ethos grounded in not only a curiosity about, and verve for, what was coming next, but also in what came before. Indeed, familiar funk, disco, and r&b anthems provided the connective tissue and primary access points for dancers in the underground house scene. This Janus-faced musical approach helped Hardy assemble a classic house repertoire in motion that influenced Chicago’s most renowned spinners throughout the 1980s and 1990s. 82 2.K - Ron Hardy in the Mix A recording from a 1987 Ron Hardy set at C.O.D., which he played on an unknown date at the 1000-person capacity basement punk club, is a useful archive with which to think through the particularity of his disbursal of cultural agency, “intense” playing style, and creative approach to programming. In the close reading that follows, I unpack the various semantic underpinnings of each song archived, as well as the multiple meanings that Hardy layers in his transitions between them. Hardy’s C.O.D. mix begins with the aforementioned MLK/Gene Hunt mix and segues at the three minute mark into Dinosaur L’s “Go Bang #5,” a 1982 Arthur Russell production mixed and mastered by New York disco producer Francois Kevorkian.241 Hardy loops “Go Bang’s” haunting, dissonant organ motif as the acid squawks of Hunt’s “Living” burble over his blend. After about 30 seconds, he releases the tension developing between Hunt’s acid track and the organ by cutting vocalist Lola Blank’s lyrical exhortation to, “bang, go bang, go bang, go.” According to historian Tim Lawrence, whose biography of Russell chronicles the composer/producer’s tragically short life and enduring impact on the world of dance music, Russell worked on “Go Bang #5” with Blank, a backup singer for James Brown, and Julius Eastman, a “black and flamingly queer” opera baritone and classical composer. The song is a post-punk narrative of radical inclusivity that sets a stage where queers, black and brown people, and straight women, as well as the many dancers who see themselves identifying at the interstices of various marginalized identities, could all find themselves together dancing to warm trombones, plucked cello, and psychedelic synth flourishes.242 After about three minutes of hammering Russell’s radically inclusive audiotopia, Hardy begins to bring in the heavy bass kick of DJ Pierre’s Music Box-inspired “Box Energy.”243 He 83 allows the cascading organ/keys of the Russell production, as well as the Eastman vocal, to ride for another minute and a half before acquiescing fully to Pierre’s acid kick. DJ Pierre is one of Chicago’s most prolific house music producers, and a progenitor of the city’s acid house aesthetic. He says he had little confidence in his abilities as a producer before Hardy supported him: “It just takes somebody saying, ‘Hey, what you did is good!’ You start to believe in yourself and build on that.”244 Hardy pulls the thunderous bass in and out from the “Box Energy” melody, letting the faint pulse of the kick drum phase out like an echoic rumble. The acid sound of Pierre’s track, produced using Roland’s TB-303 bass synthesizer, exemplifies the ways house producers stretched the affordances of high-tech compositional tools. As musicologist Mark Butler points out, “by celebrating the errors of hi-tech machinery and deliberately provoking mechanical malfunction, musicians [were] able to re-contextualize technological failure; their practices [emphasized] how we use technology rather than how it performs.”245 Next, Hardy teases his audience with glimmers of J.M. Silk’s 1986 cover version of Isaac Hayes’ “I Can’t Turn Around.” The song’s synthesizers begin to filter in around “Box Energy” at the 9:50 mark, its main introductory motif nestling into DJ Pierre’s dissonant, squelched melody.246 Hardy uses a special DJ tool released on the UK vinyl of “Turn Around” here, “Intro (House in E♭Minor).” In this version, Steve “Silk” Hurley has employed obviously synthesized strings, foregrounding a dominant counter-melody in the register of a cello, in addition to placing the song’s more familiar melodic line in the viola register. In doing so, Hurley has approximated, and departed from, the well-known orchestral motif of the original Isaac Hayes track.247 Hardy incorporated popular underground hits that straddled the disco and house eras, refusing the idea that they were closed, resolved texts – he literally gave these songs second and 84 third lives, turning them out and refusing to let up on them in much the same way that he refused to let up on his dancers. “I Can’t Turn Around,” the lead single from Hayes’ 1975’s Chocolate Chip album, met house dance floors in a variety of edits, versions, and covers by the mid- 1980s.248 After being extended and remixed by Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy via techniques like studio reel-to-reel editing and cassette tape mixing in both The Warehouse and The Music Box, the song made its way in various guises onto new cassette tapes via the home studios of other emerging house music producers. Around the 12-minute mark of his C.O.D. mix, Hardy cuts into a more rhythmically focused J.M. Silk version, one that topped the US dance charts in 1986. Rather than letting Keith Nunnally’s vocal resolve, he rapidly cuts to the track’s breakdown, looping it, emphasizing the drums, pulling them out, teasing his audience in anticipation of the song’s familiar lyrics before mixing it with the elastic bass line of “No Control,” a Tyree Cooper and Sean “Smiley” Williams track created under the alias House Family.249 Competition for exposure and recognition fueled the work of young producers promoted in Ron Hardy’s sets. Cooper graduated high school in 1983, just as Hardy was building his reputation at The Music Box. He had left Chicago to accept a basketball scholarship, but returned after his first year at University of Wisconsin, Stout. After abandoning his dreams of becoming an NBA player Cooper began to focus on DJing and promoting his own house nights with friends like Mike Dunn and Hugo H. As he tells journalist Rees Urban, he felt compelled produce his own original material: “The fact that being a Chicago DJ, you want to put records out. You want to be known.”250 Being known as a promoter or DJ was nothing compared to the notoriety one could garner as a producer. 85 Hardy sampled vocals capriciously from various black popular genres, including gospel, and around the 13 minute and 40 second mark of this C.O.D. mix, he layers an a cappella recording of Tremaine Hawkins on top of “No Control.” Hardy likely pulled Hawkins’ impassioned vocals from the vinyl single of her 1985, number-one gospel/dance crossover hit, “Fall Down (Spirit of Love),” the lyrics of which command listeners to, “Fall down on me. Got this feeling. Fall down on me. I need it. I need it. I need it. I need you walking and talking with me. Got to feel it … in my heart, in my soul, in my mind, all over me. Fall down on me.”251 “Fall Down” holds onto the secular and sacred elision familiar to house audiences who came of age in The Warehouse a decade before. It can be read as a lyrical exhortation for the C.O.D. audience to get low to the earth - to ecstatically commune with its maestro. The use of vocal narrative became a critical means by which Chicago house DJs imbued their mixing with explicit messages and rhetorical embellishment, just as their NYC predecessors did. Hardy uses vocals to weave a parallel narrative in his mix, building off the “narrative mixing” of Frankie Knuckles, and Larry Levan before him. Explicit lyrical invocations and exhortations complement, and often obscure, the implicit meanings imbued in a DJ’s instrumental tracks through melodic and rhythmic sampling, quoting, and other semantically dense Black Atlantic cultural practices. As such, it is critical to keep an analysis of vocal performance in balance with other types of close reading. Hardy’s programming is so multifaceted that there are ample places to do both types of analytical work. At the 15:30 mark, the DJ segues from one vocal track to another, leaving Tremaine Hawkins’ “Fall Down”/House Family “No Control,” for The Night Writers’ “Let The Music Use You,” a soulful production featuring Ricky Dillard that was released on Danica Records in 1987.252 Night Writers was an alias of Frankie Knuckles, and Hardy’s inclusion of this song can 86 be read as a nod to Frankie’s continued relevance as an artist/producer, DJ, and figurehead in Chicago house scene during the late 1980s, even after he had left Chicago for New York, the UK, and Europe.253 Dillard, like Hawkins, preaches through Hardy’s mix: “Music takes control, music that’s good for your soul … let the music take you to the top.” Music production in the house scene, like the r&b, gospel and blues scenes that preceded it in Chicago, was often a family affair. Tyree Cooper used his sisters as vocalists, Wayne Williams kicked gigs to his half-brother Jesse Saunders, and queer people often formed their own close-knit families of musical collaborators. In the case of The Night Writers, Frankie Knuckles worked on the 12” mixes of “Let The Music” with his sometimes lover and musical collaborator at The Power Plant, Michael Winston. Dana Powell says the early house scene was much less competitive than it has become today. Black, gay DJs, in particular, would often attend each other’s events as welcomed guests, even if they weren’t lovers or close friends: “I remember back in the times when Frankie would come in [to the Generator], and we would hang out. We would have the time of our life.”254 Hardy’s inclusion of Knuckles and Winston’s music in his C.O.D. set illustrates his generosity of spirit and demonstrates how fervently he remained committed to cultivating a competitive, though by no means cutthroat, house music scene in Chicago well into the 1980s. At the 19:37 mark in the mix, Hardy turns abruptly from the soulful effervescence of Knuckles’ Night Writers composition to “Acid Trip,” a percolating beat track produced by Farley “Jackmaster” Funk.255 Hardy might be pulling the track from Farley’s No Vocals Necessary EP, which came out on the Chicago producer’s own label in 1988, but it is likely that Farley passed compositions like “Acid Trip” to Hardy on promotional acetate or cassette tape so that the DJ could preview them live prior to their official releases. Hardy uses what sounds like 87 whooshing wind effect (perhaps from a specially-designed effects record) to set off “Acid Trip’s” squelching, pitched-up, bass line and adhesive clave, marking an emotional shift from “Let The Music Take You” and clearing the sonic ground for a new chapter in the mix to begin. *** BREAK*** The information dancers comprehend and assimilate under conditions of intense physical exertion and/or the influence of controlled substances such as MDA (an amphetamine) or LSD gets assimilated and interpreted in ways that are quite different from those they might take up listening to a live set multiple times once it has been recorded to tape or encoded as an mp3 from that tape. David Novak points out that liveness and deadness are constructed acoustic properties that rely on the differentially emplaced notions attached to live performance (“lives, places, cultural contexts”) and the deadness of “private audition.”256 Remediated recordings of live club performances in Chicago house culture, both those pulled from a club’s sound board by the DJ and those recorded by an audience member on a cassette recorder placed in a speaker, queerly conflate the liveness/deadness divide. On the one hand, recordings from the board capture none of the ambient sounds of the club space. Amateur recordings of these live events, on the other hand, capture only small amounts of the acoustic information from the performance that would likely have been available to a dancer in the mise en scéne. Their liveness is marked instead by ambient sonic impressions of the performance, like the sound of the audience singing along and cheering.257 In a 2009 interview, Chicago’s DJ Traxx, a devoted Ron Hardy follower in his youth, describes the ways that the maestro used his technical skills to stimulate and play with the sensory perceptions of his dancers. According to Traxx, Hardy’s audiences would “hear these sort of patterns and tone pads and kind of modular effects like wind and stuff in this manner, it 88 was hard to tell what was what. If you were in that time period, would you think that was Ron Hardy, or would you think that was a record?”258 Ethnomusicologists Charles Keil and Steven Feld describe culturally specific processual and textual disjunctures experienced during live performance in terms of “participatory discrepancies” between expected musical/rhythmic motifs, and what music actually gets produced.259 In addition to the unsettling, yet pleasurable, participatory discrepancies a dancer might experience during a live Ron Hardy set, they might also feel the ghost of a deferred, or perhaps impossible, pleasure related to not knowing what is being played, as opposed to the pleasure of being suspended between a state of knowing and not knowing. One can never know all the tracks, understand the machinations behind all the effects, nor parse every trick or technique used to sustain a blend. To varying degrees, not knowing is endemic to both the pleasurable experience of hearing an abridged, many-times-mediated, version of Hardy’s live set recorded on tape from a club’s sound system or DJ console, and the experience of hearing Hardy’s set as it was originally performed. Part of the pleasure of the Chicago house experience writ large has been, and continues to be, about feeling through the ambivalence between the familiar joy of musical recognition, and the novel excitement of sonic mystery indexed by these variously mediated experiences. *** BREAK *** Around the 23-minute mark of his C.O.D. mix, Hardy awkwardly begins to transition from Farley’s probably as-yet-unreleased “Acid Trip,” which has settled from an acid section into a less-jarring synthesized bass line, to the UK remix of Touchdown’s 1982 “Ease Your Mind.”260 A hiccupy transition or two, such as this segue, would have been common in early house sets, during which DJs had to transition between the regularity of programmed drum 89 machines and the fluid tempo of live, analog instrumentation without the assistance of digital beat-quantization/regularization software. Mistakes in the recorded set prove it to be the product of a human being at work. In essence, technical errors index the liveness of a performance, and thus the digital artifact’s authenticity indexing the sounds of house music’s first decade.261 The UK remix of “Ease Your Mind” that Hardy spins at this point is quite different from the more iconic electro-tinged US mix produced by Arthur Baker; it foregrounds the compositional chops of the track’s east coast studio musicians and, in the context of this particular long-form DJ mix, calls Hardy’s listeners back to the rooted sound of r&b, disco, and funk produced during the late 1970s and early 1980s before thrusting them forward. Around the 27-minute mark, Hardy pulls his Touchdown record back on the turntable’s rotating platter, letting it shred under his needle, before flipping his mixer’s crossfader across to bring in the chugging rhythms of Da Posse’s “The Groove.”262 Composed by Maurice Joshua and Hula Mahone, two young Chicagoans who would later be known for their Grammy-winning remixes, “The Groove,” is just that: synthesized bass and melodic lead with mountain of digital drums. The song typifies the less acidic, rhythmically complex side of homegrown Chicago house produced in the late 1980s. The overriding emphasis on rhythmic over melodic or harmonic complexity (though both are often present in a house set) positions house music squarely in an Afro-Diasporic lineage, and connects its aesthetic priorities to those of its sonic brother from another mother, hip hop.263 While Hardy beats “The Groove” heartily, he doesn’t allow its looped rhythm to get stale. Within a minute of putting the track on he layers in Ten City’s “Devotion” a cappella on top of it.264 By playing “The Groove,” a jack track, and “Devotion,” a deep gospel house vocal track, simultaneously, Hardy highlights the union of sacred and profane energies that animate the house 90 sound, and the sociality of house culture. Ten City lead singer Byron Stingily’s church-ready falsetto hovers over “The Groove’s” synth melody as Hardy pulls the bass in and out of Da Posse’s track with his EQ: “I wanna give devo-devo-devo-devotion …” Hardy remixes Ten City’s vocal track live, embellishing the commercially released single and tipping his hat to the uneven incorporation of house by major record labels during its watershed years 1986 and 1987 were huge for some house acts with dancers and singers, like Ten City, who achieved a modicum of national and international commercial success. However, there were relatively few crossover top 40 tracks produced by Chicago DJ/producers during this time. The relative success of more familiar-looking acts highlighted for Chicago house artists who were making jack or acid tracks just how difficult it would be to break into markets beyond the city’s local cultural economy without the presentational trappings of a pop act.265 To segue out of “The Groove,” Hardy spins a track of unknown provenance. This unknown track following “The Groove”/“Devotion,” which comes in at 29:50 in the mix, is one that neither Jacob Arnold at Gridface, nor I, have been able to identify. It marks a critical rupture of musical mystery on the C.O.D. mix. Hardy brings the high ends of the mystery track’s drums in and out, rhythmically pulsing its rapid-fire synthetic high hats and snares as an angry, buzzing baseline and pitched-down timpani course underneath. One can only imagine the frenzy Hardy might have been inducing at this peak moment in his set, his audience churning under the strobe light as its maestro “used the tape machine and the EQ to jolt [it] with a manic dark energy that teetered between beauty and chaos.”266 Hardy masterfully channeled the often-chaotic energy of homegrown house, but he frequently balanced the novel, locally produced material he was giving his audience with funk and soul elements reminiscent of The Warehouse and South Shore scenes. Nearly 33-minutes 91 into the C.O.D. mix he introduces the synthesizer motif from The Coachouse Rhythm Section’s 1977 single “Time Warp.”267 This particular musical pairing of an unknown Chicago house track and a 10-year-old jazz funk instrumental demonstrates Hardy’s musical ear and technical prowess. The lead melodies and bass lines from the two songs lock together perfectly, despite the fact that they are separated temporally by nearly a decade of changing studio technologies. Eddy Grant, the Coachouse song’s composer and Ice Recordings owner, saw black entrepreneurship as a powerful tool to be used for gaining prominence in an international music market.268 Hardy’s use of the Coachouse sound not only harkens back to the roots of house, but also cites Grant’s internationalist worldview, incorporating a progressive entrepreneurial ethos into the C.O.D. mix. After a minute and a half into the Coachouse throwback, Hardy pounds his audience with the wobbling bell tones of Mr. Finger’s “I’m Strong.”269 This instrumental version of the song, which otherwise features Robert Owens on vocals, eventually became a staple in British drum ’n’ bass pioneer Fabio’s sets at the London warehouse party Rage 50.270 Here it intones the limits of otherworldly beat-worship until Owens’ soulful vocals crest over the instrumental of another Fingers Inc. track, “Music Take Me Up.”271 Released as an album-track on Fingers Inc.’s 1988 British album, Another Side, “Music” was probably already circulating in Chicago’s underground clubs during 1987 on a gifted 12” promotional acetate or cassette tape. In this early version of the track, Owens’ voice crosses in and out of the sonic foreground until Hardy crossfades the song’s melodic line with that of Farley “Jackmaster” Funk’s “The Funk Is On.”272 Hardy ping pongs between Fingers Inc.’s “Music,” which also appeared in Farley’s radio sets around this time, and Farley’s own more melodic, highly arranged instrumental track, with its synthesized horn stabs, warm keys, and crisp snares.273 This final recorded movement of 92 Hardy’s set falls squarely in the burgeoning subgenre of mid-80s Chicago production that would come to be called “deep house” for its soulful, jazzy, and melodically complex, instrumental motifs.274 Vocal performances in particular, such as that of Robert Owens in the song following “The Funk Is On,” entitled “Never No More Lonely,” became central to the development of this new subgenre as well. While it is impossible to know what information is missing from this particular C.O.D. mix, and thus what else Hardy was able to say to his audience this particular evening, the extant record, with its various rhythmic, melodic, discographic, and lyrical modes of signifying, indexes the multiple ways that polysemic meanings were embedded and elided in long-form house mixes. Hardy’s mix also sounds the limited scope of house music’s archive, despite the fact that many house music fans have obsessively documented their experiences for public enjoyment and scrutiny. 93 2.L - Conclusion Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy played pivotal roles as midwives to South Side juice bar culture, influencing producers and promoters like J.M. Silk (Steve “Silk” Hurley and vocalist Keith Nunally), Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, Chip E., Jesse Saunders, Lil Louis, Jamie Principle, and Vince Lawrence, whose work shaped the evolution of house aesthetics and the codification of house as a commercial genre during the second half of the 1980s. While Knuckles and Hardy were the most path breaking DJs in Chicago house music’s cultural matrix in its infancy, I by no means want to minimize the importance of a vast network of DJ/producers in Chicago, Detroit, and New York who championed rhythmically-focused electronic dance music in the early 1980s. Knuckles and Hardy were two of the Chicago scene’s earliest champions, but they did not create house music, or culture, alone. Knuckles’ reputation as a game-changing DJ in Chicago was well established by the time Ron Hardy began his residency at The Music Box in 1983. Now Knuckles is often reverently referred to as the “godfather” of house music while some call Hardy the genre’s “baron.”275 These appellations often accompany pronouncements that paradoxically relegate Knuckles’ influence to the past, and Hardy’s to the present. Rather than recapitulate this disjunctive formulation of house ancestry, I honor the fact that Knuckles continued to produce innovative house music and events long after Hardy’s death in 1992. Stories told by Music Box audiences, and the central place they occupy in popular narratives of house music’s development, are connected to the vacuum created by HIV/AIDS- deaths in Chicago’s black, gay community – not just the untimely death of Hardy, but those of so very many Warehouse and Power Plant patrons.276 Hardy and Knuckles were both black and gay, but Hardy passed away during the prime of his life from complications related to what some say 94 was his drug addiction, and other say was HIV/AIDS. Knuckles’ incessant presence in house by contrast, up until the year during which fieldwork for this project was undertaken, indeed his status as both a living legend and a foundational Chicago progenitor, have made it difficult for devotees to authoritatively characterize his playing style retrospectively until quite recently. Dana Powell, a Warehouse regular and later the resident DJ at the predominantly black, gay club The Generator, estimates that eight out of ten dancers at The Warehouse died during the height of the AIDS crisis.277 Music Box stories, told by the mostly still-living straight audience- members and well-known straight producers and DJs who frequented the club, have circulated in ways that the stories of these deceased gay patrons of The Power Plant, and The Warehouse before it, have not. This asymmetrical narrative circulation can be attributed in part to the silence of mass death, and in part to the music industry’s general heterosexism, as well as the complicated black sexual politics that calcified around mainstream hip hop identities in the late 1980s. I am not suggesting that the importance of The Music Box as a cultural touchstone is illegitimate; rather, I want to complicate the ways that Music Box memories that emphasize the importance of the venue for a straight audience have covered over house music’s queer social cultures in multiple overlapping ways. In addition to the particularity of these socio-cultural factors, musical and technological innovations made by Ron Hardy on Robert Williams’ powerful RLA sound system also played an important role in confirming his preeminence in narratives about the development of house aesthetics. I put pressure on Knuckles’ deification and Ron Hardy’s cult status not to diminish their achievements or influence, but to better understand the ways that their distinct modes of memorialization trouble house music’s living history. Nostalgic honorifics can tell audiences a 95 great deal about how house communities view their artistic lineages, but they also occlude connections and influences on the margins, especially contributions by queer people of color that have greatly affected the development of house culture’s aesthetic priorities over the past forty years. By enumerating the ways that Hardy’s influence lives on in the work of his followers, while Knuckles’ original productions and parties established the Chicago house scene’s aesthetic priorities, this chapter sets up the development of the South Side’s early 1980s teen party scene as well as the evolution of North and West Side house scenes that flourished in Chicago during the late 1980s, early 1990s, and beginning of the 21st century. In the next chapter, I will more fully explore the fertile soil from which these straighter teenage counterparts grew. 96 Chapter Three - Making House Music Radio: Adaptation and Queer Remediation 3.A - Introduction Before teens from Chicago’s South Side ever began sneaking into The Warehouse and The Music Box, many had already partied in intergenerational, community spaces in their neighborhoods. Not unlike the children of other black, southern migrants living in the urban north, young Chicagoans learned how to listen to dance music and comport themselves within loving social dance communities from their peers, elders, and through mass media. Pre-teens danced in their houses in front of their televisions, learning new steps from other young dancers on shows like Big Bill Hill’s Red Hot and Blues, Kiddie-a-Go-Go, Chicago Party, and, of course, Soul Train. By middle school, many had practiced dancing at block parties and birthday celebrations, not to mention Chicago’s many roller rinks. In these public spaces, older siblings and neighbors, as well as watchful adults, taught youngsters how to move, how to dress and, perhaps most importantly, how to enjoy sonic and social diversity of the dance floor. High school-aged teens went on to dance with adult supervision at sock hops, Sadie Hawkins dances, and Chicago’s famous parties at Mendel, Hales Franciscan, and Leo Catholic, among other parochial schools. Some of the most fondly remembered house music events were held in hotel banquet halls and other flexible, multi-use spaces where members of dance crews, cliques, and social clubs brought semi-choreographed dance routines and wore matching costumes. While this chapter makes mention of artists who propelled Chicago house music forward, both sonically and in terms of its commercial/industrial characteristics, it should not be underestimated just how critical the anonymous teens on the scene were as progenitors of Chicago house music’s social dance culture. These groups sustained and passed on new 97 traditions while maintaining connections to their ancestors, getting down together for over a decade through serious “musical play.”278 Some playful social cliques morphed into ambitious entrepreneurial entities that extended house music’s cultural reach and fostered its commercial viability, producing their own events around the city and contributing to the development of a teen juice bar scene that rivaled the queer of color underground from which it drew inspiration. By the early 1980s, groups like The Chosen Few, Vertigo, and Gucci Productions had adapted and revolutionized the all-ages juice bar model used by queer of color promoters. Their events catered to the tastes of intrepid, mostly black and middle-class teenagers yearning for un-chaperoned opportunities to dance all night. Vertigo’s work, in particular, highlights the ways that queer teens and women responded to and adapted Warehouse culture in ways that connected musical freedom and radical sexual inclusivity. The “disco punk” teen juice bar and parochial school dance scenes these entrepreneurs helped build were also fed by the cultural work of radio DJs like Herb Kent, the disco mixers on WDAI, and the original WBMX Hot Mix 5 collective, who fostered the commercial viability of house in Chicago by codifying the “hot mix” as a distinct, culturally- specific radio format. Hot mix shows were connected to but divergent from early speculative black appeal radio models. They built off of networks of cultural influence linking Chicago’s live music venues, its independent recording industry, and the work of the city’s entrepreneurial artists.279 In this chapter I contextualize the various structural factors and introduce the cultural actors that enabled house music to move from Chicago’s queer of color underground to the city’s airwaves and larger, city-wide cultural marketplaces and beyond. I argue that the WBMX Hot Mix 5 shows in particular remediated the temporal and spatial dimensions of queer club sounds for 98 new, younger, audiences comprised of more racially, sexually, and socio-economically heterogeneous listeners than had previously accessed house music. On air hosts, hot mixing DJs, and their production directors facilitated these processes of queer remediation by harnessing multiple markers of sonic urbanity, projecting the aural traces of blackness, femininity, and Latinidad over the airwaves while minimizing markers of house music’s queer heritage. The new, urban soundscape they aggregated might be thought of as having remediated house culture in two senses of the word – in reframing and augmenting diachronic media formats and styles hot mixes repaired the fragmentation caused by hyper-targeted, genre-specific, listener profiling, but they did so by eliding the noncommercial and anti-teleological “queer time and space” of the underground.280 Radio entrepreneurs left the work of acculturating expanding house music audiences to the teenage promoters and DJs who produced underground parties in South and West Side multi- use spaces and industrial lofts. Even though not all of these teen spaces were wholly accepting of queer people, I suggest that the processes of remediation and adaptation shaping their development were always queerly recursive. Queer remediation disrupts assumptions that cultural change takes place along linear, progressive trajectories, wherein new media formats supplant their older, outdated predecessors. Rather, house music media, like radio hot mix shows and pause mix cassette tapes and remixes, influenced, and were influenced by, “residual” sound and broadcast media, like Chicago’s black appeal DJing and independent blues, soul, and r&b recordings, themselves the products of the city’s specific queer, black, and Latino musical and social matrices.281 99 3.B - The Deep Times and Spaces of Chicago’s Black Social Dance Cultures Chicago has long-standing, complex affinities with Don Cornelius’ Soul Train dance show. Before the show was filmed in Los Angeles, it was a local Chicago production and, from its very first broadcast in August of 1970, a hit with the city’s teens. Young black and brown Chicagoans relished watching and moving alongside the Soul Train dancers in front of their TV sets, responding to and learning moves that could have easily been developed in their neighborhood social dancing communities. To suggest to readers just how popular the show had become, The Defender dared them to “find a single black or Spanish person under 30” who was not watching Soul Train if they could.282 Cornelius’ program wasn’t Chicago’s first teen dance show on public access television, but its rise to prominence was predicated on its instantiation within the unique public media landscape of the city.283 In 1963 music publishers Phil and Leonard Chess, the Polish/Jewish brothers who ran Chess Records and the Macamba Lounge on Chicago’s South Side, purchased the broadcasting rights to 1690 AM, a radio station that they renamed WVON to signify that they were (still) dedicated to broadcasting the “voice of the negro.” The Chess brothers hired now- legendary local talent, like Herb Kent, and cherry-picked the best black DJs from around the country. These WVON “Good Guys … had their own theme song, their own little signature laugh, a sound, or a saying.” They collectively hailed the diverse black listeners that came together in the urban north during the Great Black Migrations of the previous decades, helping synthesize Chicago’s homegrown r&b and soul sound from many disparate regional tastes and influences.284 By 1964, the ratings specialists at Pulse reported that little WVON’s listenership was so large in Cook County that it was beating out many radio stations large enough to service 100 Chicago’s whole eight-county metropolitan area.285 Richard Stamz, a South Side radio personality, says that despite WVON’s popularity, other independent black radio stations that offered DJs commission payments rather than salaries still had an outsized cultural influence in the city’s black neighborhoods. The entrepreneurial black appeal DJs on these indies used a “timeshare” model, purchasing broadcast posts for a flat fee and selling airtime directly to local businesses.286 The timeshare model allowed DJs to play the sounds that they believed would best capture the attention of listeners whose tastes, and purchasing patterns, mirrored their own. According to Stamz, these small, black stations gobbled up what little market share remained for white ethnic radio in the city.287 In 1967 a media entrepreneur named Howard Shapiro rescued WCIU TV, a small public access television station, from financial insolvency by adapting the timeshare model used on the city’s independent radio stations. First, Shapiro won over the city’s business community broadcasting a daily Stock Market Observer show and financial news. Having stabilized the station financially by catering to Chicago’s elites, he began to tap into new markets by soliciting ideas and talent from a large swath of Chicago’s underserved ethnic communities.288 Described in 1993 by The Chicago Tribune as “the UN of the airwaves,” WCIU gave unparalleled opportunities to amateur Spanish, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Arab, Filipino, Greek, Chinese, and African American broadcasters, groups that were almost entirely ignored by other larger television stations. These entrepreneurs created their own culturally specific programs, hailing marginalized audiences and tapping into new sources of marketing revenue.289 In 1967 a young broadcaster named Don Cornelius was working for both WVON and WCIU, filling in for DJs at the former and reporting for A Black View of The News at the latter. After a couple years of this piecemeal work on the radio and TV, as well as some experience 101 hosting high school sock hops, he pitched Howard Shapiro on an afternoon dance show that would build off the demonstrated successes of the station’s Kiddie-a-Go-Go and Red Hot and Blues programs. According to Chicago TV historian Jake Austen, these earlier Chicago dance programs refined a template developed on Philadelphia’s American Bandstand, as well as other urban social dance programs that featured white preteens, like Time for Teens, Spin Time, and The Swinging Majority. None of the earlier shows were geared towards black and brown audiences, nor did they feature people of color as dancers, except for Red Hot and Blues. According to Soul Train dancer Wayne “Crescendo” Ward, none of them, even Red Hot, were cool. Cornelius switched up the format, bringing in local teens and club dancers, as well as local musical acts like Jerry Butler, The Chi-Lites, The Five Stair Steps, and The Emotions, all of which performed for the show’s first episode on August 17, 1970. Soul Train was an immediate hit. It captured the attention of a receptive, young audience eager to hear its favorite music and see a version of itself on local television.290 Like most programs on WCIU, Soul Train was a frugal production. Cornelius introduced the bands, and teenage couples crammed into a small studio to dance. Notably, guest artists would lip synch in front of a “low-relief sculpture of an oncoming train,” obliquely referencing the sustained importance of trains for black Chicagoans so many years after the city’s Great Migrations.291 The show’s low-budget aesthetics didn’t stop it from becoming enormously popular. In 1971 Cornelius had already worked out a deal for national syndication with the support of Chicago’s Johnson Products Co. He moved most of Soul Train’s major operations to Hollywood and began producing the newly national version on a weekly basis with celebrity co- hosts and formalized dance contests. Back in Chicago, dancer Clinton Ghent took over as host of the homegrown show.292 102 Ghent was Julliard trained, but had returned from New York to Chicago to work as a teaching artist in the city’s Park District. He quickly became a fixture in South Side nightclubs, especially Budland at 64th and Cottage Grove, where he formed a dance crew called The Budlanders that opened up for touring musical acts and created dance routines for everyone from The Emotions to The Jackson 5. Cornelius tapped Ghent to choreograph for him and his teenage dancers, asking him to bring what he brought to the Budland scene to the WCIU studio.293 The Soul Train pilot showcased some of black Chicago’s most virtuosic club dancers, those who were the most inventive and rhythmically precise, as well as the city’s best-dancing teens.294 As much as they tuned in to hear great music, Chicagoans of all ages were tuning in to see, and learn, new steps remediated from the late night, adults-only club scene and high school dances. With Ghent at the helm, Soul Train on WCIU became a primary way for pre-teen black and Latino dancers in Chicago to see their communities getting down. Simultaneously, the show’s nationally syndicated counterpart remediated the experiences of other black and Latino dancing communities, primarily those moving to and emerging from LA’s underground club scene. Chicago house promoter David Risqué remembers watching the Soul Train show as a child, and that its appeal was directly related to the fact that the dances were “created in the communities.”295 As dance historian Thomas De Frantz puts it, the show “referred to black social dance as a component of black identity and a strategy of simultaneous creative expression and cultural mobility.”296 Like Risqué, DJ Darlene “Lady D” Jackson remembers watching Soul Train as a child: “It was a thing, you know? And I mean with other people too. Not just me.”297 Young dancers in Chicago’s black communities might dance with their families in front of the TV, and they were often prompted to perform with and for each other in informal contests in the backyards, streets, 103 garages, and basement rec rooms of their neighborhoods. DJ Leonard “Remix” Rroy recalls his mother and her live-in boyfriend encouraging him to perform in the informal dance contests they would have during house parties: “The adults would put on music by James Brown or The Jackson 5 and throw money on the floor as the kids danced. My mother used to tell me ‘Boy you better go out there and get some of that money.’”298 In addition to learning to dance in informal domestic settings, young people in black Chicago were taught how to listen to and program music for dancing. DJ Craig Cannon remembers playing records for his parents and their friends when they would have parties: They would have me sit on the stool next to the record player ... It was my job to lift [the records] back up [off the spindle] so they could play over again … I saw the reaction too; this was playing and they’re reacting like this. It’s what made me become a DJ … that I know when whatever James Brown or Marvin Gaye song came on, Motown song, they would just go crazy. Not on every song, some songs.299 Just as adults taught young black and Latino dancers in Chicago to understand when and how to move their bodies by rewarding them when they performed, they transmitted embodied knowledge about what sounds would sync up and create pleasurable experiences for other dancers. This intergenerational sharing of knowledge helped Chicagoans develop a fecund cultural firmament on which house DJs, dancers, and promoters would build as they aged into the city’s teen dance scenes, and established pedagogical pathways that would be recreated subsequently by younger dancers in juice bars and clubs. Beyond the informal teaching and learning happening in domestic, neighborhood, and community spaces of intergenerational contact, black and Latino Chicagoans who were too young to begin attending high school sock hops or basement parties learned about dance music and social dance culture in the city’s many roller skating rinks.300 By the late 1970s, as part of a broader industry trend in which these venues emphasized their general entertainment value over 104 skating as sport, Chicago roller rinks incorporated disco music, colored strobe lights, and other nightclub effects. “Roller discos” created opportunities for all-ages dancing, skating, and dancing while skating.301 DJ, videographer, and house music historian Reggie Stanton, who grew up near The Loop roller disco at West 95th Street and South Eggleston Avenue, remembers the density of black creative practice that took shape at and around the rink: “That’s where I started spinning at … there were so many DJs in that small little area … we were just vibing on that.”302 Some skaters recall taking their skates off and dancing when they went to The Loop; others remember watching older steppers perform with each other, cruising with flashy JB skaters (who performed tricks and spectacular dance moves), and skate dancing with Chicago’s beloved black mayor, Harold Washington.303 The Loop, as well other popular Chicago roller discos like the North Side’s Rainbo on North Clark and The Rink at 87th Street on the South Side, incubated a unique, local variant of urban skate dance culture that fed into the city’s nascent house music scenes. Like house music spaces, roller discos offered life-bringing alternatives to gang life and drugs, and they introduced young audiences to a particular danceable repertoire.304 As DJ Lora “Lori” Branch puts it, young, black and Latino skaters were not just “skating to anything,” they were moving to a steady disco beat.305 Chicago roller discos were spaces that complemented the remediated aural and bodily training that took place at home on TV dance shows like Soul Train, as well as in the city’s parochial high schools. According to Craig Loftis, Mendel Catholic High School’s bi-level dance parties extended and codified elements of the roller disco and house party scenes for many young South Siders: “We could all come together and you weren’t worried about fighting, violence, guns, 105 stuff like that. You were just partying.”306 Lady D confirms Loftis’ impressions of the Mendel scene: “it wasn’t like some outlaw party that you were going to. In some ways it made [our parents] feel good about it, like, ‘okay, they’re just going to dance.’”307 Other parochial schools, like Visitation Catholic School at 900 West Garfield and Hales Franciscan at 4830 Cottage Grove, as well as elite magnet schools like Gordon Tech at 3633 North California Ave and Whitney Young at 211 South Laflin St, built off the Mendel template, booking DJs who gained prominence in the juice bar underground, and later house music radio, and drawing teens from across the city to their weekend dance parties. Much like the musical repertoire of Chicago’s underground, its high school dance party culture incorporated familiar practices and novel traditions, in part because it was organized around, and by, school-aged youth. Dancers aged into and out of its various institutions, passing on dance floor pedagogies and curricula every three and four years. DJ Celeste Alexander describes the generational continuity of high school social dance culture in Chicago as being organized “like stair steps.”308 At each step along the way the elders who hadn’t yet graduated to the next level would socialize younger disciples, teaching them how one danced, dressed, or courted a partner before leaving to learn a similar set of social practices in the next venue or institution up the chain. Lady D says that this cultural “training” was something she became accustomed to and took with her as she aged out of the teen scene and entered into the North Side’s more mixed dance music culture: “I always considered myself like a trainer, an educator. Because you don’t come in knowing. How would you know?”309 106 3.C - Remediating Juice Bar Repertoires for Radio With the rise of higher-powered FM frequencies on the radio dial in the late 1960s, geographically isolated AM broadcasters had begun to be supplanted by stations reaching larger, more socially diverse listening publics. Radio’s immateriality and its reach made it capable of influencing and connecting these disparate publics despite social, and geographic, distances; even if they experienced their lives through distinct prisms of race, class, gender, and sexuality, radio audiences could conceivably share the same music at the same time.310 Most young Chicagoans first heard mixed disco music on their radios. Craig Loftis calls WDAI 94.7 FM “the originator of the lunchtime mixes.”311 Its all-disco programming ran for just sixteen months during the tail end of disco’s corporatized zenith, but its hot mixes, recorded without interruption by club DJs Lou DiVito, Peter Lewicki, Kenny Jason, Scott Adams, and Charlie Di Giovanni, made a lasting impression on young audiences from all over the city’s metropolitan area.312 They also trained many of the young DJs and dancers who sought out The Warehouse, The Music Box, and other teen parties, to listen for mixed sounds, or as they were initially called, changes, before ever setting foot in the city’s underground juice bars or night clubs. WDAI brought on Lou DiVito, often remembered as the station’s most influential mixer, after he became known for DJing at Dugan’s Bistro (The Bistro) during the second half of the 1970s. DiVito’s mixing, archived on cassette recordings from WDAI and now on mp3, is a testament to the fact that there was far more to the popular gay discotheque on the city’s North Side than its racist door policy. The venue featured state-of-the-art acoustics and even had a crossover that its DJs used to equalize bass and treble, albeit a primitive one when compared to the RLA system of The Warehouse. 107 DiVito’s work at The Bistro helped earn him the title of Billboard’s top regional DJ for two consecutive years.313 There is little evidence suggesting that his hot mixes at WDAI were recorded while The Bistro was open to patrons, but hearing them still proved to be a revolutionary experience for young Chicagoans because they approximated the club mixing style that had evolved in discotheques. DAI hot mixes also showcased new recording and musical reproduction technologies such as 12” dance singles, two-channel DJ mixers, and more powerful speakers.314 WDAI hot mixers remediated the sonorous experience of an all-night dance party for young radio audiences, trading the queer spatio-temporal affordances of the gay discotheque, where dancers came together physically under the pressure of powerful sound systems and the long-form musical programming of a single maestro, for the corporatized brevity, and sonic compression, of commercial radio. Unlike hip hop’s move from its live DJ’d performances in the South Bronx to the studio-recorded rap on wax, a process that musicologist Loren Kajikawa describes as a formal and social translation/transformation, underground dance music in Chicago moved via the creative input of club DJs themselves, remaining a long-form effort in programming a creatively mixed sequence of songs.315 That being said, the remediation process transformed the aesthetics of discotheque DJing because it eschewed the embodied, dialogic aspects of live performance, as well as the intimate, vibrotactile, physical experiences of club spaces, in favor of abbreviated musical monologues. While the conventions of corporate radio forced disco DJs to remediate their club programming, DJs also remediated FM broadcasting to accommodate some of the aesthetic conventions of the discotheques. WDAI hot mixers, for one, prioritized unbroken, continuous streams of music, and refrained from chatting on the air.316 They also traded the possibility for 108 racial identification with the DJ, central to the winning formula of Chicago’s earlier black appeal radio, for a more subtle, intersectionally nuanced palette of identificatory possibilities; each song in their mix offering up multiple opportunities for audiences to find themselves hailed across a variety of subject positions. At the top of a WDAI mix from 1980 DiVito played Janice McClain’s 1979 “Smack Dab In The Middle,” a soulful disco cut mixed by Larry Levan and released on Warner Brothers Records.317 The song features Afro-melismatic skat singing, a rich orchestral arrangement, and doo-wop backing vocals.318 DiVito transitions from the saccharine hard disco of “Smack” at the 3:40 mark into the opening synthesizers from Manhattan Transfer’s kooky novelty track, “Twilight Zone,” a disco production that, like “Smack,” was released on a major American record label at the height of the genre’s popularity, in this case by Atlantic Records.319 In the production credits of these two songs alone, which comprise less than one sixth of the full length of a single hot mix, DiVito foregrounds the queer of color New York roots of disco culture in Levan, the primacy of the black femme vocalization in McClain, and nods to the participation of white artists in disco with The Manhattan Transfer. DiVito’s hot mixes, as well as those produced for WDAI by the station’s other DJs, were in some ways swan songs for Chicago’s gay disco era. Ostensibly presented for a generation used to hearing beat-matched and mixed music in clubs, they were most influential for young dancers and music entrepreneurs in Chicago who were too young to get into the city’s discotheques. That being said, WDAI’s primary listeners weren’t total neophytes. They had, in many cases, heard dance music played by amateur DJs at neighborhood parties, live on Soul Train, and at their neighborhood roller rinks. WDAI hot mixes, like these other sites of consumption, helped train Chicago dancers to think about musical programming in an extended 109 temporal frame – longer than the length of a radio-edited single, but shorter than the length of a long-form DJ set at an underground juice bar like The Warehouse. Hot mixers remediated the primary unit of musical content for their audiences as the arc of many songs played in a seamless succession – an hour-long mix greater than the sum of its parts.320 While media scholars often emphasize the cassette tape’s transportability, mutability, and compact size as being the most important affordances shaping its uses by amateur compositional communities, the format’s affordability was also critical.321 By 1974, a few years before the hot mixes debuted, Dolby dual recording cassette decks and blank cassettes produced with chromium dioxide tape had dropped in price.322 These more economical technologies, which promised both increased stability of recorded sound and better audio quality, helped ensure that cassette taping would remain an accessible and reliable way for audiences to emulate radio hot mixers. Young listeners “pause edited” or “pause mixed” blends of their favorite dance songs, approximating the sounds of the hot mix DJs’ seamless musical narratives by manually manipulating the recording functions of dual cassette decks. In his memoir, From The Root to The Fruit of House Music, DJ Leonard “Remix” Rroy recalls using a Sanyo RD7 cassette recorder to not only create seamless pause-mixed cassette tapes, but also, as Knuckles and Loftis did with reel-to-reel tape, extend and edit songs to make them better suited for dancing: “The method … allowed me to use a break from a song that was different from the original song, blend it over a song, record the whole song using the 32 beat measurement break, and have a finished product that was almost equal to a remix.”323 Jesse Saunders remembers using the pause button to remix as well, saying he “extended the album version of ‘One Nation Under A Groove’ [by George Clinton/Parliament Funkadelic] long before the 12” extended version had come out … people went crazy and were wondering what it 110 was.”324 Saunders describes how pause editing helped him develop a singular reputation as a DJ with surprising repertoire that was not commercially available. He also connects his musical interventions on cassette tape to parallel developments taking place in New York studios, where in years prior the affordances of magnetic reel-to-reel tape had helped to shape the aesthetic priorities of disco.325 Saunders and his older stepbrother Wayne Williams, along with their friends Tony Hatchett and Alan King, were some of the first straight teens to get an inkling of what was happening with Frankie Knuckles and his mostly gay audience at The Warehouse. In 1977 they formally established The Chosen Few Disco Corp., a mobile disco for-hire. They brought on DJ Tony Hatchett in 1978, Alan King in 1979, and Tony’s baby brother Andre (the group’s sole gay member) in 1981.326 The group earned money promoting parties at established South Side venues like Blue Gargoyle, at 5638 South Woodlawn, and Burning Spear, at 55th and State, but it is most fondly remembered for promoting The Loft, an underground party that adapted the spatial, social, and musical dimensions of Robert Williams’ Warehouse for a straight, teenage audience. In the late 1970s, Wayne Williams and Saunders began renting out a disused industrial space at 14th and South Michigan. Promoter David Risqué remembers his introduction to the scene there in 1979: “the party’s music was great … girls could dance with their shirt off and have their bra on, two girls could dance with a guy and two guys ... whoa, what is this!?”327 Producer Chip E. remembers his first time at The Loft too, saying that he “had heard some disco on the radio before … but [he’d] never heard disco like this.”328 The parties may not have been promoted by gay promoters or for gay audiences, but Wayne Williams and his friends were able to recreate a version of The Warehouse musical mix in a raw, industrial space that was still able 111 to evoke some of the sexual fluidity and cross-genre musical experimentation of The Warehouse for the South Side’s teenage audiences. By the end of 1979, the demand for underground dance music among South Side teenagers was so great that The Chosen Few had no trouble filling The Loft each weekend. DJ Alan King remembers the parties there being so intense that the wooden floor would buckle while dancers stomped to the beat, much like at The Warehouse. Some nights patrons literally climbed the walls: “People’d be in line outside but we’d be way over capacity … all of a sudden we see a ladder come up against the windows of the second floor and people just … started pouring in.”329 The Loft may only have lasted for a couple years, but it set a fire under promoters across young, black Chicago and demarcated the contours of a pared-down adaptation of Robert Williams/US Studios’ NYC-derived aesthetic template for a good party. In the early 1980s several other social cliques-cum-mobile discos began throwing parties at a German restaurant called Sauer’s, just a few blocks from The Loft. With its close proximity to other teen venues, and easy-to-move wooden chairs and tables, Sauer’s became a central locus of proto-house entrepreneurship for groups like Risqué’s Gucci Sounds/Gucci Productions and Craig Loftis and Eric Bradshaw’s Vertigo between 1980 and 1982. According to David Risqué, he was the first to approach the venue: I went in there one day, in a suit – well I was punk disco, so I went in jeans, some shoes, had a little tie on, a sports jacket – and I made a meeting with the owner Cary … talked to him about negotiating a deal to do Friday and Saturday nights and splitting the profits of the night. So that was my first deal on my own that I did and produced on my own. My mom was my cashier, my dad was, you know [Chicago Police Department], was security.330 Proto-house music entrepreneurs like Risqué began using the term punk to describe the type of disco they were invested in in part because it helped them emphasize the racial and 112 sexual liminality of parties they were trying to emulate and promote. Early scholarship on punk coming out of Birmingham’s Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies tended to flatten a heterogeneous constellation of cultural practices taking shape in the late 1970s, including of Chicago’s nascent house movement, into a one-dimensional narrative with whitened, masculine, protagonists, hegemonic narrators who historian of punk Linda Andes calls the music’s “ideal type[s].” Andes proposes a life-stages model of punk participation instead, suggesting that one can understand the term as indexing a series of individualized, processual identifications with hybridity and liminality.331 Golnar Nikpour and Mimi Nguyen build off Andes’ work, proposing a genealogical, episodic approach to punk historiography. Using a global, as opposed to Euro- centric frame, they foreground punk’s anti-teleogical capacities to surprise and destabilize.332 Music entrepreneurs selling to national and international audiences, like Seymore Stein of Sire Records, fretted over the capricious use of the term punk because it seemed to have the power to destabilize the major label recording industry’s commitment to sonic segregation. Sire helped to squash its capricious use across the US in the late 1970s by directing radio program directors to stop saying the word on the air, and instead start using “new wave” to describe danceable rock music instead. Stein and his label implied that saying punk was déclassé, like using “race” and “hillbilly” to describe black and white musics respectively, but, ironically, by setting the term apart from those used to segregate, they showed that it could trouble sthe idea of sonic segregation itself.333 Punk’s capacity to disrupt sonic, and thus social, segregation helps explain why it became so widely used in Chicago’s underground dance music communities during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Self-described “disco punks” were reacting against the same post-Civil Rights era imperatives towards social fragmentation critiqued years later by Cathy Cohen in her 113 foundational article, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” In her essay, Cohen questions the “limits of a lesbian and gay political agenda based on a civil rights strategy, where assimilation into, and replication of, dominant institutions are the goals.” She suggests, rather, that those on the margins “continue to search for a new political direction and agenda, one that does not focus on integration into dominant structures but instead seeks to transform the basic fabric and hierarchies that allow systems of oppression to persist and operate efficiently.”334 The maroon, queer of color Warehouse culture adapted by teen promoters attempted to do this very thing. Risqué developed his Gucci concept while throwing parties at Western Illinois University for the school’s relatively few black students. The name was both an acronym for Gentleman’s Unification of ConCeptual Individuals, and a nod to the global fashion brand indexing the preppy, middle class culture of Chicago’s disco punk juice bar scene. While Gucci and Chosen Few events were produced mostly by straight teens adapting the queer spaces and sounds of The Warehouse, Vertigo Productions was comprised of a sexually mixed cohort of DJs and promoters. Its members connected the musical freedom of The Warehouse explicitly to the venue’s inculcation of sexual freedom. According to Craig Loftis, Vertigo began as a promotional entity, booking outside DJs to spin and provide sound for its parties. This worked well for the group so long as the DJs they booked showed up. One night Vertigo came too close to losing money, and its reputation, on a promotion featuring the Chosen Few DJs, who showed up hours late. According to Loftis, Eric Bradshaw went out the next day and bought Vertigo its own sound system, ordering him and Lora “Lori” Branch to learn how to DJ. 114 Fig. 3.1 - Vertigo promotions flyer, Chicago’s top D.J.s. Vertigo, at its most prolific, featured Loftis and Branch as DJs, Bradshaw handled graphic design, and Steve Moore took care of logistics and promotions. The DJs of the group became known for their artistic and technical prowess, having developed their ears at parties thrown by their peers in Chosen Few and Gucci, as well as at Frankie Knuckles’ Warehouse, a venue they were technically too young to get into. Vertigo also became known for being one of the few promotional entities on the scene that presented a young woman behind the decks. Lora “Lori” Branch grew up in a large, conservative family on Chicago’s South Side suffused with jazz and pop music, and a love for the church. She remembers that before becoming a DJ, she had attended several Vertigo parties with her friend Jean-Pierre Campbell, and that she would also accompany him on record buying trips up north to Wax Trax!, an industrial/punk record shop opened in 1978 on Lincoln Avenue.335 Describing how she got into 115 DJing, Branch says that Vertigo founder Eric Bradshaw knew that Campbell had amassed a significant collection of 12” singles, and that Branch was not only a music lover, but would draw a crowd because she was attractive. At his direction she went to work, learning how to mix and program disco punk music under the tutelage of Craig Loftis’ friend José Gomez: “we sat in Craig’s basement and we learned on those old whatever Gemini belt-driven turntables with the Numark mixers. You had to really be on point with those things because they were cranky and weird, not quartz-driven.”336 Branch remembers her late high school years as being a time during which she was experimenting with both Chicago’s underground nightlife scene, and her sexuality: We were introduced to The Warehouse when were sixteen [or] seventeen. Too young to get in there, but we found a way … It was just a magical time … I think it was a coming of age experience for … dance music fanatic[s], like we were. And also it was coinciding with this whole coming out period … I was coming out myself, and so I was exposed to people who were gay and lesbian, and also people who were just intensely invested in this music movement. So it was a fantasy … when you’re at that crossroads.337 Branch connects the fantastic musical experience she had sneaking into The Warehouse with her exploration of her same-sex desires. For intrepid teenagers at The Warehouse, the spirit and presence of other queer people of color became intimately connected to the venue’s sound; they were two facets of a singular cultural experience. Branch was one of the only queer women with a citywide reputation as a DJ in the disco punk teen scene, but she wasn’t the only woman making waves in the early 1980s. Around the same time Branch got her start, DJ Celeste Alexander had her first gig at The International Game Room off of King Drive and 47th. Calvin Hollis, who would later become infamous in Chicago after a deadly stampede took place at his club E2, owned the Game Room, and David Risqué was promoting a party there featuring DJs Steve “Silk” Hurley, Keith Fobbes, and Andre Hatchett. Alexander recalls that she originally disguised herself as a man to gain credibility: “I 116 played in baseball caps and loose sweat clothes, and a lot of the times I did not reveal that I was a girl until after I started playing and kind of got them drawn in.”338 She eventually quit performing when she got pregnant a few years later, but not before making a huge contribution to Chicago’s house music scene as an artist, and as a silent financial partner in Frankie Knuckle’s Power Plant. Although their presences continue to be overshadowed by the well-documented careers of straight men who came to dominate the world of house music production in the mid-1980s, women and queer men were critical to the spread of proto-house/disco punk music culture, contributing to the growth of the scene as patrons, dancers, and artists. Andre Hatchett and Celeste Alexander are a case study in queer/femme filial connections and artistic influence during the time. The two developed a loving mentor/mentee relationship after Andre’s older brother Tony Hatchett turned him on to DJing. As he tells the story, the younger Hatchett had already been making pause mixes on cassette for some time, and like Jesse Saunders, even used his dual cassette deck to remix tracks. During his first semi-public performance at an aunt’s birthday party, he realized that he had an innate talent for mixing as well, and an irrepressible love for the craft of DJing: “The party was over about 1:00/2:00, but I wasn’t. I sat there and had the headphones on me and I just kept mixing all night.”339 Hatchett moved on from DJing family functions to carrying equipment for his older brother and the Chosen Few, all the while developing his taste and appreciation for a diverse array of danceable sounds while partying at The Warehouse. Even though Frankie Knuckles never formally mentored him, he had a formative influence on Hatchett’s sonic approach and work ethos. Hatchett emphasizes that his craft was built on listening for both repertoire and programming, and that Knuckles was an inspiration on both fronts. One time when he was 117 playing Knuckles came in to record his set with a reel-to-reel tape recorder: “There was nowhere to hear this music but 206 [South Jefferson], so he found out it was being done outside of his club, so he had to come and record. He recorded me … It was so weird.”340 According to producer Vince Lawrence, promoters with their ears to the ground in Chicago’s dance music scene rushed to establish themselves in the nascent all-ages nightlife marketplace during the tail end of the 1970s and early 1980s, adapting some elements of The Warehouse model and jettisoning others. Promoters like Craig Thomson repurposed South Side gay juice bars near The Loft for lucrative teen nights featuring local DJs. Thomson had previously been a manager at Den One, a popular North Side gay discotheque, and he understood that his first task with Columns was to make sure it appealed to the mostly straight teens whose business he was soliciting. To that end, he renamed his venue First Impressions.341 Leonard “Remix” Rroy, who would go on to local fame as one of the resident DJs at The Rink Zone on Chicago’s West Side, says that he and some partners in a crew called Wall To Wall Sounds took a similar approach to rebranding a gay juice bar called The Bitter End at 7300 South Cottage Grove: “the club would be promoted as The B.E. Room and not The Bitter End … due to [the] club being well known as a gay bar.”342 That Rroy and his partner JR Dionte believed they couldn’t sell parties to teens if their venue was too closely associated with queer culture shows that even as straight teens adapted the sonic and social cultures of queer people, they attempted to set their spaces apart; gay culture might be cool, but it had to be given a straight veneer to appeal to large teenage audiences. Thomson also understood that success in the teen scene was, like high school popularity, fleeting, and that just as he needed to minimize the queerness of the culture he was promoting, he would have to ally himself with the black South Side’s most popular social cliques. He 118 developed a street team with connections to what promoter Reggie Corner calls “nice schools,” such as Hyde Park, Dunbar, and Kenwood on the South Side, and arts magnet Whitney Young on the North Side. Thomson relied on a group of middle-class teens connected to these institutions to deliver audiences using small printed flyers called pluggers, as well as large, less geographically targeted posters that they would post around major transit hubs.343 Promoters and DJs who adapted the social and economic models favored by queer of color nightlife entrepreneurs came from various socio-economic backgrounds, but it was middle class black teenagers from the South Side, in particular those from the Hyde Park and South Shore neighborhoods, who had the highest visibility on the scene between 1979 and 1981. The Chosen Few, a group that Leonard “Remix” Rroy sardonically calls the “Mickey House Club,” exerted a huge influence on the sound of disco-punk/proto-house and shaped the preppy sartorial culture that would come to characterize the entire South Side teen scene.344 Disco punk promoters often used dress codes inspired by Lisa Birnbach’s 1980 Preppy Handbook, which became hugely influential to middle class black teens in Chicago during the early part of the decade.345 Preppy style, and brands, in a sense, became synonymous for some with the music. According to Reggie Corner, It was standard to have your Polo and Izod, and K-Swisses with holes in them and your jeans were worn, that was just ooh ... that was preppy. Nice clean shirt ... buttoned up, the Oxford … we’d wear tight jeans with holes in them … and a suit jacket. It was preppy to have a nice suit jacket on.346 119 Fig. 3.2 - Chicago Hot flyer, The Izod & Burger Bash Fest! Promoters like Chicago Hot used iconic preppy brands, like Izod, in the promotions for the events to signal their desired audience’s class composition, even if they often referred to these class-distinctions using oblique terms like attitude or style. In the image above from a Fall 1981 “Izod & Burger Bash Fest” promotion, Antonio Wade’s illustration looks to be a close approximation of an actual Izod or department store catalog advertisement of the day. The aspirational class consciousness alluded to by such images connected to debates around black authenticity indexed by hip hop artist Chuck D, who in 1987 famously bemoaned the queerness, upward mobility, and inauthenticity represented by house in one breath: “it’s sophisticated, anti- black, anti-feel, the most artificial shit I ever heard. It represents the gay scene, it’s separating blacks from their past and their culture, it’s upwardly mobile.”347 Authentic blackness, in Chuck D.’s estimation, requires the specter of a contaminating, white homosexual to authenticate it.348 In denying the value, and history, of middle class and queer black folks, he denies the heterogeneity of black culture writ large in favor of a one- dimensional, class-homogenous, ideal type. House culture wasn’t built from emulating, or over- identifying with whiteness, rather it incorporated sartorial, and musical, markers of sophistication 120 because many of its participants longed to maintain a sense of social freedom and possibility as black economic advancement began to stagnate in the 1980s. Preppy style helped teenagers self- fashion an escape from diminishing social mobility that their families were experiencing during the Reagan years. DJs, producers, and promoters like Wayne Williams, Jesse Saunders, Vince Lawrence, and Steve “Silk” Hurley, who grew up in relatively stable, mostly two-parent, middle class homes, often had access to musical instruments and private music lessons. Some had access to music business insiders and capital that could be invested in recording sessions as well. Members of this cohort have come to be the most cited narrators of the early house movement’s history, having conducted numerous interviews with music journalists during which they put themselves at the center of the action. I point this out not to suggest that their viewpoints, recollections, or musical and promotional interventions weren’t as important as they claim they were, but to open up space for thinking about why certain voices have risen to the forefront of the mix, so to speak, while others have been relegated to the subliminal tape hiss of history. Promoter Vince Lawrence’s access to and appreciation for the various facets of Chicago’s independent black music business were strongly influenced by the entrepreneurial endeavors of his father, Nemiah Mitchell Junior, who got his start in Chicago’s local soul music industry working at Curtis Mayfield’s Curtom Records. Mitchell managed the books of Captain Sky, a funk band called that had scored a local hit with its track “Wonder Worm.” As Captain Sky was gaining popularity on Soul Train and the east coast club scene, Mitchell allowed Lawrence to work on the band’s tour. Lawrence used his earnings from the Captain Sky tour to purchase his first synthesizer.349 121 In addition to his work with Curtom and Captain Sky, Mitchell started his own vanity label in 1982, Mitchbal Records. He risked his profits on each release, pressing a limited number of vinyl records at Chicago’s Musical Productions pressing plant, and hustling to sell them to local retailers and independent radio.350 Mitchell later invested some of his own money in Lawrence and Jesse Saunders’ band Z-Factor, giving his son and his friends studio time as a high school graduation gift. The boys recorded 1983’s “(I Like To Do It) In Fast Cars” during this gifted session from Lawrence’s father, a track they put out on Saunders’ Jes Say subsidiary of Mitchbal. It became a minor hit on WBMX and WGCI and is today understood as a foundational disco punk/house recording.351 Mitchell, no different from Vivian Carter and James C. Bracken of Vee Jay Records or Mayfield of Curtom before him, saw music production as an arena where he could gain creative autonomy and cultural agency while potentially earning a windfall. As historian Adam Green points out in Selling The Race, Chicago’s music entrepreneurs often linked communal cultural authority with personal economic ambition.352 Older icons like Mayfield, Carter, and Bracken were archetypes of entrepreneurial self-definition for black Chicagoans in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Their accomplishments served as evidence for minor players like Mitchell and Lawrence that they too might have a shot at greatness. For former WVON good guy Herb Kent, the struggles of the pioneers proved that success never came without its share of trials and tribulations. Herb Kent returned to Chicago after a bout with drug addiction and a series of personal tragedies. Like Al Cooper and George Benson before him, he was extremely mindful of how popular songs could be remediated from the South Side’s live, club-based musical marketplace to radio. He says that after visiting one of the juice bars clustered around 14th and Michigan, 122 perhaps First Impressions, though according to Kent, he can’t be sure, he developed a concept for a radio program that played off the taste of the teen scene’s trendy, black partygoers, who he says he saw, “just jumping up and down and going nuts” over Devo’s “Whip It.” He bought his own airtime on WXFM 106, which he called a “white” station, and tried to integrate the “punk” sounds setting off the teen juice bar scene with the eclectic mix of r&b he was already known for playing.353 According to Chicago house DJ Sherman “Shockin’” Oliver, Kent was one of very few radio disc jockeys in Chicago who could get away with playing whatever he wanted.354 His WXFM Stay Up and Punk Out show built on this reputation by combining punk, Italo, and r&b- based disco records, much like the DJs in the teen juice bars and the underground queer of color parties that inspired them. Vince Lawrence describes Kent’s approach on Punk Out as “real open format,” calling it an inspiration to him and his friends. House producer Chez Damier says Kent is “the father of it all,” extolling him for fearlessly programming genre-defiant danceable music “all in the same breath.”355 According to Kent, Stay Up and Punk Out became an overwhelming hit in its two years on WXFM in spite of the racially charged, homophobic invective directed at him and the show by his white colleagues at the station. Ultimately, the speculative risk he took paid off and the “cool gent” was able to get a salaried job at rival, black-oriented station WGCI 107.5, the FM sister station of WVON.356 While WDAI had a relatively limited disco playlist, Stay Up and Punk Out was more generically capricious. Kent may not have mixed like a disco DJ, but he was better approximating the repertoire lighting up Chicago’s juice bars than any of his contemporaries. That being said, his show reflected a national trend adapted in particular ways by Chicago DJs. By the time Punk Out was on air, Billboard was preaching the gospel of danceable rock, 123 extolling the rise of downtown New York “rock discos” like Trax, Hurrah’s, and The Mudd Club, all of which, like Chicago’s juice bars, played a more open format dance music than the gay discotheques of the 1970s. Billboard even promoted its February 1980 International Dance Music Forum with the tagline: “incorporating rock, soul, disco-fusion music.”357 Punk Out played into a national trend, but Kent was focused on reflecting its hyper-local texture. He remediated the repertoire of teen promoter/DJs for larger, intergenerational radio audiences in Chicago, much like WDAI had been doing with repertoire played in the city’s gay discotheques. The DAI hot mixes and Kent’s Punk Out shows both had interracial FM audiences, but the hot mixes seem to have reached more of Chicago’s young white listeners. Perhaps white teens weren’t tuning in to Punk Out because they didn’t want to hear Kent’s funkier r&b and soul offerings, or maybe his black appeal patter turned them off. Whatever social and sonic preferences structured these early divisions, WBMX, a black FM station broadcasting to the Chicago metro area, began to produce a new Saturday night mix show in 1981 that came to supplant both Kent’s program and the WDAI hot mix show, which was canceled when the station went to an Album Oriented Rock (AOR) format in 1980. Saturday Night Live Ain’t No Jive and its hugely popular DJs, the original Hot Mix 5, gave the city’s burbling post-disco juice bar scene a more fully-rounded sonic counterpart to its live DJ sets, remediating and codifying the sound of “house” as it grew from a DJ culture into a production culture, and spreading its sound to the far reaches of Chicagoland. 124 3.D - “Saturday Night Live Ain’t No Jive” Apart from the relatively small group of teens who took part in the straightened juice bar scene on the Near South Side, and the even smaller group who managed to get into The Warehouse, most young people in Chicago got their first taste of what came to be called “house music” listening to 102.7 FM, WBMX. Other smaller shows cropped in the mid to late 80s on college radio stations like WKKC and WNUR (both of which used the low-power 89.3 band on the FM dial), but WBMX’ Saturday Night Live Ain’t No Jive show, featuring The Hot Mix 5 DJs, is the most frequently mentioned touchstone for the generation of house music listeners that came of age in the first half of the 1980s. Media entrepreneur Egmont Sonderling founded WBMX in Oak Park in 1973.358 When Viacom Inc. purchased the majority of his holdings in 1980, he held on to his WBMX license, committing to nurture the station’s innovative mix of crossover black music programming for nearly a decade longer than he did for any of his other radio holdings. After Sonderling hired Lee Michaels as production director (PD) in 1980, WBMX became renowned for its independence and innovation in the Chicago market. A veteran of independent black radio, Michaels had cut his teeth working in Charlotte, North Carolina on a reel-to-reel mix show, an experience that served him well as he fought to wrestle market-share away from rival Chicago station, 107.5 WGCI.359 Michaels’ counterpart at WGCI, PD Barry Mayo, claimed in a 1980 interview with Billboard that “disco was never that popular with black people” and that his station was on the rise at the top of the decade because it had abandoned a trendy all-disco format for a diverse palette of r&b, jazz, new wave, and adult contemporary. While Mayo derided and whitened disco by distancing his black audience from it, Lee Michaels at WBMX knew that Chicago’s queer, 125 black, and Latino dancers, the folks who set the city’s trends, were still invested in a mixed, post- disco sound that played well in underground teen clubs and juice bars; even if using the d-word had become anathema because of the ways it explicitly indexed queerness, disco music’s energy still animated Chicago’s dance floors. By remediating the disco mixing styles and genre-defiant repertoire of the teen juice bars and queer of color underground, styles that had already been remediated on Disco DAI hot mixes and Herb Kent’s Stay Up and Punk Out, Michaels expanded the reach of what was coming to be called house music, bringing its sounds ever deeper into the city’s North Side and suburbs.360 The WVON Good Guys program of the 1960s catered to a generation that moved to Chicago from the various regions of the mostly rural South, but Michaels envisioned the Hot Mix 5 as a group that would be attuned to the regional distinctions of the post-industrial metropolis itself. In the spring of 1981 the WBMX PD held an open call for mix tapes, selecting five DJs who played sounds that he imagined would suit their particular geographically distinct audiences, but who also had the capacity to share sonic space with those from beyond their neighborhoods. As he puts it, the original Hot Mix 5 covered the deep house and punk relevant to the South Side, the poppy, “taffy” tracks favored by kids in the suburbs, amateur Chicago acid and beat tracks preferred by West Siders, and the Latin freestyle popular on the North Side. Michaels didn’t rely on the Hot Mixers to carry all the cultural weight of sounding Chicago’s sonic diversity, however. He augmented the multicultural sounds of the mixes by hiring a new team of black and Latino on-air hosts, relying on their voices to help sustain and add texture to the station’s “urban” personality and brand.361 Audience composition had been a primary concern of radio’s corporate sponsors beginning with the format’s very earliest commercial incarnations in the 1920s. The challenges 126 facing stations that served large, racially diverse markets were nothing new.362 As Chicago black appeal DJ Al Benson showed through his verbal syncretism of “northern being and southern memory” a generation earlier, Chicago’s South and West Side audiences responded with enthusiasm and loyalty to stations that featured DJs with vocal styles that were audibly black, even if national advertisers balked at marketing to them.363 WBMX’ black and Latino hosts, Veronique, Mike Jeffries, Steve Gunn, and Armando Rivera, ad libbed on air using speech patterns, accents, and slang that were alternately classed, racialized, and gendered. The show focused the sexually fluid soundscape that Saturday Night Live Ain’t No Jive consolidated from geographically disparate club scenes through a cone of nonwhite vocality. The huge popularity of Veronique among BMX audiences demonstrated that underground sounds could be packaged and sold by an Afro-Latina woman even if the station’s mixing DJs were all men. Some hot mixers, like Ralphi Rosario, were, in fact, gay too, but this information wasn’t ever conveyed to audiences explicitly over the air. WBMX didn’t reject the queer of color cultural matrix that it was remediating, rather, the station elided it by emphasizing the aurality of racial alterity and femininity in Veronique’s on-air patter. Femme, Afro-Latina vocals came to the sonic foreground while long-standing queer identifications dissolved into the mix. According to Lee Michaels, when he promoted the mix tape contest to find the DJs who would become The Hot Mix 5, he knew he “couldn’t do more than five guys ... five was a push,” but “if [he] only did three, this style or this style wouldn't be represented.” It was critical to the show’s success that it mirror, and reify, the culturally distinct, yet overlapping, dance music scenes of Chicagoland as well as the hyper-masculine tenor of the city’s DJ cultures – “guys” was clearly an operative word in his configuration of the show’s final lineup. 127 Fig. 3.3 - The original Hot Mix 5 - clockwise from left: Kenny “Jammin” Jason, Scott “Smokin” Silz, Ralphi “Rockin” Rosario, Farley “Funkin” Keith, and Mickey “Mixin” Oliver. As the new Saturday Night Live DJs began to accustom themselves to the temporal constraints of radio, both its corporate regularity and the musical brevity this regularity entailed, they programmed music and used various sampled sounds and other DJ techniques to hail the cultural distinctions of the heterogeneous audience tuning in. Host Armando Rivera connected with the city’s growing Latino population; Kenny “Jammin” Jason, Scott “Smokin” Silz, and Mickey “Mixin” Oliver played to suburban as well as white/North Side audiences; Ralphi “Rockin” Rosario appealed the Latino audiences on the North and West Sides, and Farley “Funkin” Keith (later in his career Farley “Jackmaster” Funk) reached out to black listeners on the West and South Sides.364 128 Lee Michaels says that Frankie Knuckles submitted a tape for consideration, but that he didn’t make the first cut, in part because he was late in submitting and “inconsistent” in his mixing.365 The idea of creating consistency, a critical aesthetic priority of radio production, with its hourly scheduling and regularized sales metrics, didn’t harmonize with the queer time/space of the underground night clubs where Knuckles was most used to performing. Jack Halberstam suggests that there are “specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves behind the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance.” These queer times are greatly affected by the “place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage … new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counter publics.”366 Knuckles eventually joined the Hot Mix 5 in 1985/1986 before he left Chicago, but by that point, as he put it, WBMX benefited more from him than he did from it: “I had probably the most successful underground club in the city [The Power Plant] … And with me being a part of that team and making tapes and being on the radio, it lent a lot of credibility to the show.”367 Knuckles also claimed that other hot mixers, like Frankie “Hollywood” Rodriguez and Farley “Funkin” Keith/Farley “Jackmaster” Funk were covertly, if not overtly homophobic, a reading corroborated by in an interview with Farley where he says that the “Warehouse” music he and Jesse Saunders were playing at The Playground took a while to catch on because straight, black teens, and by extension he and other straight DJs adapting the Warehouse sound, thought it was “fag music.”368 WBMX Hot Mixers remediated not only the genre-defiant sounds of Chicago’s queer of color clubs and juice bars, reducing the sonic complexity of live DJ’d performances in some ways, embellishing them in others, they also helped to regularize dance music’s queerly 129 “ambiguous structuring and divergent metrical paths.”369 This queer remediation was not just an artistic intervention; it was, perhaps primarily, a commercial one. In abbreviating, contracting, and restraining the queer temporality of what was coming to be called house mixing, the Hot Mix 5 were able to promote more songs in less time because they were truncating and compressing them, playing as many as 15 in 30 minutes. While queer of color progenitors of house culture, like DJ Mike Ezebukwu and Frankie Knuckles, whipped their audiences into a frenzy by extending the most beloved sections of individual tracks for as long as possible, WBMX hot mixers crammed as many songs into their brief sets as they could. As station producer Sal Amato puts it, in “playing those ‘hot’ records you are generating more interest ... and [teenage consumers would] all wind up at the stores buying those records the next morning.”370 Lee Michaels’ almost instantaneous success with Saturday Night Live Ain’t No Jive suggested to him that it would be prudent to expand WBMX Hot Mix 5 programming to daytime hours so that the station could further capitalize on the collective’s popularity. Just a few months after the first Hot Mix 5 show went on the air, WBMX was broadcasting the Hot Lunch show each day at noon, and Friday Night Jam at the top of the weekend. Amato remembers the revelation of hearing sounds he’d never heard anywhere else during the Hot Lunch mix: “you’d hear Cinnamon. You’d hear Sweet Pea. Or you'd hear Indeep. Those were club records man, that were banging in the clubs!”371 For the most part, The Hot Mix 5’s queer remediation of underground club aesthetics served to narrow the scope of the underground’s repertoire, forcing it to conform to pop conventions in terms of song-length, lyrical structure, and harmonic complexity. This pop conformity helped WBMX to cultivate an audience that was not only larger, but more 130 geographically, generationally, and racially heterogeneous than those of both Chicago’s teen juice bars or its queer of color underground. When Hot Mix 5 listeners grew older and came to dominate the city’s night life, they came with ideas about musicality and sociality cultivated in some cases within, but in many cases beyond, the embodied sites of cultural transmission that had taken shape in black and brown home spaces, roller rinks, and underground juice bars. These crossover communities, twice removed, were less explicitly attuned than even the teens in the Near South Side juice bar scene to the ways that the mixing style and repertoire it identified with was built from and tested in spaces created expressly to serve the city’s culturally marooned queers of color. The authoritative claims of Lee Michaels aside, for a non-Chicagoan born in the mid- 1980s listening to the extant recordings of various WBMX radio hot mixes that have been transferred by fans from cassette tape recordings of radio to mp3 archives, it is nearly impossible to discern the ways that particular programmatic choices might have hailed particular geographically dispersed, and ethnically distinct, audiences. Despite this interpretive challenge, one hot mix artist, perhaps the most visible and commercially successful, provides a useful case study in how the five original DJs might have each connected with their geographically-diverse dancing communities as they helped create a newly expansive, commercially viable radio format and musical culture. Farley “Funkin” Keith Williams, aka Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, aka the self-proclaimed “creator of house music,” first garnered notoriety as a resident DJ at Craig and Hayne Thomson’s Playground, a venue across from the Loft and First Impressions in the disco punk vortex of South Michigan and 14th Street. The space, which opened in the spring of 1982 after Farley had already successfully auditioned for the Hot Mix 5, had about 1000 square feet of dance floor and 131 a soaring, 20-foot high ceiling. Built with an all-ages juice bar license, The Playground had a snack bar and a water station. According to resident DJ Jesse Saunders, weekend parties started at 9:00pm with a line around the block and the venue was at its 1,500-person capacity by 10:00pm. 372 Before his star turn at The Playground, and at WBMX, Farley was doing everything he could just to be close to Saunders and the underground DJ culture germinating on the Near South Side. He carried records, hung posters, and passed out pluggers, familiarizing himself with the critically important, but often undervalued, promotional aspects of Chicago’s disco punk ecosystem. When he wasn’t hustling a promotion, Farley taught himself how to blend records by listening to Kenny “Jammin” Jason’s WDAI hot mixes: “my mom had a record player at home, and if you turned the knob in between ‘FM’ and ‘phono,’ you could hear the radio and the turntable at the same time. So what I would do is get the same exact record he was playing, put it on the turntable, and try to find the exact same part of the record he had it at. That’s how I learned to flange before I even learned to mix or scratch.”373 Much like the Chicago artists who came before him, Farley stretched the affordances of the acoustic tools at his disposal, training his ear to hear dance music’s rhythmic complexities, shifted pitches, and divergent tempos. Between 1981 and 1987 he became an undisputed master in manipulating the sound, and championing the culture, of what came to be called Chicago house. Two anecdotes in particular illustrate Farley’s tireless advocacy on behalf of the Chicago house movement. First, after joining the Hot Mix 5, he began to call the inchoate, genre-defiant post-disco mix he was spinning on WBMX and at The Playground “house music.” His repetitive insistence that this sound would be called house helped instantiate that oft-debated term on air. His demonstrative labeling was in part an offensive jab at West Side spinner and house pioneer 132 Leonard “Remix” Rroy, a resident DJ at the popular Rink Zone juice bar who also claims to have been the first to use and circulate the term “house music.” Farley, as he would do time and again, used his rival’s good idea to launch a new phase of his own career, while helping shift the terms of belonging and identification for Chicago’s larger underground dance music community. Fig 3.4 - Invitation, New Music Seminar DJ International showcase at Better Days, July 16, 1986. Farley took a similarly bombastic approach to proliferating the term “house” in July of 1986 when he attended the New Music Seminar, an industry conference and showcase held each year in New York City. He was joined by a stable of artists from D.J. International Records for the event, widely thought to have been a critical juncture at which the British lifestyle press 133 began to seek out the progenitors of Chicago house. Farley says this happened in part because he heralded the music’s prominence during the seminar’s panels: Kenny Jason, Julian Perez – we were all in the room, and I was trying to get our music known. If someone was on a panel and said something such as, “I was playing the stereo the other day at my house…” I’d shout, “He said House! HOUSE! HOUSE!” What happened is that by the time we went to the second panel, everyone would catch on to me saying “HOUSE!”374 Farley’s advocacy should not be discounted, but he hardly solicited national visibility for Chicago house alone. He was, of course, part of a collective. WBMX Hot Mix 5 programs were in part built off stylistic interventions like on-air blending and concise musical narratives performed on WDAI by Farley’s mentor, Kenny “Jammin” Jason, as well the station’s other DJs. The collective expanded on the genre-defiant repertoire of Herb Kent’s Punk Out show as well, incorporating the outer limits of Italo-disco and punk music in its programming, as well as sounds that in other times and places might have been heard as too white for play on black radio. The Hot Mix 5 DJs also employed performance techniques that were relatively new to Chicago radio, such as rapid-fire mixing, scratching, Roland TR-808 drum enhancements, name drops, sound effects, back-spinning, and phasing. Adding an additional layer of 808 percussion over an auxiliary microphone, or a separate audio channel, eventually became known as using the “Farley foot” in house circles, in part because Farley’s use of it was so integral to his mixing style that it was often difficult to tell where his records ended and the 808 began. Japan’s Roland corporation released the $1,195 TR-808 Rhythm Composer in 1980. The drum machine had 16 onboard percussion sounds and adjustable knobs that allowed music producers to tweak its sonic parameters, changing, for example, how quickly an effect would come in or exit a musical frame.375 Only a fraction of the cost of the Linn LM-1 Drum Computer, 134 which had been released around the same time by Linn Electronics Inc., the 808 had a deeper, more resonant bass drum sound than any other instrument on the market. Its synthesized percussion sounds came to constitute the connective tissue between the interrelated danceable genres being spun at clubs like The Playground and on the WBMX hot mix shows, including the Latin Freestyle music that was integral to sets by Ralphi “Rockin’” Rosario and the electro/hip hop played by Farley “Jackmaster” Funk.376 By the end of the decade, the iconic sounds of the TR-808 constituted a millennial lingua franca for black popular music. They bridged the worlds of production, live club performance, and radio.377 An 808 may not have sounded like a human drummer, but that wasn’t the point. Its affordable, futuristic bounce bound together the sounds of a generation of musicians and dancers by offering a metronomic alternative to fallible flesh and bone. Farley says he first started adding the 808 to his sets at The Playground in an attempt to beef up the low end of older disco repertoire: “When I first did that with MFSB’s ‘Love is the Message,’ the crowd instantly screamed.”378 In a hot mix thought to be from about 1985, he uses the 808 kick drum with handclaps, toms, and cymbal crashes to undergird a sequence of popular vocal tracks and a vocal snippet intoning his name over and over. First he brings in Status IV’s “You Ain’t Really Down” on beat, then Colonel Abrams’ “Trapped,” and finally First Choice’s “Let No Man Put Asunder.”379 The 808, featured on recordings and performed live, becomes part of the whole cloth of the house mix, helping Farley weave vocal tracks from various songs together into a single musical narrative. The Hot Mix 5 was not merely a radio phenomenon; the group was also a promotional entity that could be deployed by WBMX at events around the city to spread the gospel of its own brand, as well as that of the station. According to Sal Amato, a popular promotion with the Hot 135 Mix 5 at the Taste of Chicago festival in The Loop showed just how massive, and massively diverse, the WBMX audience had become by 1985/1986: “you’re mixing 3,000 black kids with 4,000 white kids, and 5,000 Spanish kids, not one fight, not one problem, they’re just all there to listen to the music. It was like the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen.”380 That the city’s ethnically and racially diverse youth could come together without incident seems to suggest that the house sound itself, its very heterogeneity, allowed audiences to come together across boundaries of race, class, and sexual orientation peacefully. Fig. 3.5 - Poster, New York versus Chicago Hot Mix 5 DJ Battle, October 2, 1982. 136 Live bookings of the Hot Mix 5 DJs reinforced WBMX’ dominance on the airwaves and reified the remediated musical format that hot mixers cultivated on-air at festivals, teen parties, and clubs. By spinning hour-long, and even half-hour DJ sets all around Chicagoland, hot mixers not only tested tracks and reinforced their show’s brand identity, they also helped concretize audience expectations for a particular, radio-friendly style of house DJing in live performance. The Hot Mix 5 show, and its DJs, at times struggled against the perception that they were dumbing down dance music, making it pop when it should have remained challenging. Frankie “Hollywood” Rodriguez recalls a time when he asked a DJ at the bar Neo’s about playing “Pump up the Volume,” the 1987 crossover dance hit by UK artist M.A.R.R.S.: “I said, ‘wow, that's a jam! I’m going to play it on the radio,’ and … he said, ‘please don’t … you fuckers start playing it and its not cool for me to play because my new wave punk fans will hear it on BMX.’”381 According to Zinzi Powell, who grew up in Hyde Park listening to Hot Mixes during the mid- 1980s, it was the second generation of hot mixers who marked the end of the show’s influence on her age cohort: “we did kind of grow away from the BMX mix stage when maybe it got a little too commercial or something like that, around about maybe the time that Julian Perez was starting to get on board.”382 If by 1987 the Hot Mix 5 were overexposed and had become less popular with the audience that had grown up on their sound, in 1984 and 1985 the collective could do no wrong. Hot Mix 5 programming helped WBMX almost double its four percent share of Chicago metro’s radio market. Michaels was convinced that if he had a million dollars more in his budget he could crush WGCI, which at the time had about 825,000 cumulative listeners to WBMX’s 600,000. According to Frankie “Hollywood” Rodriguez, who joined the hot mixers in the middle of the 1980s, BMX employees “could go directly to the owner … no red tape, no Wall Street 137 radio.”383 Michaels took advantage of this flat organizational culture, calling a meeting with Egmont Sonderling, who was then based in Miami. Sonderling promised him $300,000 to use towards perceptual studies, focus groups, and weekly music surveys. According to Michaels, this market research helped him refine the station’s Hot Mix playlists and quantify what he and other PDs in black radio had been doing intuitively for decades. In 1985 WBMX surged past WGCI, claiming a 14 percent share of Chicago’s most coveted primetime radio market.384 Despite having achieved this milestone, the station still couldn’t match WGCI in terms of attracting national advertisers, in part because WGCI was backed by Gannett Company Inc., a well-capitalized, highly diversified, national media conglomerate that owned newspapers, television stations, and even outdoor billboards. WBMX was one of a dwindling number of black independents with no sister stations and a relatively hard-to-sell demographic in terms of its racial heterogeneity and age. It simply couldn’t compete. In October of 1985, Lee Michaels left WBMX over a $5,000 salary discrepancy and was immediately hired by WGCI. On his way out the door, he wooed his original Hot Mix 5 DJs to the rival station as well. However, each of the original DJs, minus Scott “Smoking” Silz, who had jumped ship months earlier for personal reasons, and Farley, who had already left to join WGCI’s imitative Jackmasters mix show, were still riding out their contracts. WBMX replaced Farley with Julian “Jumpin” Perez after he won a citywide DJ battle, and filled the fifth slot with a rotating group that included Steve “Silk” Hurley, Frankie Knuckles, and Frankie “Hollywood” Rodriguez. It lost Ralph “Rockin” Rosario, Kenny “Jammin” Jason, and Mickey “Mixin” Oliver to WGCI in July of 1986.385 138 Ultimately WGCI ended the Jackmasters program in February of 1987, just a few months after poaching its show’s DJs from WBMX. By that time WBMX had rebuilt its hot mix programming with a new stable of DJs that included Julian “Jumpin” Perez, Frankie “Hollywood” Rodriguez, Bad Boy Bill, and Mike “Hitman” Wilson, but the incendiary moment had passed and audience support was waning. According to Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, he returned to BMX, helping the station pump up its ratings before Sonderling sold it in 1988 to WGCI PD Barry Mayo’s Broadcast Partners Incorporated (BPI) after failing to garner support from the FCC to sell the station for a reported $27-million to Detroit’s Sky Broadcasting Inc. 386 The sale marked Sonderling’s retirement from radio, and the end of innovative hot mixing in Chicago, at least according to the WBMX devotees. Mayo fired the entire WBMX staff and flipped the station to a “black adult contemporary” format, leaving behind a tried and tested approach to programming that Billboard had only just begun to call “urban.” 139 3.E - Conclusion The manner in which WGCI/Gannett took advantage of WBMX, learning from the station’s innovative crossover programming before eviscerating it, recapitulated the tactics major record labels like Warner Brothers and Atlantic had used to exploit the a&r capacities of Chicago’s black independent record labels in the 1970s. Nimbler, less risk-averse independents took on the financial risk involved in supporting new artists, and large vertically integrated corporations creamed off proven, top-selling talent. After cashing in on local hit records by promoting them through larger distribution networks, major labels would often allow their new signees to languish in their contracts, much like Gannett/WGCI did with the original hot mixers. The story of the rivalry between WBMX and WGCI is to some extent also the story of the personal rivalry between Lee Michaels and Barry Mayo. Much like the competitive DJs on Chicago’s house scene, these PDs publicly debated what the terms of success in Chicago’s radio market should be, both claiming to know what was best for their listeners. Michaels and Mayo would eventually leave salaried radio work altogether to try to make it as freelance consultants, embodying larger shifts towards increased individuality, and decreased communalism, that had been changing the business of selling black music for over twenty years. According to Billboard, black consultants venturing out on their own at the end of the 1980s were doing so without the backing of one of the four major consulting firms in the radio business, firms that collectively employed only one black associate in 1989. Some newly independent black PDs claimed they faced overt racism, while others merely decried the challenge of building brand recognition. Despite the challenges, independent contractors like Mayo were bullish on the idea of independence because they had established relationships with 140 national advertisers that they would be able to leverage as black radio continued to expand into bigger markets.387 It is tempting to look at the sale of WBMX, and the diminishing of the hot mix format, as concluding the story of independent black radio in Chicago. Like other segments of the culture industries that flourished in the 1980s, genre-defiant radio was forced into more austere economic frameworks by greedy music entrepreneurs out to serve shareholders over employees and customers. When large corporations like BPI gobbled up minor players like WBMX, free- agents-cum-moguls like Barry Mayo sold component pieces off in media packages ever more finely separated into youth and adult subcategories inflected by “psychographic” race, gender, and class profiles.388 By the time President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, deregulating media markets with one hand while providing for increased competition in telecommunications with the other, black music consultancies had already helped to rationalize and segment the programming at once-independent stations all over the country. What had been a broad-based, heterogeneous format with wide appeal to all kinds of black and non-black listeners, broke off into ever more narrowly imagined age, gender and class-specific “urban” sub-categories anchored by r&b, on the mature/feminine side of the age and gender divide, and hip hop on the youth/masculine one.389 In the following chapter I examine several other cultural dimensions of queer remediation in Chicago house music culture, including those that shaped the choices of its producers and record labels; the development of its punk affiliations; the effects of HIV/AIDS on its originators; and the aging and moving out of its middle class pioneers. Like Chapter Three, Chapter Four argues that house music, and the communities it touched, continued to burn brightly into the dawn of the 1990s, despite the ways they were repeatedly starved for air. 141 Chapter Four - House Music on The Move: Juice Bars, Record Labels, and The Making of Crossover Communities 4.A - Introduction Much like the early years of The Warehouse/US Studios, a time during which social antagonisms threatened to halt the rise of house music before it even began to coalesce as a commodifiable genre, the first half of the 1980s was a time marked by toxic interpersonal feuds, professional slights, and competition, not only between juice bar promoters, but also between radio station PDs and DJs. The changing business of black radio in Chicago and the queer remediation of disco punk music were critical to the re-booting of Chicago’s independent music industry writ large, but it was the city’s cluster of record stores and new independent record labels that offered young producers material incentives to create. Chicago teens fueled their local house music scene by producing “disco on a budget.”390 Like Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy before them, they dreamed beyond the prescribed compositional capabilities of synthesizers and drum machines, stretching the technological affordances of the tools at their disposal. By the mid-1980s, pioneering labels published and distributed 12” vinyl records of tracks that had already been market-tested on tape cassettes in Chicago’s underground juice bars; its DJ-friendly record stores sold them. Support from local independent labels became as critical to the spread of Chicago’s homegrown house sound as the city’s radio stations, juice bars, school dance halls, ballrooms, and club spaces, but not without a cost. The enormous growth of the local house music industry in Chicago in the middle of the decade was partially predicated on the financial exploitation of young artists. In the second half of the 1980s some of the city’s top-selling producers grew frustrated with Chicago’s limitations and began to look outside the city to further their careers. At the same time, new punk juice bars were expanding the capacity of house to bring together more 142 geographically and racially diverse crossover communities. Chicago dancers flocked to mixed North Side spaces like Medusa’s and South/West Side venues like Club Naked to hear house blended with industrial, punk, hip hop, and electro. The last spaces to take full advantage of the juice bar licensing structure so critical to proto-house/disco punk entrepreneurship, these “brown punk” venues emerged at a critical point in the life cycle of Chicago house, remediating the already remediated sounds popularized by Hot Mix 5 mixers for a new generation of dancers.391 In this chapter I argue that the queer remediation central to Chicago house music’s national and global diffusion was greatly affected by the indomitability of the city’s independent music ecosystem, a network that, like the house sound, rose from the ashes of its industrial antecedents. I also argue that the catastrophic effects that HIV/AIDS had on house music’s queer of color progenitors played a large part in creating the opening through which house crossed over from queer of color and majority nonwhite spaces to straighter, whiter ones. Finally, I suggest that an intergenerational cohort of survivors and young dancers brought 12” singles and cassette- taped hot mixes with them when they left Chicago for work, college, and military service, disseminating and helping popularize the sound of Chicago across the US, the UK, and Europe. This cultural ambassadorship introduced even more new audiences to the city’s musical culture, but it also helped to decouple house from its queer of color roots back home. Many people would come to know the music, few of them would remember or even learn about the richness of its history. 143 4.B - Making and Selling Chicago House Paul Weisberg became a huge player in Chicago’s house music ecosystem after running an imports-focused record pool for DJs during the late 1970s called Independent Record Services (IRS). The pool’s members included DJs Patrick Hernandez, Tom Hayden, and Grant Smith, who spun in the mostly gay discotheques on Chicago’s North Side. Weisberg soon realized he could expand his cultural influence, and earn more money, by setting up a brick-and-mortar vinyl emporium to serve his expanding coterie of DJs. He called the store, which he set up in his father’s Plymouth Court automotive garage, Importes Etc. There were dozens of record stores that played minor roles in the early development of house music in Chicago, but Importes Etc. is the most revered, and oft-cited. The store became renowned for its critical role as a pipeline between Italo-disco distributors in Europe via Walter Paas’ Cap/C.A.P. Exports, and later C.W. Paas Inc., and the city’s underground juice bars and clubs. Importes also became the place that young house entrepreneurs like Vince Lawrence and Jesse Saunders unloaded crates of their amateur productions before the proliferation of Chicago house records revivified the city’s independent recording industry. When he founded the IRS DJ pool, Weisberg had the good fortune to meet an encyclopedic music lover named Brett Wilcots, who defected to IRS from a rival pool called Dogs Of War, which was run by Eddie Thomas, Curtis Mayfield’s partner at Custom Records. Wilcots had experience creating playlists, shipping product, and writing copy for Dogs while holding down a day job as the buyer for Sounds Good Records’ 12” disco section. As he tells the story, he was critical in helping expand IRS into a full-service specialty record store. Weisberg may have had the building, but Wilcots had the taste and the retail distribution experience needed to fill it with the best product.392 144 Frank Sells at Importes also played a critical role shepherding the sonic assemblage of The Warehouse to the city’s commercial marketplace. Leonard “Remix” Rroy calls Sells “the backbone of many a first generation Chicago house music DJ.”393 According to Rroy, Sells would pay careful attention to how a particular DJ played out, then curate a selection of some 30 records that would best fit their playing style, placing the product in a box specifically marked for them at Importes. Rroy says that Sells would even go so far as to direct different artists to play different tracks on the same LP: “When the Kasso LP [Walkman] came out, Frankie [Knuckles] was directed to play ‘Walkman’ and Frank suggested that I play ‘One More Round.’”394 Weisberg’s team adapted the taste making function of the record pool expertly in their management of the store and its inventory, inspiring loyalty that bordered on fanaticism. As Farley “Jackmaster” Funk remembers, having received many free records from Weisberg and co., “you give a DJ record free, you know, he’s more apt to play that record than one that he paid for.”395 If Importes was the only store in town with a particular Italo-disco import, then club and radio play by someone like Farley would almost certainly lead to increased sales. The intimate social and economic ties between DJs and the staff at the store, and the trust in musical connoisseurship that was fundamental to this intimacy, expanded exponentially with the growing popularity of the music that was being played at The Warehouse, The Loft, Sauer’s, First Impressions, and other underground spaces. By 1980/1981, Importes staff helped codify the still generically diffuse amalgam that came to be called house by giving the music a section all its own. As Chicago producer Chip E., who worked for a time at Importes, recalls: people would come in and ask for the old sounds, the Salsoul that Frankie used to play at The Warehouse, so we’d put up signs that said “Warehouse Music” to get people’s 145 attention to re-issues and collectors’ items. It worked so well that we started putting it on all sorts of records and shortened the label to “House.”396 The codification of the house section at Importes Etc. enabled all kinds of DJs to buy the same “old” songs, in effect helping create the commercial underpinning for a constellation of established recordings that would come to be understood as house music’s classics, the foundation of what I call its repertoire in motion. As DJ Marlon “Jo De Presser” Billups recalls, his brother belonged to another smaller record pool at a store called Bernie’s, and purchased records he heard out at the same stores as the DJs he followed, primarily at Importes.397 The store was not only a social and musical hub, it served a democratizing function in house music culture as well, disseminating information and access to popular DJ repertoires among amateur DJs all around the city. By the mid-1980s, Importes had formalized the category of house music, perhaps not understood to be a genre in and of itself before then, and reinforced the commercial and social connections between The Hot Mix 5 programs, the underground juice bar scene, and Chicago’s record-buying public. Producer Marshall Jefferson says that the store put up a notice board where the staff described songs that had been played on the Hot Mix 5 shows. This bulletin not only served a commercial function, it also saved the store’s staff time fielding a ceaseless stream of “Hot Mix 5 questions.”398 For the obsessive record collector/record store clerk, negotiating the hip accumulation of knowledge was in many ways about creating and policing problematic canons.399 The dual time- saving and taste-making function of the Importes clerks, and the ongoing devotion of store employees to the primary concerns of semi-professional and professional club DJs, as well as radio DJs, over those lowly amateurs, WBMX fans, and dancers, reinforced the idea that 146 specialty record store clerks cared little for mass consumption and less for teeny bopper tastes. As DJ Michael Serafini says of his friend and collaborator DJ Derrick Carter, a clerk at Importes during the late 1980s, “I used to go see him … at Importes Etc. and he would be so bitchy.”400 This bitchiness wasn’t (entirely) personal; it was also professional. A hard exterior signaled to patrons that the practice of remediating musical information for DJs at Importes was, unlike other types of shop keeping, a serious, masculine, endeavor. In their purchasing of product, curation of special sections, and attention to customer concerns, Importes employees, like their contemporaries on Chicago radio, were on the forefront of national commercial trends in underground and specialty dance music.401 Their knowledgeable staff and prime location helped them to play an outsized role in transforming house from a proto-generic category to a commodified generic format with its own, Chicago- specific, aesthetic contours and social frameworks. In 1983, teenage producers Vince Lawrence and Jesse Saunders visited the store with a stack of vinyl that they had just printed up at a Bridgeport record pressing plant. According to Lawrence, he had taken his last thousand dollars and invested them in making the records because, having tested the new material in the juice bars, he “knew he was gonna be able to sell them already.”402 “On and On” approximated the sound of a rare, post-disco 12” promotional release from 1980 created by an artist named MACH, supposedly stolen from Jesse Saunder’s record collection.403 The original track and its clone were both based around sound effects and a bass line sampled from 1980’s “Space Invaders,” by the Australian band Player [1], the drum track and car horn from “Funkytown,” by Lipps Inc., and the “toot toot, beep beep” call out hook from Donna Summers’ “Bad Girls.” In a sense, Saunders attempted to re-construct the hard to find 147 mashup from scratch using a polyphonic Korg keyboard, a Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer, and a TB-606 drum machine.404 According to Saunders, the original MACH track that he lost had become a staple in his sets, and part of his drive to re-create it came from wanting to keep using the song to signal his sonic presence at The Playground and his other gigs around the city. That the original record sparked such interest among Saunders’ audiences in the first place can in part be explained by the winnowing of disco repertoire that took place along with the decline of the American recording industry in the late 1970s. Without access to a stream of new disco sounds, audiences wanted to hear familiar sounds in fresh configurations. In emulating the rare import anew, Saunders helped demarcate the very simplest production elements and compositional strategies - indeed the techniques – that would come to be used by amateur producers who would flood the city’s dance music marketplace.405 When Importes. Etc. bought all 500 black label test copies of “On and On,” Lawrence and Saunders quickly returned to press up more with Larry Sherman, a fellow South Side entrepreneur who had purchased his Bridgeport Precision Pressing Plant (formerly Musical Products) in 1982. Sherman had started Precision with the idea that he would fill a lucrative market niche re-pressing rock records for jukeboxes, but when he saw Saunders and Lawrence, who he described as two inexperienced kids beating out “simple rhythms” on “strange toys,” turn around a quick 400% profit by copying a bootleg, disco record, he began to focus on the juice bar scene.406 Sherman founded Trax Records at his pressing plant and brought on Vince Lawrence as head of a&r. 148 Before they began working with Trax, Saunders and Lawrence were putting out records on Jes Say and its parent imprint Mitchbal, the small r&b and blues label owned by Lawrence’s father, Nemiah Mitchell. Mitchell used Sherman’s facility to press new recordings by Z-Factor, including “I Like To Do It (In Fast Cars)” (1983) and “Fantasy,” (1984) which Lawrence and Saunders recorded with the help of “Screaming” Rachael Cain. According to Mitchell, he hadn’t had much luck with his blues records on Mitchbal, but he trusted his son’s taste.407 Between 1984 and 1985, Saunders, Lawrence, and their writing partner Duane Buford pulled in about $10,000 to 15,000 a week selling their homespun tracks through specialty DJ stores and club promotions.408 Hearing tracks like “On and On” and “Fast Cars” in the juice bars and on the radio was, by many accounts, revelatory for young people in Chicago, especially since the production elements used on the tracks were so simple. According to Marshall Jefferson, Saunders and Lawrence inspired other producers not because of their enormous talent, but because they “weren’t that good.” Their music built off the genre-defiant disco punk soundscape that had become popular in the teen juice bars, but they were also taking punk, DIY approaches to industrial production, recording, pressing, and promoting their own material. They were just, as Jefferson says, “non-musicians making music” - if they could do it, then so could he.409 Z-Factor represented the democratic, punk possibility of new, relatively affordable studio technologies like Roland’s drum machines and bass synthesizers, but teenager singer/songwriter Jamie Principle was the burgeoning Chicago house scene’s one-in-a-million savant. A middle class kid who listened to Bowie, Prince, and The Human League, Principle was never a DJ, rather he identified as a clarinetist who played drums in his devout family’s church ensembles. A cassette tape recording of his moody composition “Your Love” happened to find its way into 149 Frankie Knuckles’ hands in 1984, courtesy of Principle’s friend José Gomez, the same dance music enthusiast who had taught Craig Loftis and Lori Branch to DJ. Principle says that before playing “Your Love” at The Power Plant, Knuckles had graciously called him and asked for his blessing, which he gave. When he finally made it out to the venue to hear the song played on The Plant’s sound system, his jaw hit the floor. He had inadvertently composed a house music anthem. Although “Your Love” wouldn’t get a proper 12” release as a single on Trax until 1987, it became an important musical foil to the quick and dirty bootlegs that inaugurated the house music recording industry, a must-have anthem for DJs working in the early 1980s house scene.410 Fig. 4.1 - “Your Love” 12” record label with Trax label designed by Vince Allen. Jesse Saunders was the first to put out a record on Trax. Released in 1985 under the name Le’ Noiz, “Wanna Dance” is a little slice of a drum machine breakbeat with an almost inaudible melody and two iconic vocal snippets, the first begging the question, “wanna dance?’ and the second, a sample of Curly from the Three Stooges, replying, “soit-enly!”411 According to Vince 150 Lawrence, he and Saunders had sampled the vocals by reconfiguring a LinnDrum drum machine with a special chip from the manufacturer that turned it into a sampler.412 Chicago house producers were, like their DJ heroes from The Warehouse and The Music Box, still stretching the affordances of the technologies at their disposal in new and surprising ways. Sherman and Lawrence’s second release on Trax, while hardly significant for its influence on house writ large, is a critical sonic marker of the influence that Latino artists were having on the scene’s production culture. Jesse Velez’ “Super Rhythm Trax” (1985) EP features a suite of six experimental dance songs that touch on the stylistic conventions of early hip hop, punk, and 808-driven rhythm patterns that presaged what would soon be codified as the sonic foundations of freestyle and electro.413 Velez’ single from his EP, “Girls Out On The Floor,” which Trax released as a stand-alone a few months later, features boastful rapping, polyphonic synthetic toms, and a driving guitar motif.414 Velez even quotes a popular vocal from the 1981 underground hit “Los Niños del Parque,” an import by the German band Liaisons Dangereuses: “Las niñas en el piso … mueven su culito!”415 Perhaps Velez would have been a big star on the early house music scene if he had lived to see his material released. Sadly, he passed before it ever hit the record store shelves. In 1985 Vince Lawrence and Larry Sherman licensed new production work by Adonis and Marshall Jefferson for Trax: the harmonically audacious, “No Way Back” and “Move Your Body (The House Music Anthem).”416 Radio and club DJ Farley “Funkin” Keith (not yet “Jackmaster Funk”) was regularly putting out quick and dirty DJ tools like “Funking With The Drums” on the label too.417 With The Hot Mix 5 and popular DJs like Ron Hardy championing Trax Records, and Importes Etc. ensuring that consumers had easy access to all the label’s new material, a host of new Chicago entrepreneurs began to try their hands at production, upsetting 151 the dominance of Saunders and Lawrence and fostering competition that fueled new sonic experimentation. Larry Sherman’s record pressing plant had become the cornerstone of new music production in Chicago house, especially for small vanity labels, but he wasn’t the only label owner looking to capitalize off of young producers. Another white music entrepreneur named Rocky Jones, who was running a record pool called Audio Talent, entered the scene in 1985, quickly matching Sherman’s influence with his D.J. International (DJI) imprint. Jones’ first release on DJI was Steve “Silk” Hurley’s “Music Is The Key,” put out under the name J.M. Silk. Hurley’s drum programming and use of arpeggiated synthesizers, as well as vocalist Keith Nunally’s inspirational lyrics on the track, which included the now famous exhortation for audiences to “Jack that body baby,” opened a new chapter in the development of Chicago house music – one that was animated not only by the demand of the local record-buying market, but a national one too.418 According to Rocky Jones, since he lacked the surplus capital to invest in a proper release for “Music is The Key,” he gave Larry Sherman his Corvette in exchange for printing 10,000 copies of the record. It seems like the odds were in his and Hurley’s favor, since, as he puts it, they had huge demand from record buyers after selling out of “Music’s” original test pressing, which had been funded almost entirely by Hurley with $1,500 he borrowed from his father.419 “Music is The Key” went on to sell approximately 85,000 copies over the next year, cracking the top ten of the Billboard Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart in October and remaining ensconced there for a total of thirteen weeks.420 152 According to Hurley, the success of his new record was already proven on the city’s dance floors before its release on DJI: “It was a real raw, real street record. That’s what made house different from other forms of music: a bunch of deejays who didn’t know what they were doing musically but knew everything about moving a crowd.”421 The intimate connections between the early house music producers and their audiences allowed them to experiment and develop sounds in dynamic reciprocity with dancers. DJs like Hurley, who also had a radio audience on WGCI, were able to promote and get audience feedback in a range of venues before they released any new material. The huge success of “Music” marked the beginning of a new phase in Chicago’s increasingly competitive house music marketplace. Hurley had produced the song with his best friend and roommate Farley Keith, or at least that’s what the label credit implies. According to J.M. Silk singer Keith Nunnaly, “When Steve started having success, Farley couldn’t handle it … he got real jealous.”422 Because of Farley’s huge radio presence – at that point WBMX was a powerhouse compared to WGCI where Hurley spun on the derivative Jack Masters show – he was often able to control the public narrative in the city’s house community with respect to what was becoming an acrimonious rivalry. The first stone cast was Farley’s declaration that he was no longer Farley “Funkin” Keith, rather he would be going by Farley “Jackmaster” Funk. Hurley had already been going by Steve “Jack Master” Hurley, but because of Farley’s visibility, he had to trade the alias for Steve “Silk” Hurley. Stealing a name seems like minor slight in comparison to what Hurley believed to be Farley’s wholesale copying of his work: Before I could get my cover version of “I Can’t Turn Around” out by Isaac Hayes, [Farley] went and made his own version and based it on my arrangement — because we were roommates, he got ahold of my four track recording of it, took my version and just altered it a little bit to make his own. His version, which he called “Love Can't Turn 153 Around,” came out overseas before mine and everybody was like, “Hey, hey, hey, Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk.” Then when mine came out, everybody was like, “Oh, he’s stealin’ from Farley,” because nobody really knew the story.423 Hurley and Nunally’s cover of Isaac Hayes’ proto-house anthem “I Can’t Turn Around,” which Hurley had been championing in his DJ sets since 1984, got caught up in legal limbo after Hurley and Nunally attempted to distance themselves from DJI’s Rocky Jones. After “Music Is The Key” had become a national dance floor hit – indeed, by 1986 was thought to have sold over 100,000 copies – Jones only paid the producer and vocalist $35,000; in their minds this sum was much less than they were owed. Hurley and Nunally told Simon Witter, writing for the UK-based magazine New Music Express (NME), that they were wise to the history of independent black music in Chicago, and weren’t about to become yet another black creative team joining “the ranks of the ripped off.”424 According to Hurley, Jones retaliated after he and Nunally seized the masters of the song from their recording studio, saying that, “people would try to contact us through [him], and he’d say we were out of town or didn’t wanna be bothered, and they’d take his word for it. He told someone that we would never perform in England.”425 With J.M. Silk’s Hayes cover version tied up in legal limbo, Farley moved quickly to capitalize off its huge popularity in Chicago’s juice bars by recording a new version, which he released on his own “House Records” label. According to Farley’s collaborator on the track, Jesse Saunders, it wasn’t Hurley’s four-track cover, but rather his own music theory bonafides that were at the compositional core of Farley “Jackmaster” Funk’s “Love Can’t Turn Around.”426 Vince Lawrence takes some credit too, saying that he brought the flamboyant gay church singer Daryl Pandy in to sing lyrics that he had helped re-write. 154 Lawrence’s lyrics inverted the affective charge of Hayes’ anthem; instead of celebrating love, like “I Can’t Turn Around,” “Love Can’t Turn Around,” laments romantic rejection: “now this is how it started/my dreams all broken hearted.”427 Lawrence says Sherman and Jones worked together with an in-house legal council for Trax and DJI named J.B. Ross to sell the new cover’s UK publishing rights to London Records at the 1986 Marché International du Disque et de l’Edition Musicale, or MIDEM, Conference.428 With support from London a&r executive, and Chicago house enthusiast, Pete Tong, “Love Can’t Turn Around” became the first Chicago house song to crack the Top 10 of the pop charts in the UK. The controversy over who came up with the Isaac Hayes cover first, and who had the right to profit from its popularity abroad, seems to gloss over the fact that everybody involved was in fact versioning a previously-released song. Like many artists rooted in Afro-Diasporic cultural practices, house artists, and the disco artists that preceded them, created work in the ways they did because they prioritized repetition with a difference over the myth of novelty or the idea that creativity happened in individualistic isolation.429 Furthermore, it was a commonly held tenet that classic tracks were part of a shared repertoire in motion; artists like Hurley, who creatively flouted IP standards and practices, only changed their tunes when they believed that their competitors, who they saw as derivative, stood to benefit materially from their copyrightable material. Saunders says that “Love Can’t Turn Around” was one of the last Chicago house releases that the whole community rallied around.430 Artists began to fight each other more and more over who deserved to reap the material rewards of burgeoning interest in house music while Rocky Jones and Larry Sherman were, by many accounts, fleecing them. In some cases, Jones and Sherman offered artists up-front cash payments, or gifts like cars, while they kept publishing and 155 future rights to royalties; in others they would simply sell bootleg product and fail to report it when they settled their accounts with artists.431 Some Chicago house producers never knew how much of their music was selling in Chicago and New York, let alone the UK.432 In addition to the problems Chicago house artists faced getting compensated by Trax and DJI, many claim that consumers were dissatisfied with Musical Products’ musical products. Sherman was thought to have been recycling old vinyl and chucking cardboard into the vats where it was heated.433 Charles Williams at Importes alleged that the Trax mogul simply neglected to replace broken parts on the pressing plant’s machines.434 In his defense, Sherman says he was running a bare bones operation. The amateurism of the whole endeavor allowed him to streamline the flow of music from the production studio to the pressing plant and back to the record stores, dance floors, and radio: “I was buying a record on Monday, cutting it Monday night, Tuesday it was in the tank, Tuesday night I had a test pressing. If the thing sounded okay, Tuesday afternoon I was in the print shop making tile labels. Monday it was a new release.”435 Years later, Chip E., who worked in a&r for DJI, reflected on why it was that Sherman and Jones were so effective at ripping off young artists: We were young and these guys had checkbooks. We didn’t look at them as villains, we looked at them as saviors. Here they were giving us a way to exploit our music, to some extent … [they were offering advances of] between $500-$1,500 … It was done on a licensing agreement … [J.B. Ross] was a solicitor. Basically Rocky or Larry would come up with a contract, Jay would write them. They’d say, Go over to Jay, he’ll help you sort out the contract.’ You didn’t understand that that was their solicitor, who’s working on their behalf. But most of the contracts were five or 10-year licenses, and they’ve all expired.436 As house music gained popularity abroad, eventually becoming a primary source for pop artists in the UK and continental Europe during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Sherman and 156 Jones continued to reap material rewards from the creative labor of the young producers they worked with. Very few artists, if any, were able to support themselves in a meaningful way from their recordings on Trax and DJI. Whether or not it was a reasonable expectation that a teenager should be able to cut one local hit record and eat off it for decades, the racially-charged perception that Jones and Sherman were not out for the best interests of young black and Latino artists helped to quell the surge in new productions on Trax and DJI while stimulating the development of new black-owned labels in Chicago.437 The greed and short-sightedness of Sherman and Jones aside, the types of subversion and sabotage that artists like J.M. Silk experienced at their hands can be read not only in a trans- historical context sensitive to Chicago’s “ranks of … ripped off” artists, but also in an industrial context where independent labels faced the prospect of being ripped off as well. It was, after all, the creaming of top local talent in the 1970s by major record labels that helped drive the nail into the coffin of the vibrant independent recording industry on Record Row. Indeed, the fear of artist abandonment and IP disenfranchisement limited the horizons of success in Chicago’s local dance music marketplace long before its re-birth in the early 1980s. 157 4.C - Chicago House Music Moves Out In 1986, just nine years after Frankie Knuckles began to spin at The Warehouse, the city that birthed the sounds, spaces, and social culture of house music was a city transformed by new structural arrangements, cultural initiatives, and generational cleavages. These came to have transformative effects on the music’s production, consumption, and circulation at the end of the decade. First, a generation of dancers, DJs, and producers aged out of the juice bar scene, some leaving town to try and make it as recording artists abroad or at major labels, some to attend college, and others to join the military. Second, the music’s original queer of color cohort thinned with the spread of HIV/AIDS; the plague would more than decimate Chicago’s black, Latino and queer communities by the end of the decade. Finally, Chicago’s City Council began the process of legally dismantling juice bar licensing, the license used most often for house music-related events in the city.438 The massive structural and cultural changes affecting house were experienced by Chicago audiences through prisms of several overlapping identifications, primary among them a sense of being a part of distinct, but overlapping, generational cohorts. The groups that were active in the teen scene during the early 1980s, including the first wave of promoters and DJs that ushered in the Hot Mix 5/Importes Etc./Trax and DJI era, began to disperse once they finished high school. Jesse Saunders and Vince Lawrence both moved to California after signing separate deals with Geffen Records. At that time, Geffen was a pop label promoting middle of the road artists like Donna Summer, Peter Gabriel, and Joe Walsh. According to Saunders, whose career with Geffen went nowhere, it didn’t take long for him to realize that it was a problem to be a black artist without a legible generic profile. Reflecting in his autobiography on the experience of 158 working with the label, he says he “had expected more from the recording industry that had broken jazz and r&b into the mainstream.”439 Lawrence, who developed his Bang Orchestra project with Geffen, says that although he and Saunders were adept at producing their own music in Chicago’s genre-defiant DIY scene, they weren’t savvy enough to steer their nascent projects through the established pathways of the majors: “I spent two years recording a bunch of other stuff that they didn’t understand that never came out.”440 During the same time that Saunders and Lawrence were making a go of it in LA, DJ Pierre’s “acid house” productions for Trax, based on the producer’s innovative manipulation of the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer, became sonic markers of what Marshall Jefferson calls the splintering in the Chicago house scene.441 According to Pierre, he built up the buzz around his “Acid Tracks” EP by servicing a tape of the recordings to Ron Hardy, who played them at The Music Box religiously. It wasn’t until the acid house sound had already become popular for dancers that he approached Jefferson about putting the EP out with Trax.442 Jefferson had taken over a&r at Trax after Lawrence’s departure and was helping Larry Sherman put out music by all types of new artists, including Pierre’s Phuture project. He claims that in his capacity as head of a&r for Trax he was democratizing access that had been hampered by Vince Lawrence’s hyper-competitive ethos: “Vince’s a&r philosophy was basically, don’t put out anything, except your own and Jesse’s stuff! My philosophy was, put out anything, that’s good, and underground. Keep the label cool and everybody’ll get out there.”443 While Jefferson may truly have believed that a rising tide would lift all boats, his enormous, almost immediate success with “Move Your Body (The House Anthem)” in the UK and Europe allowed him to make money touring abroad. According to Jesse Saunders, Marshall said “when he went over there [the UK] people started asking him to DJ, and he said, ‘I ain’t no DJ’. And they said, 159 ‘We’ll pay you $1500, $2000’, so he said, ‘Alright, I’m a DJ!’”444 By 1987 Jefferson didn’t have to struggle as a songwriter; he could depend on his work as a touring artist to pay the bills. Jefferson went on become a prolific DJ and dance music producer of hugely successful tracks like Kym Mazelle’s “Useless,” which he released on Capitol Records, and Ce Ce Rogers’ “Someday,” which he recorded for Atlantic.445 Even if he never made any money off “Move Your Body,” the record might be thought of as a loss leader that launched his career on a global stage.446 This type of success was not typical for a Chicago house producer in the mid-1980s. Indeed, most of the folks recording on Trax and DJI stayed put in Chicago where they held down day jobs, whether they dreamed of having international touring careers or not. Phuture’s 1987 “Acid Tracks” eventually became one of Trax Records’ most iconic releases; a burbling, psychedelic whirlwind of concussive bass, the EP sounded a particularly jarring, far-out vision for Chicago house, one incubated in the frenetic culture of Ron Hardy’s Music Box and the teen parties it influenced. Joe Smooth’s “Promised Land” on DJI, another landmark Chicago house record from 1987, signaled quite another sound and psychic space, a house world that had been sustained at Frankie Knuckles’ Power Plant.447 Known for having been the first resident house DJ at Smart Bar, Chip E. says that Smooth “was always coming into Importes and … telling us about some of the gear he had.”448 No doubt his sampling Ensonique Mirage keyboard was integral to Smooth’s slick, soulful production style, a sound on full display in “The Promised Land,” in which Anthony Thomas’ gospel vocals float over a bed of synthesized harmonies, punchy bass, and 808 handclaps. Thomas and Smooth gesture with their lyrics toward a transcendent freedom, a biblical 160 “promised land,” perhaps even a utopian dream: “one day we will all be free … From fighting, violence, people crying in the streets.”449 That the aggressive, acid house sound of Phuture and the uplifting, gospel-inflected “deep” house of Joe Smooth were both hitting hard in underground clubs in Chicago and abroad shows just how stable the dyadic nature of Chicago house had become by the music’s second decade. What Craig Loftis describes as the “yin and yang” of The Warehouse, embodied in Frankie Knuckles’ soulful narrative steadiness, and Robert Williams’ experimental radicalism, forked when house music’s inaugural venue closed.450 Williams began to work with Ron Hardy, whose penchant for ecstatic, amateur beat tracks is legend, and Knuckles doubled down on soulful musicality. The artists who followed further animated these two sonic impulses. While a second cohort of Chicago house producers like Marshall Jefferson, Joe Smooth, and Phuture were putting out their biggest hits with Trax and DJI between 1985 and 1987, The Hot Mix 5 DJs, as well as other competing radio mix show DJs, were coming to realize that national and international fame, as well as long-term material wellbeing, were strongly correlated to whether or not one had put out hit records at home and abroad. The pathways that had been established in Chicago between house DJs and producers, artists that often spent time developing reciprocal but distinct musical and social skill sets, converged in unprecedented new ways during these years. Towards the end of the decade, Chicago radio and club DJs were often said to be over- playing their own production work in their sets to the detriment of musical diversity and collective betterment in the city. According to “Screaming” Rachael Cain: “At first it was great because people were really helping one another … and then I guess it was because everybody 161 was starting to say, ‘Hey, look what’s happening, these records are breaking. I’ll just do my own thing, push my own music.’”451 Individualism was, as always, in tension with collectivism; a DJ/producer needed a receptive audience to create great music – they had to test their ideas – but they also needed support from their peers. Hot mixer Ralphi Rosario recorded his track “You Used To Hold Me” with singer Xaviera Gold at Seagrape Studio on the North Side for the Hot Mix 5 Records imprint. Released in 1987, the song eventually sold 40,000 copies, helping launch Rosario’s career as a Grammy- nominated remixer who would touch dozens of commercial club tracks during the 1990s.452 Rosario didn’t make it alone, however. He got his first commercial remix job working on a track by Vince Lawrence’s Bang Orchestra! for Geffen.453 “Sample That!” built off the work that Lawrence had been doing with Saunders on their Trax releases (like “Wanna Dance?”) but featured smashing bottles, thickened drum pads, synthesized horns, and an elastic bass line as well; a sonic palette heavily influenced by Al Jourgenson’s Ministry, and the folks recording for Jim Nash’s Wax Trax! Records on the North Side. According to Lawrence, he had “been sitting in on Ministry’s studio sessions, listening to Trevor Horn’s work with Grace Jones and The Art of Noise and Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rock It,’ and [he] made a record that was one-hundred percent Fairlight synthesizer.”454 The Fairlight was the king of samplers, a $35,000, six-octave, touch-sensitive wonder with the capacity to overdub eight sounds simultaneously.455 That Lawrence could lay his hands on, let alone purchase, such a tool speaks to the great material success he, Saunders, and Farley had with their early indie efforts. What is truly notable, however, is not that Lawrence had moved from stretching the affordances of a LinnDrum to pushing those of a Fairlight, but rather that the sonic territory he was opening up shared so much in common with the industrial music 162 being produced on Chicago’s North Side. Just as the commercial constellation of Importes Etc., Trax/D.J. International, and The Music Box (among other juice bars) grounded a genre-defiant teen dance scene on the South and West Sides, Wax Trax! Records, Sea Grape Studios, and Medusa’s on North Sheffield grounded the punk and industrial scene centered around the Belmont corridor. Partners Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher opened Wax Trax! on Lincoln Avenue in 1978, just in time to witness the ritualized death rites of disco at Comiskey Park. Their Wax Trax! record label, established in 1981, was committed to releasing “uncompromising and aggressive” material that might not have a shot on a major.456 Its biggest success story was Cuban-born Al Jourgenson’s Ministry, who was nominated in 1992 for a Grammy in the best metal performance category. Jourgenson took an active role in running Wax Trax!, even after his band moved on to record with Sire/Warner Brothers. He also continued to record on the label with side projects like Pailhead and The Revolting Cocks while Nash and Flesher put out new material by My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult (MLWTTKK) and other Chicago punk/metal/industrial bands.457 DJ Michael Serafini says he used to hang out with Wax Trax! artists at Berlin, a legendary gay bar on Belmont Ave, around the turn of the decade, when Ralphi Rosario was holding down a regular Tuesday residency at the bar. Known for its rotating immersive, themed installations and music video jockeys (or VJs), Berlin was part of a constellation of venues radiating out from the Chicago Transit Authority’s Belmont Red Line train stop where mostly North Side whites and Latinos rubbed shoulders with a growing cohort of black south and west siders in the second half of the 1980s. Many North Side punk venues helped to spread and expand the geographic reach of Chicago house, but it was promoter Dave “Medusa” Shelton’s 163 Medusa’s on Sheffield that became the neighborhood’s most iconic site of convergence for the queer, black, and Latino audiences that continued to push house music and culture to evolve. Medusa was one of the first white queers to make his way down to The Warehouse in the late 1970s and early 1980s, throwing his first party in the 206 South Jefferson space on March 17, 1979.458 He was producing events outside The Warehouse too, often with Frankie Knuckles on the decks at 161 West, an after-hours venue near the Loop, as well as “hit and run” parties in Chicago’s North Side gay discotheques. In October 1979, Medusa produced an event at Duggan’s Bistro that he called “Medusa Pigs Out at The Bistro.” The party, billed as “sleazy, lowdown, fuckpig,” apparently featured 1,000 White Castle hamburgers passed out on silver trays and a soiled mattress in the middle of the dance floor.459 Parties like “Pigs Out” connected Medusa to a queer punk genealogy with roots in both New York City and Chicago. First, like producers in New York’s abject off-Broadway theatre scene, where queer artists Jackie Curtis and H.M. Koutoukas presented spectacular “camps” featuring the nude glittery bodies of their trans and gender queer performers, Medusa relied on shock and subversion to stimulate patrons.460 His events also built off the non-corporate buffet flat/queer of color social culture of The Warehouse, with its roots in New York City’s interracial underground gay disco traditions and Chicago’s South Shore party culture. When Medusa began producing events at a former Independent Order of Vikings Lodge on the corner of School and North Sheffield in 1983, he imagined that the space would be a non- corporate house party like The Warehouse where all his friends, both gay and straight, could be themselves; a whiter version of 206 South Jefferson so to speak.461 By 1985 Medusa’s was open for business every Friday and Saturday night, admitting a 17+ crowd from 7:30 to 10:30, and 164 then re-opening at 11 for 21+ dancers. Head of security Rodney Russian told the Sun-Times that the club was an alternative to unsupervised house parties where young people could “mingle with other teens who don’t live on the same block.”462 According to dancer Kelsa Robinson, at Medusa’s, “you had your hip hop community, your kind of punk/new wave kids, and your grunge kids, and then your house kids, and everybody would be in that space. Just kind of this one love kind of feeling.”463 The venue became a meeting ground not only for kids that didn’t live on the same block, but also for those who lived outside, and on opposite ends of, the segregated city – a true crossover community. While many young dancers came to Medusa’s to experience the frenetic VJing, beautifully-crafted artist installations, and massive dance floor, others came to hear DJs like Mark Stephens take Chicago dance music in new directions. Stephens helped knit together a harder industrial soundscape with punk, pop, hip hop, and house. He was meticulous about his mixing, lamenting that he often had to play pop tracks that didn’t appeal to him because he understood his artistic labor to be about both giving and receiving pleasure: “It’s sort of like sex … There’s an element of tease—and actually giving [the audience] satisfaction.”464 According to DJ Val “Psychobitch” Scheinpflug, she and her collaborator Teri Bristol would take naps before going to Medusa’s to hear Stephens spin at the peak of the night. He eventually mentored both DJs, who later became residents at the club. Teri Bristol recalls his generous spirit as a mentor: He taught me in DJing about having integrity, and respecting people when they make requests and not being disrespectful. One night, he just goes, “I gotta pee. Here take over.” And I’m like, “what?” [deer in headlights?] Exactly. Major freak out. My poor hands were shaking so bad. Finally I was like, “alright, do or die.” So I got on there. He never even came back until almost the end of the night. He was dancing.465 165 Medusa’s not only became a site for intergenerational mentorship, it became a lauded live music venue too, hosting performances by Ministry, The Revolting Cocks, goth pop songstress Anne Clark, and even Chicago’s early 1990s alternative rock gods, The Smashing Pumpkins. While the rock shows certainly added to Medusa’s cachet, it was the integration of more house music in the resident DJ playlists around 1987, as well as the one-off holiday weekend parties produced by DJ Rush (Isaiah Major), Armando (Gallop) and Lil’ Louis (Marvin Burns) beginning in 1989, that truly tied the venue to what was happening on the city’s South and West Sides.466 Fig. 4.2 - Medusa’s flyer, ca. late 1980s/early 1990s. By the time they started working with Medusa, Rush, Armando, and Lil’ Louis were already major players in Chicago’s teen party scene, pulling in crowds of 3,000 - 5,000 at ballrooms like the West Side’s DaVinci Manor.467 According to DJ Mike Dunn, parties at The Bismarck in particular were a critical access point for many young black dancers in the city: “Most people go back and talk about Frankie [Knuckles] and Ron [Hardy] … but the Bismarck with Lil’ Louis was the place where a lot of people started to party.” Dunn goes on to remark upon the ways that the straight teens who were coming into the house scene during the mid- 1980s often situate their participation with respect to the Music Box, Power Plant, and The Warehouse to convey a connection to the root of the culture, when in actuality they were probably not there at all. Rather, they were, as Dunn says, “hangin’ out on cars all night!”468 166 Late 1980s ballroom audiences, who were mostly black and from the South and West Sides, and the interracial groups that took to the Rush, Armando, and Lil Louis sets at Medusa’s, took new sartorial approaches that mirrored the more integrated sonic and social scenes of their crossover communities. According to DJ Duane Powell, anti-racist skinheads introduced black teens from the South Side to punk stores on Belmont like The Alley and 99 Floors: “we’d get the motorcycle jackets and the Doc Marten boots, and the whole striped tights and all of that stuff. And we did incorporate that into our style. It would be that look with a twist … and of course, being from the hood of Chicago, we were weird.”469 DJ Pierre says that in addition to the punk mohawks and army surplus looks described by Powell, hip hop fashions came to challenge the dominance of the South Side’s preppy flavor as well: “the pants [had] to be baggy. And the haircuts were sharp ... Whoever had the longest, the highest.”470 As artist/promoters like Louis codified new, sonically aggressive approaches to late 1980s Chicago house with singles like “Video Clash,” “Blackout,” and “War Games,” their audiences self-fashioned themselves in ways that similarly challenged mass mediated cultural divisions along lines of race, class, and sexual orientation.471 Medusa’s was mostly accessible to a 17+ set, but many of the younger teens in Chicago seeking spaces of cultural connection with youth from other neighborhoods were hard-pressed to get in, both because they were too young, and because the venue was quite geographically distant from the South and West Sides. According to Martin Sorrondeguy of the Chicago punk band Los Crudos, there were still too few venues for brown and black punk kids in Pilsen and on the black South Side. Medusa’s only partly addressed this deficit. In 1989/1990 four young South Siders threw an underground party called Club Naked that helped to fill the void.472 Troy Abshire, the visionary behind the party, secured a warehouse 167 at Cermak and Halsted, but Club Naked was co-produced by “artistic director” Bryan Sperry, DJ Johnny Fiasco (John Lopez) and doorman/host Sang Jo Lee, all of whom were also in the venue’s house band, United Freaks of America. As Club Naked regular Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta recalls, the venue’s crossover community became a musically and racially diverse alternative to both the teen scene that was produced for profit by adults at spaces like Medusa’s, and the house parties that many teens went to around the city: In the dance area, we saw just about any type of person you can think of. White guys in t- shirts and Converse, Latinos in long ponytails, black girls with mohawks, Asian guys in gold chains. The walls were plastered in flyers and original artwork that glowed under an impressive light display. And the music! One minute it was “My Forbidden Lover,” by TAPPS, the next it was “Join In the Chant,” by Nitzer Ebb, and the next it was “Sex and Violence,” by The Exploited.473 DJ Jesse De La Peña, an occasional performer at Club Naked living on the South Side, confirms Acosta’s read of the venue’s soundscape, one he describes as integrating a heterogeneous mix of music that suited his overlapping interests in hip hop, punk, industrial, and house. He calls Club Naked, “our answer to the North Side … to Medusa’s and places like that.”474 According to Brian Sperry, the racial and ethnic mix of Club Naked’s crossover community was a critically important antidote to the racist majority culture at Curie Metro High School, where he and the other founders matriculated on the West Side: “when I was a freshman, there were tremendous race riots … it would be blacks against Latinos, the whites against the blacks … I was fourteen years old and I was seeing all this violence.”475 Sperry’s framing of daily violence at Curie as “race riots” situates the conflicts over bussing there within Chicago’s long history of anti-integration terrorism. As they had with other types of violence tied to structural racism, young people in Chicago negotiated their own cultural responses in their own integrated spaces. 168 Club Naked ultimately crumbled under the stress caused by Abshire and Sperry’s battles with drug addiction, and other general challenges that came with operating a teen juice bar. Squabbles over money certainly played a part as well. Recalling the end of the project, DJ Johnny Fiasco says that “egos got really big, and then at one point, maybe Troy said, ‘well, I could do this without you guys.’ Which, he could have. And he did.”476 Abshire went on to open The New Scene on Maxwell Street, channeling the momentum and energy of the Club Naked scene for a new generation of teen partygoers. Several years later he was dead of a drug overdose. Fig. 4.3 - Club Naked reunion, digital flyer. In September 2012, Club Naked regular Larissa Johnson partnered with DJ Jesse De La Peña to throw a Club Naked reunion party at Output, a venue on Chicago’s West Side. The event’s flyer features a listing of the DJs, including Club Naked regulars Fiasco, De La Peña, 169 Adam “Chunkabud” Maljan, and Craig Alexander, as well as a photograph of three party-goers wearing hats presumably designed by Abshire (who was known for crafting massive crowns). Johnson says that even though the venue was packed, the founder’s absence cast a shadow over the celebration: “I never really had an opportunity to thank him, because I had left the scene altogether to go to college ... he really did a lot for a lot of kids … it was a starting point for us to discover our potential as human beings even though we were freaks.”477 Like many middle class youth from the South and West Sides of Chicago, Johnson’s departure affected her relationship to the ongoing development of house music traditions. Without being present consistently, it was challenging to participate fully in what was happening in the city’s underground nightlife. DJ Lady D remembers coming back on weekends and holidays, reuniting with her friends from childhood and hitting up the newly accessible North Side clubs: “I was getting into live bands and live shows. But coming home was always about the same, comforting, and meeting up with old friends, nostalgic.”478 For Jackson, house music was a cultural touchstone imbued with a sense of familiarity and comfort, and yet she was hungry for new sounds and experiences. By integrating live music with her visits to Coconuts, A.K.A., and C.O.D., she maintained an ear for new house music while developing a musical curiosity she had already cultivated under the tutelage of house DJs. College-aged youth who grew up on house were ambivalent in terms of how they identified with and participated in the changing culture when they returned home. According to DJ Jevon Jackson, the house scene on the South Side had become overwhelmingly masculine by the end of the 1980s, with straight men participating in such high numbers that it became unsustainable economically, since even the most open-minded straight guy didn’t really want to dance at a “sausage fest.” The hyper-masculine energy of the late 80s South Side scene had a 170 sonic counterpart in the heavy, “tracky” materials produced on Dance Mania, a label founded by Jesse Saunders but brought to prominence by Ray Barney in the wake of Chicago house music’s commercial explosion abroad: “It was this communal not gay male energy – almost tribal. That’s where you see a bunch of guys, this movement of the crowd that would happen through this pseudo-slam dancing.” As Jackson notes, slam dancing was a kinesthetic counterpart to the increasingly masculine sonic and social South Side house music scene of the late 1980s, often described as a counterpart to the moshing and slam dancing that took place in the city’s whiter punk clubs.479 While house continued to shift sonic and social valences in the city of its birth, many college-aged dancers brought, nurtured, and disseminated the sounds of house they grew up on when they went to schools out of state. Zinzi Powell remembers Chicago DJs introducing audiences at her Florida university to the music: “bass music was the choice of music for southerners at the time. They would do their thing and then the house music would come on, and Detroit, Chicago, New York, Philly folks would take over.”480 Powell connects house to not only Chicago, but also a wider diaspora of post-disco electronic dance music scenes that had developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s across the post-Great Migration urban North, indicating that Chicago was but one of many hubs for the efflorescence of genre-defiant post- soul aesthetics during the era. College-bound Chicagoans weren’t the only ones to bring house out of its ancestral home on cassette tapes and 12” records. Armed service members also played a huge role in disseminating house around the US and abroad during the 1980s. DJ Steve “Miggidy” Maestro recalls using what he learned in Chicago’s heterogeneous house music scene to cater to the diverse tastes of military recruits in an off-base club near Fort Knox in Kentucky: 171 Because of house music I figured out how to play hip hop. I was playing Full Force back then; I was playing Tejano; I was playing go go; I was playing 2 Live Crew. I understood programming. We had all these different people from all these different cities come to this club on Thursday, Friday, Saturday night … I had to come in at 8 with ten crates easy and wear them down from 9pm until 5[am].481 Maestro’s off-base after-hours became a queerly cosmopolitan site for trans-local black and Latino cultural maintenance and exchange, a crossover community much like those dancing in the Chicago scene that shaped its DJ. Promoter David Risqué remembers DJing and throwing parties with a collaborator from New York when he was interned at the Schofield Barracks in Honolulu Hawaii: “They might play hip hop music, along with house music, anything that was danceable was getting played. One of the biggest songs was ‘Jack Your Body,’ [by Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley].” As Risqué notes, in its international circulation, perhaps more than its local instantiation, house was part of a black American soundscape that included hip hop.482 When young people who came of age in Chicago house culture moved out from their hometown, whether to further their education, serve their country, or tour their music abroad, they incorporated an ever greater variety of sounds and dance styles into their repertoires. This incorporation fueled the evolution of Chicago house culture at home and in its emergent sites of incubation in New York City and the UK.483 Frankie Knuckles’ friend and tour manager Maurice “Judge” Chaytor recalls feeling as though the house scene had changed both musically and socially by the time he came home from his military service in 1988: “sonically, music moved forward… and more people were becoming involved … this thing was a universal thing and something that was so synonymous with just a gay culture has crossed all these barriers now and I’m seeing … a heterosexual influence.” Chaytor notes that although house music culture continued to thrive as more straight 172 people came into the fold, the increasing prevalence of HIV and AIDS in the queer, black, and Latino communities that gave birth to the music cast a dark shadow over the scene: “there was research not being geared towards prevention, and addressing what it was, [policy makers were] just letting a whole society annihilate itself and in the process we lost a lot of wonderful talent.”484 Chaytor acknowledges not only the political dimensions of homophobia and racism that allowed for HIV/AIDS to ravage Chicago’s house community, but also the consequences of this devastation on communal creativity and cultural development in the scene. The lack of compassion and responsiveness to HIV/AIDS on the part of drug companies and the US government were multiplied by racism in Chicago’s white community, and homophobia in its black one. DJ Craig Canon recalls that There wasn’t such thing as having it and taking a pill to live like it is now. There were casualties and carnage. And it was a very helpless feeling, that the Centers for Disease Control, or other medical organizations, weren’t doing enough to try to save these people, or the person was in denial and waited until they were in dire straits before they asked for help because of the shame factor.485 Writer Jo A. Moore, reporting for an August 1985 article in Chicago’s Gay Times, corroborates Cannon’s assessment of the ways that political and personal silences compounded each other’s effects. By 1985, faith-based charitable organizations had only just begun to “wake up the slumbering black community” to the devastating realities of HIV/AIDS, which Moore says they had previously dismissed as being a white thing.486 In 1985 the number of reported HIV/AIDS cases among black Chicagoans was 30% of the total the number of cases diagnosed in the city.487 This number, which roughly mirrored the proportion of blacks affected nationally, had doubled since 1984, according to the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH). 1985 was a pivotal year in Chicago for HIV/AIDS 173 activists, who established the AIDS Foundation of Chicago (AFC) and Chicago House, an organization started to fight housing discrimination against people with AIDS.488 These nonprofit social service and advocacy organizations weren’t lauded in mainstream philanthropic circles, but they provided critical services to people suffering from the plague. In 1986 the rates of infection increased yet again.489 As DJ Lori Branch remembers, “just one by one people started dying off.”490 DJ Michael Winston recalls that people in the community would get sick, and be dead in a month. A producer and DJ intimately involved with The Power Plant scene, and a longtime friend of Frankie Knuckles, when Winston began to suffer from complications related to HIV, he thought he was catching a common flu.491 He hid his illness from his friends and family, eventually cycling through addiction and depression in Springfield, Illinois, isolated from the house community that he loved. Today he is an HIV educator and addiction counselor working at Haymarket Center on the Near West Side. Like many DJs, producers, and dancers in Chicago who have survived, Winston hasn’t let his serostatus define his life chances or constrain his optimism. Teri Bristol says that she and Psychobitch lost friends, many of them fellow DJs and club goers, to AIDS.492 According to DJ Dana Powell, it is quite possible that four out of five members from the original Warehouse at 206 South Jefferson contracted HIV/AIDS during the mid-1980s, many of them passing from complications related to the illness in the years that followed.493 The disease also ravaged the whiter gay, dancing communities at clubs like Medusa’s. According to Rod Rushing, 1985 was marked by the diagnosis of many of the venue’s most beloved DJs and dancers: “There was a lot of unspoken fear and sadness that was swirling around all at the same time. I tested positive in 1985. My best friend passed away a month after I 174 tested positive. And then Mark [Stephens], I think, tested positive right around that same time.”494 While HIV/AIDS wreaked havoc on Chicago house communities, white residents of the Lakeview neighborhood surrounding Medusa’s began to flex their political muscles in response to what they perceived to be the declining safety of their neighborhood. In December of 1986, Aldermen Bernard Hansen of the 44th ward, which includes Lakeview, and Eugene Schulter of the 47th ward, which includes segments of the North Center and Lincoln Square community areas adjacent, co-sponsored a citywide ordinance to keep juice bars to the same hours of operation as taverns, which had to close at midnight. This legal change would effectively shut juice bars down before their late night crowds typically arrived, destroying the favored economic and social model that had enabled house music to flourish in the city over the previous ten years. At a packed community hearing on the proposed ordinance, Medusa’s supporters, including neighborhood business owners like Jim Nash of Wax Trax! Records, and Pat Murphy, the director of arts at Hull House, as well as teens and their parents, came out in full force to show support for Dave Shelton and the institution he had built. These supporters called Medusa’s a “healthy alternative” for teens, and countered narratives propagated by neighborhood residents and the City Council that portrayed the club’s young audience members as vandals and drug users. Supporters implored the Council to see the value of the club in cultural and economic terms, a job providing, good paying, neighborhood arts institution, rather than the den of iniquity Hansen and Schulter were making it out to be. 495 Despite passionate appeals from neighborhood stakeholders, some of whom could not understand the hypocrisy of targeting nonalcoholic juice bars for social problems associated with 175 alcohol consumption – some even wondered publicly as to whether members of the City Council were “stuffing their pockets” with liquor license kickbacks – Chicago’s City Council compromised by voting a month later to curtail juice bar hours to 2 a.m.496 This legal change ended the juice bar era in Chicago as it had existed since Robert Williams began throwing parties with US Studios in the early 1970s. 176 4.D - Conclusion At an October 1991 City Council hearing on more new juice bar restrictions, Bernard Hansen claimed victory over Medusa’s for a second time, doubling down on his insistence that outside agitators were to blame for the used condoms, liquor bottles, and graffiti cropping up after dark in Lakeview. For Hansen, these cosmetic problems, which might be thought of as inherent byproducts of a nightlife economy, were somehow always attributable to the patrons at Medusa’s. He even claimed on record that the owner of the property at 3257 North Sheffield had assured him that the Medusa’s lease would not be renewed when it was set to expire in May 1992.497 Indeed, Medusa’s held its last weekend of music in June of that following year. The blowout celebration featured artists from Wax Trax!, a retro party, and, of course, house music. The venue closed its run by again championing the eclectic musical mix that inaugurated and endeared it to Chicago artists and audiences alike. According to experimental house producer Jamal Moss, who crafted a series of bootleg Medusa Edits of his favorites from the club’s playlist, the venue “helped change and evolve the sound of Chicago for a lot of cats who were in house who got exposed to industrial.” Its denouement marked the end of a generational life cycle in the city’s house music culture.498 Chicago’s house music community splintered at the end of the 1980s around questions of ethics and entitlement related to production, distribution, and consumption, but also those related to cultural ownership and belonging. Too often the utopian message of acceptance and freedom imbued in the musical culture by Godfather Frankie Knuckles was subsumed under a banner of quick cash and clever marketing ploys. Even as gentrification and reverse white flight in Chicago displaced class-diverse black, queer, and Latino residents in neighborhoods like Lakeview and 177 the South Loop that had once been amenable to all-night, all-ages, social dancing, house music culture remained an important part of the city’s ever-shifting cultural fabric. In many ways the cultural descendants of house music’s first two decades continue to celebrate the very same traditions as their foremothers and fathers. In others they are revising these traditions to adapt yet again and again to the technological and social conditions of their own times. In the following two chapters I explore the richness of contemporary Chicago house scenes, those connected to its North and West Side punk/industrial antecedents, its South Side disco punk cultures, and its queer of color progenitors. In these chapters I continue to ask what it is that the city’s house audiences remember when they remember house. 178 Chapter Five - “Is It All Over My Face?” Sustaining a Love Ethic at The Old School Reunion Picnic 5.A - Introduction “Is it all over my face?” “Hell Yeah!” “Is it all over my face?” “Hell Yeah!” Jesse Saunders called out to the audience at 2012’s Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic with his cover of Loose Joint’s classic “Is It All Over My Face?” The packed field before him, thousands deep, in turn, responded, a chorus echoing across the leafy landscape of Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side. The hot sun had all but set behind a creeping cloud cover and dancers looked skyward as they shifted their weight in ecstatic reciprocity with the iconic house producer and DJ. Indeed, bliss was all over their faces. Couples held hands and two-stepped, babies shook their fists in the arms of their parents and grandparents, and the VIPs behind the stage tripped over each other to get to the front of the DJ booth so they could mug in front of the dancers in the effervescent crowd. By this point in the day my skin was taut with dried sweat, my ears and arms sunburned; my knees were sore from running, and dancing too. Taking a moment away from my stage-running duties, I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and soaked up Saunders’ peak-time, sunset performance, his reward for taking on what must at times feel like the thankless work producing the “largest house music picnic in the world.”499 Until you have danced with 40,000+ house heads in the humidity of Chicago July, with the breeze off Lake Michigan just barely licking the back of your neck, and the smell of barbecue, blunts, and incense curling in your nostrils, you can’t begin to comprehend the magnitude of the party that Saunders and The Chosen Few throw each summer. At The Chosen 179 Few Old School Reunion Picnic, the occluded, adult culture of the house music club sheds its grown and sexy, nocturnal mystique.500 DJs, dancers, and guest vocalists celebrate the longevity of Chicago house music, enshrining the roots of their shared culture while continuing to celebrate the sounds, steps, styles, and tastes that keep it moving forward. Most attendees are African American Chicagoans in their 40s, the children that came of age in the 1980s when house was the sound of independent black radio and parochial school dances in the city. Beginning at the crack of dawn on Saturday of July 4th weekend, this dominant cohort and other house music lovers circle in on Jackson Park, arms full of sleepy toddlers, camp chairs, umbrellas, coolers, grills, and other picnic accouterments. If you are lucky, your friends shelled out for at least a 10x10 foot area where you can set up a canopy and a buffet. If you’re one of the thousands of dancers who purchased an economical ticket for entry but don’t have an encampment to host you, plan to keep yourself hydrated and well-provisioned for the marathon day of dancing ahead. The Chosen Few are a collective of Chicago-based DJs who produced parties during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Record executive Wayne Williams founded the group with his stepbrother, Saunders, in 1977, bringing in Tony Hatchett in 1978, Alan King in 1980, and Tony’s brother Andre in 1981. DJs Terry Hunter joined in 2006 and Mike Dunn in 2012.501 These men are some of the biggest house music icons from Chicago’s black South Side, but the Picnic, as it exists now as a public, ticketed festival, was the brainchild of the collective’s sole female, and non-DJing member, Kim Parham. Parham wanted to build off the participatory energy developing at Tony and Andre Hatchett’s family reunion by inviting various crews from “the early house music days” to come 180 together on July 4th weekend, 1990. Just as the Hatchett family had been doing for years, attendees came to barbecue and dance in the Garden of The Phoenix behind The Museum of Science and Industry.502 More than twenty-five years later The Chosen Few collective has moved its party from the picturesque Japanese folly built for the 1893 World’s Fair to 63rd and Hayes Drive. It welcomes tens of thousands of house music devotees from Chicago and the world. In this chapter I use field notes from my time as a stage runner volunteering to marshal artists and staff for The Chosen Few, and as a picnic attendee dancing with the crowds at the 2012, 2013, and 2014 Old School Reunion Picnics, to draw out the ways that the Picnic has become a site where participants collectively sustain what bell hooks has called a politically- charged love ethic.503 The revolutionary vision of collective liberation embedded in this ethic is consolidated in the preparation and shared consumption of sustaining food and drink, DJ performances of “classic” vocal house music, audience performances of communal consent and recognition of a shared musical repertoire in motion, and the contagious Afro-Diasporic movement vocabularies that braid these various practices together.504 I conclude the chapter by gesturing to ways that The Old School Reunion Picnic is not only a complex, public/private ritual of collective belonging for Chicago’s queer, black, and Latino house music communities, but also a rebuttal to the muted cultural violence of white supremacist, homophobic, patriarchal EDM festival production that has relegated the city’s majority-black South Side to house music’s bygone past. 181 5.B - Reunion Picnics, Chosen Family, and Camp Culture The Hyde Park neighborhood, and its adjacent public parks, have been stages for self- fashioning in black Chicago since southern migrants began arriving to the city during the first half of the 20th century. The Chicago Defender held communal Bud Billiken picnics in Washington Park to both cultivate young readers (hailed by the fictitious Billiken character featured in paper) and rally black Chicagoans to support each other in the lean times of the Depression. Families with means, as well as churches, fraternal groups, and corporate and institutional sponsors like L. Fish Furniture Company, the YMCA, the YWCA, and the NAACP contributed goods and services to the early Billiken picnics, helping to ensure that needy children were able to eat even if their parents were unemployed. Over time, the Billiken picnic became synonymous with the South Side’s “community dynamism as well as a means of enhancing African American social and community life.”505 In 1937, Billiken’s promoters secured permits to use all of Washington Park, effectively transforming the space into the nation’s “first and largest all black public park.”506 The Billiken picnic, as well as the festive parade that kicked it off, inculcated rituals of social beneficence and performances of cultural continuity that bound together an African American community still under duress, despite having left the Jim Crow South. The event also helped enshrine black culture in a site that would later become home to The DuSable Museum of African American History, as well as a black cruising district at the center of various queer of color cabarets (see Chapter One). Although the Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic was never held in Washington Park proper, it was, for a time, produced on the Midway Plaisance that connects the event’s current Jackson Park home to the black South Side’s original site of public cultural maintenance and memory. 182 The narrow band of green known as The Midway Plaisance is most famous for leading the city’s visiting tourists from Washington Park along what was once the southern border of the University of Chicago, to Jackson Park, the site of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair’s famed “White City.” The Fair’s producers, a cadre of white political elites, staged a living tableau of non-white others on the Midway to represent then-popular theories of unilineal social evolution. While it is almost impossible more than a century later to find traces of The World’s Fair in Jackson Park, the event’s architecture is preserved nearby in the facade of The Museum of Science and Industry. Known during the Fair as The Palace of Fine Arts, The Museum’s enshrinement of white civilization was accentuated by its proximity to the primitive, native villages on the adjacent Midway.507 In the early 1970s, The Chicago Daily Defender became the lead sponsor of an annual black history month series at Science and Industry called “Black Esthetics.” The 10-day long event, which in 1984 was rebranded as the “Black Creativity” exhibition, showcased “special exhibits, a juried art show, free performances, and workshops on ‘Black Entrepreneurship.’”508 Black Esthetics/Black Creativity, one of the few programs at Science and Industry that highlighted the accomplishments of black folks, was curated to instill race pride as well as uplift ideology. It extended The Defender’s vision for black upward mobility within a space that, in its original incarnation, represented the nonwhite other as the antithesis of the modern, civilized subject, and revised the trope of the black genius by emphasizing the greatest collective achievements of the race even as it exhorted young people to pursue high levels of individual achievement in math, science, and the arts.509 The Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic has built off work done by The Defender and Science and Industry in that it is a collectively devised annual production that enshrines 183 black entrepreneurs working in the arts. While earlier celebrations of cultural and communal vitality in and around Hyde Park were conceived of for large, diverse audiences, Chosen Few began behind The Museum of Science and Industry as the Hatchett family reunion. After the Great Black Migrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries dispersed tight- knit African American communities, northern family reunion picnics helped ameliorate ongoing trauma and fracture. During the 1960s and 1970s, family reunions remained, like more public Bud Billiken celebrations, “rituals capable of strengthening and stabilizing the African American family, and tools for building strong and viable foundations for future generations.”510 Family reunions were also crucial spaces for passing on social values, strengthening identity and self- esteem among participants, instilling feelings of belonging, love and caring, increasing inter- familiar communication, educating and passing on traditions.511 Chosen Few DJ Andre Hatchett recalls the beginnings of the Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic when it was just his father’s extended family and a couple friends in attendance: It started with one tent. That was ours. We just kept going there. Next year was two tents. We had the same exact tent as last year's, which was my uncle’s, and then there was another tent for the kids. Then next thing we know, we look around, we was like, “what the hell?” I started calling it tent city.512 Hatchett uses a “tent city” metaphor to highlight both the spontaneity and integrity of the mushrooming sea of temporary structures set up near his family’s reunion picnic. Unlike Bud Billiken, which was always conceived of as a public celebration for Chicagoans, The Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic developed from one Chicago family’s July 4th celebration into a destination for house music audiences from around the world. This shift, which was also encouraged by the promotional efforts of Kim Parham and The Chosen Few DJs after 1990, 184 indexes the instability of clear delineations between blood and non-blood relations in African American social culture broadly, as well as the expansive filial connections developed specifically in Chicago house music culture since its efflorescence in the early 1980s. The expansion of The Hatchett family barbecue came to pass in part because local house audiences found out that Hatchett and his friends, DJs they used to hear at school dances and juice bars in the 1980s, were playing for free during the holiday weekend, and in part because The Chosen Few encouraged it. As Hatchett puts it, “there's a lot of people that don't live here no more, they all come back for the Picnic. We got heads from all over the world coming to this ... they make they vacation for this Picnic.”513 A generation of black dancers that came of age in the 1970s and 1980s developed a deep appreciation for black cultural continuity via family reunions. During the 1990s and early 21st century, the generation of elders stewarding these celebrations passed on in ever-increasing numbers, upending the continuity of many large-scale reunion celebrations.514 The Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic stabilizes an expansive “chosen family” in the face of these generational shifts, as well as the ongoing material and psychic burdens of acute neoliberal institutional reforms, such as the premature cessation of programs like Mayor Harold Washington’s CIN interventions for gang-affiliated youth, and general disinvestment in the parks and schools of Chicago’s black and brown neighborhoods.515 The Picnic also asserts a right of return to the Hyde Park neighborhood for black residents of Chicago, and Chicago’s black Diaspora, following over a half-century of “Negro clearance” policies and gentrification promulgated by the University of Chicago.516 185 Chicago’s post-war black population, many of them lured to the city from the Jim Crow South by the promise of stable industrial employment and freedom from the lynch mob, found themselves in newly precarious terrain, in part because they were the last hired and first fired from industrial work, and in part because industrial managers often used them to bust work stoppages started by segregated white unions. Additionally, black migrants in Chicago found good housing options scarce, with many middle class neighborhoods constrained by racist housing covenants and redlining. These new, urban pressures intensified the daily challenges faced by up-south migrants who, in many cases, forfeited stable social networks and obvious forms of racial discrimination in hopes of achieving a better life in the North. The life story of Chicago-born playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry helps to illustrate the connections between post-war structural pressures that forced black Chicagoans and their children into social and cultural configurations shaped by unfamiliar, opaque forms of institutional racism. Her story also demonstrates how they forged non-blood filial connections to achieve some semblance of social stability.517 The daughter of a prominent middle class banker/real estate broker and schoolteacher, Hansberry came of age as an artist and activist in a crucible of white terrorism. Her father, Carl, moved the family into a virulently racist white neighborhood where they endured constant threats of physical and psychic violence. Carl Hansberry spent much adult life fighting in court for the right to live with his family in relative safety and comfort.518 Hansberry chose to leave Chicago behind. She moved to New York in her mid-20s and began writing for a variety of publications, including the radical journal Freedom, and published several critically acclaimed plays. Her most renowned, A Raisin in The Sun, tells the story of a striving black family divided in the face of Chicago’s racist housing market. 186 In her journalistic writing, Hansberry cultivated an internationalist perspective on black liberation. Before she passed from cancer at the age of 34, she had surrounded herself with a tight-knit community of artists and intellectuals similarly politically disposed, including Langston Hughes and James Baldwin.519 Nina Simone, in particular, became a confidant and sister in struggle. According to a mutual friend, poet Nikki Giovanni, the two shared a loving, sustaining bond founded on their shared commitment to black identity and revolutionary politics. Following Hansberry’s death, Simone fell into depression, writing in her diary, ‘She’s gone from me and I’m sure it’ll take … many years to accept this thing.’520 Not necessarily lovers, too close to be just friends, Hansberry and Simone’s filial intimacy was born from shared experiences of American racial violence and cultural struggle. On Hansberry’s end it was also shaped by Chicago’s particular flavor of segregation and white terrorism. The term “chosen family,” developed by scholars in the field of kinship studies, is useful for understanding intersectional queer, black, and Latino affiliations at The Chosen Few Picnic, and in house music culture more generally, because it emphasizes the creative, and counter- hegemonic world-making processes by which filial connections are generated and re-generated through life and love-affirming rituals. Used first by social scientists to describe the efficacy and value of support networks created by gays and lesbians, “chosen family” is almost interchangeable with the concept of “fictive kin,” a term that has been used more frequently, and somewhat more problematically, to characterize the non-biological filial support structures prevalent in African American communities.521 In adopting “chosen” as their preferred honorific, the Chosen Few DJs reject the stigmatizing logic imbued in idea that their bonds are fictional and yoke their event to a history of African American family reunions that have always included blood and non-blood relations.522 187 Much like the event producers at Bud Billiken day, as well as those at the southern ice cream socials and church banquets that inspired it, pioneering Chicago house promoters use food to create a welcoming environment at their events and to help audiences feel like invited guests and active co-producers.523 Chosen Few Picnic food connects the event to a long history of functions at which house music and community have offered marginal citizens, especially queer blacks and Latinos, material as well as spiritual sustenance.524 House promoters learned to feed their guests from their forefathers and mothers in New York and Chicago loft parties and pre- WWII buffet flats, sites that shaped the efflorescence of the Windy City’s black cultural life in the second half of the 20th century.525 The Old School Reunion Picnic extends this down-home ethos of the buffet flat/house party and underground loft/juice bar into the domain of the hybrid reunion picnic/music festival. In 2012 and 2014 I ate delicious catered food provided for artists backstage: corn bread, bean salads, grilled marinated shrimp, several meats in sauces, cookies, and Chicago’s famous Garrett candied popcorn. In 2013 I learned that most attendees are just as well prepared as the caterers backstage. My picnic hosts, Tuffy and Michelle, pulled out all the stops to provide a spread of culinary delights: coffee-rubbed lamb ribs (only because beef or pork ribs weren’t available), pork sausage, turkey tips, taco and pasta salads, and a secret potato salad recipe, which Tuffy says he learned from his grandmother. Every year, those who haven’t brought food can either purchase from vendors, or eat free food from sponsors like Pepsi, who are well stocked with complimentary samples. According to culinary historian Michael Twitty, barbecue has deep connections to Caribbean maroons, who jerked their meats, as well as indigenous/African American anti- colonial culinary practices.526 Chosen Few audiences practice barbecuing expansively by 188 incorporating a variety of “soul foods,” into their meals, many of which index trans-regional and cross-class connections forged after the Great Black Migrations of the early 20th century. Indeed, a panoply of multi-ethnic options brought from home and available for sale at events like the Picnic, have been important since the 1960s to northern blacks, and especially northern middle class blacks, because they connect them with southern, working class African American culture.527 Dr. Renee McCoy attests to this will to connect, describing how the pig roasted in its entirety at her family’s reunion barbecue connected her family to a history of slavery and migration: “Generations of men and women who proudly trace their roots through the backwoods of Georgia, South Carolina, and Michigan boldly defend the sanctity of this animal to this day,” despite the warnings of physicians and public health officials.528 The culinary options at the 2013 Old School Reunion Picnic far exceed the sundries of the roast pig, in part because African American culture in Chicago is more creolized than ever. New immigrant communities, like Mexican Americans in the Pilsen district that abuts Chicago’s historically African American West Side, shape consumption patterns across the city. Tuffy, for one, was excited to share grilled corn with mayonnaise, queso blanco, chili powder, and lime: his version of the Mexican American street food, elotes. The enthusiastic incorporation of elotes in our predominantly African American camp shows that picnic participants integrate new culinary traditions much in the same way that Chicago house DJs integrate new sounds: by juxtaposing them with already-familiar ones. 189 5.C - Sounding The Classics The preparation and shared consumption of food are critical aspects of the heritage- making that takes place at The Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic, but for most attendees eating is only a secondary concern. Chosen Few DJs, as well as guest DJs and performers, put an immense amount of effort and thought into artfully cultivating trans-generational musical connections at The Picnic while they perform an expansive musical narrative of self and communal love.529 They do this by emphasizing what Chicago house audiences deem to be “classic” songs, many of which feature life and love-affirming lyrical exhortations. Classics help the Chosen Few community tell a complex musical story about how its members love each other and themselves. The cultivation of communal love and trans-generational connection is particularly vital in class-diverse queer, black, and Latino communities where blood families are, as bell hooks puts it, “unloving because continual lack of emotional and material resources makes living environments unnecessarily stressful.”530 Artists at The Chosen Few connect multiple generations of dancers to each other, sonically fortifying a massive chosen family with a mix of classic tracks, songs that sample classic tracks, and tracks that may soon become classics (future classics). If the classics are so important, then what, exactly, is a classic track? Well, it’s complicated. New York house dancer Brian Polite says that songs that connect four or more generations of house dancers and DJs, like “Moody” by New York girl-group ESG; “Love Is The Message” by the house band of Philadelphia International Records; and “Video Clash,” by Lil’ Louis, can be thought of as classics.531 At the 2012, 2013, and 2014 Old School Reunion Picnics, DJs juxtaposed these and other well-worn anthems with newer songs, which might be thought of 190 as future classics, like Sean Escoffery’s “Days Like This,” Dennis Ferrer’s “Hey Hey,” Terry Hunter’s “Wonderful,” and posthumously released remixes of the Michael Jackson single, “Love Never Felt So Good.”532 Building on Diana Taylor and Rod Ferguson’s generative critiques of canonicity, I suggest that classic house is a queer of color repertoire in motion, unfixed and in flux.533 While a classic house repertoire and an anthemic b-boy canon discussed by Joseph Schloss in his ethnography Foundation share some similar qualities, there are many ways in which b-boy canonicity is a useful counterpoint to a classic house, or “old school,” repertory.534 Like songs in the b-boy canon, house classics trigger “preconscious though learned” embodied responses that reflect the primary emotional energies and specific experiences of a song’s early audiences, as well as secondary and tertiary responses to unique instrumental figures and rhythms.535 Unlike b- boy anthems, house dancers rarely associate specific songs with specific dances or steps, and as such, house repertoires are not necessarily constitutive of embodied knowledge in the same ways that songs from the b-boy canon are.536 Even the most devout Chicago house historians and musically aligned aficionados find it difficult to agree on the tracks that would comprise the classic house repertoire since most dancers developed particular affinities with songs over decades and with the input and consent of geographically dispersed dancing communities. Rather than belabor what songs are classics, it is useful to think about house music’s classic repertoire as being elastic, capacious, and unstable, or “in motion,” and to focus on the effects, and affects, created by sounding songs widely accepted as classics in the mise en scéne of the Chosen Few Picnic. 191 In 2013, guest DJ Ron Trent, a Chicago native who has developed his career both in New York and the Windy City, opened his set with Chaka Khan’s 1981 “I Know You, I Live You.”537 It was an apt song to play for a homecoming picnic in Chicago since Khan is well regarded in the city’s black community as a native daughter from the South Side’s housing projects. When Trent played “I Know You,” he teased the audience with its iconic horn stabs, equalizing isolated arpeggios against a wave of distortion while panning the horns from left to right across the stage’s massive sound system. After this instrumental tease, he brought Khan’s verse around two, and then three times, hammering the lyrics: “Like I feel the sun in the morning; Like I see the moon at night; I feel as if you’ve been a part of me; I know you, I love you.” Indeed, the man knows his city, even though he has not lived there consistently for many years. When Trent plays these lyrics, he implies that the dancers in the audience singing along also know each other, and themselves, through “I Know You, I Live You” – it is a soundtrack to their self-knowing/self- loving as well as their communal knowing/loving. Trent cycled the song’s various instrumental motifs, adding bass, guitar and horn grooves to his mix while equalizing high, middle, and low frequencies at consecutive points in a looped instrumental section of the verse. While hip hop DJs tend to move briskly to a song’s break, especially when catering to the needs and desires of b-boys and b-girls, house DJs often find unexpected musical phrases to explore. By emphasizing, and manipulating, various melodic motifs, Trent stimulates his audience’s nostalgic nerve centers, celebrating the sample-based sonic palette at his disposal and triggering old and new associations with “I Know You, I Live You” and Chaka Khan.538 Other artists similarly use classic tracks, and their polyvalent associative webs, to activate trans-local black audiotopias.539 Wayne Williams, for example, opened his 2013 picnic set with 192 Kraftwerk’s 1977 “Trans-Europa Express,” referencing house music’s history of trans-Atlantic influences while activating and indexing the layered mnemonic associations his audience was likely to have with the song.540 “Trans-Europa” is not only a house classic, played during the late 1970s at The Warehouse and other underground parties, but is also widely considered an anthem for fans of Detroit techno. Furthermore, “Trans-Europa” has achieved iconic status in New York hip hop scenes via its sampling by Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force on 1982’s “Planet Rock.”541 By starting his set with this well-known track, Williams emphasized the connections between artists and audiences in (at least) three critically important sites of black musical ferment, sounding the multiple ways that German synth-pop helps stitch together the musical cultures of the black American Midwest and Northeast. House DJs often drop classic tracks in their sets when the crowd’s energy is primed at the precipice of ecstasy, relying on the familiarity of shared repertoire to push everyone over the edge. At the 2012 picnic, Jesse Saunders cued up his house cover of The O’Jays’ “Now That We Found Love,” a track written by Philadelphia International’s Leon Huff and Kenny Gamble and originally put out in 1973.542 I got round after round of goose bumps when he released the jog wheel of the CDJ; my body confirming my connection to the melody by releasing waves of pleasurable neurochemicals.543 Saunders’ cover called up feelings I had singing along on the radio to a 1991 cover version by party rap crew Heavy D and the Boys, and more recent positive associations with the 1978 cover by reggae pop group Third World that I had been listening to. His performance also aligned me with the “oceanic feeling tone” of The Picnic. This feeling tone, which works similarly in house spaces as it does in the disco spaces analyzed by Tavia Nyong’o, dissolves individual subjectivities and opens up an embodied state through which house heads drop egoism and experience transcendent connections with each other.544 These 193 connections are intensified by affect-shaping sensuous environmental elements, such as the pull of hot skin drying sweat, the cool breeze off of Lake Michigan, and the smell of incense and flavored tobacco.545 Classic tracks like “Now That We Found Love,” covered and commercially successful several times over and across a span of multiple decades, remain salient to house audiences because they never stop resonating with the social allusion underpinning house music community-making.546 They not only open space for anti-atomistic connections during live performance, but draw out and thicken the texture of shared, trans-generational musical memories for audiences that may be balkanized by structural factors such as gentrification and displacement as well as the micro-targeting of niche radio marketing.547 In playing his cover version of the O’Jays’ classic, Saunders simultaneously activates the trans-generational continuity indexed by its various versions, as well as the queer of color club context that shaped its initial popularity for house audiences. While most DJs at The Chosen Few Picnic rely on and celebrate classics almost exclusively during their hour-long sets, some DJs use what limited time they have on stage to acknowledge the classics before moving on to program from less familiar, often newer, house repertoires. These interventions break up what can become redundant sets and shape house music’s repertoire in motion. In 2014, for example, Steve “Miggidy” Maestro, a longtime player in Chicago radio and resident DJ at Da Prop House, used the then-unreleased DJ Dolla Bill track “How It Started” to hail the classic repertoire without actually playing any of it.548 In composing “How It Started,” Dolla Bill used a sample of Daryl Pandy’s vocal track from Farley “Jackmaster” Funk’s “Love Can’t Turn Around” (“now this is how it started …”) to sanctify a megamix of iconic vocal hooks and rhythmic cadences that moves briskly through first 194 decade of Chicago house music’s development. By using “How It Started” to show his respect for, and understanding of, a classic repertoire in shorthand, Maestro was freed up to play one of the 2014 picnic’s more esoteric sets, one in which he incorporated a plethora of new and surprising house sounds while paying homage to the many artists that paved the way. Maestro’s set was replete with unfamiliar tracks programmed to excite his audience, but 2014 guest DJ Pharris Thomas proved that familiar classics surprise and delight as well. The Chosen Few had Thomas set up on a pair of gold CDJs on a short card table stage left of the shared DJ console where most DJs perform from throughout the day. This visual setting apart mirrored the rupture of his unexpectedly fresh-sounding performance. Thomas opened his set with Willie Hutch’s “Brothers Gonna Work It Out,” teasing the Picnic audience by leaning back into the early 1970s while riding the track’s syncopated toms, insistent strings, and wah-wah guitar, as Hutch pleaded for black unity and intra-community problem solving.549 He went on to segue seamlessly between classics like Alicia Myers’ “I Want to Thank You,” Chaka Khan’s “I Know You, I Live You,” and Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes’ “Bad Luck.”550 When it was all over, he collapsed with tears in his eyes, clearly moved by the energetic exchange he shared with Picnic dancers. The Chosen Few audience received Thomas’ set as a wholly formed artistic product, a seamless durational expression of his love for house music and community. Part of its affective impact was connected to this experience of an improvisatory sum greater than its parts. Yet part of its impact was connected to Thomas’ programming. In blending his classic selections seamlessly, he called attention to them as discrete moments in and of themselves while re- doubling the impact of hearing them anew in the mix. 195 At The Chosen Few Picnic the complex intertwining of classic Chicago house repertoires, and to a lesser extent newly produced music that keeps this repertoire moving, troubles the useful distinction made by sociologist Sara Cohen between innovative music scenes, and the memory cultures that form in their wakes.551 House music culture insists on its capacity to be Janus-faced: to incorporate the old with the new in the service of re-articulating an expansive love ethic again and again. This past, present, and future character of the music often gets mapped onto a North/white/new v South/black/old binary in Chicago, but this is an overly simplistic generalization. While there is certainly a greater appreciation for a classic repertoire in the communities that grew up with it, both North and South Side scenes are suffused by old and new sounds. It’s part of what connects them to the spirit of house. 196 5.D - Dancing The Loving Community The expansive love ethic cultivated at The Chosen Few Picnic is served not only by the intensification and repetition of songs that lyrically exhort the audience to love and be loved, but also by social dancing that allows for a plurality of dancers to express this communal love kinesthetically. In the politically-charged context of a massive public dance party in gentrifying Hyde Park/Jackson Park, beaming faces, outstretched hands, two-stepping feet, and ebullient voices physicalize the love ethic articulated in house music. House dance, like house music, is a repertoire in motion; it continues to evolve as the bodies that populate its dance floors change with age and experience over time. Some South Side house music historians, like Reggie Stanton, say black Chicago’s house music scene saw an unprecedented influx of middle-age people since 2005, many of them falsely claiming longtime affiliation as their metabolisms slowed and they could no longer adhere to the rigid standards of physical beauty hailed by a youth-obsessed, corporatized, hip hop culture.552 Whether or not house became a refuge for aging hip hoppers, house spaces have always allowed for, and prioritized the experiences of, people with diverse body types and ways of being in motion. The Old School Reunion is no exception. In general dancers at The Picnic moderate the intensity of their exertion to keep themselves from getting too overheated or fatigued. Spending a hot afternoon mostly on one’s feet, dancing or not, is a physical feat of endurance, especially if one doesn’t have easy access to a shaded tent. Additionally, the park’s mix of grass and dirt, while blessedly forgiving on the knees, allows for little in the way of virtuosic spins, dips, or partner dances like stepping that require ample space and a smooth floor. That said, from the moment the day’s first DJ hits the 197 decks in the early morning hours, there are audience members working it out, spilling sweat as they move alone and with other dancers. Some dancers save their sweat for a particular DJ, spending the early part of the day drinking liquid courage and the later part in the sunshine expelling it. Others are in and around the main stage sweating, not as dancers, but as caretakers for babies, children, and elders. As Jafari Allen says, black sweat shed in the service of communal joy might be thought of as “an ironic (attempt at or) reminder of selfhood for those whose historical (and paradigmatic) experience is precisely and uniquely marked by expropriated labor in chattel slavery.”553 The exchange of sweat between the dancers and the DJ at Chosen Few operates in a non-transactional economy of pleasure that inverts an Anglo-American Protestant work ethic.554 It is also a potent expression of unflinching self and communal love that relies on intimate consensual negotiations – the DJ calls with a track, and audience members respond with their bodies. The more rapturous their response, the more affirmed a DJ feels. The stage show has no small part to play in consecrating the loving vibe of The Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic.555 While much of the party is characterized by alternately surprising and familiar old school DJ sets, performances by headline DJs are always interspersed with those of non-DJing vocalists. When these performers come to the microphone, bass, and percussion volume levels come down in the mix. The tempo and overall sonic intensity of the music diminishes as well. “Old school” guest vocalists like 2012’s Linda Clifford and Leroy Burgess (singer for the group Black Ivory), 2013’s Crystal Waters, and 2014’s Jocelyn Brown, perform live to their own instrumental recordings. Their performances remind Picnic attendees that house is a tradition 198 deeply indebted to the talent and creativity of instrumentalists and vocalists who produced its DJs’ source materials. The Picnic’s producers program the annual “public addresses,” or PAs, by these artists to create energetic valleys in the otherwise high-intensity DJ program. This gives the audience time to breathe, relax, hit the bathroom or grab a snack between the more ecstatic headline DJ performances. During Leroy Burgess’ 2012 PA, I had a chance to break from my duties backstage and find my friends in the Picnic audience. Most people in our vicinity seemed to be uninterested in Burgess’ performance, turning their backs and talking over it, but there was still a sense of playful give and take between the stage performers and the performing audience.556 I was chatting with Dr. Meida McNeal when I noticed that our other companions were playfully synced up with a number of other dancers in an electric slide. It was unclear to me whether the slide in this particular moment constituted a thoughtful gesture, a lighthearted joke, or something not quite either – the affect of the dancers seemed ambivalent. As the mood of the dance shifted from moment to moment, with more people joining in on each turn, the first group of dancers shifted the valence of their participation, moving between what LeeEllen Friedland describes as three primary modes of African- American kinetic engagement: being rhythmic, playing with movement, and straight up dancing.557 They moved in and out of semi-structured choreography and responded to each other’s movements, switching blithely between performances of disinterest and deep physical commitment. This moment illustrates how dance works on the ground at the Old School Reunion Picnic to thicken the texture of self/communal love, as well as community memory and intergenerational connectivity, despite the messy, and problematic, tensions created within 199 Chicago’s house music community by cross-racial consumption and individualistic entrepreneurship. It also shows the “contagious” qualities of house music and dance that enable this thickening.558 In 1976, a white, New York dance instructor named Ric Silver trademarked the choreography for the electric slide, a 4-wall line dance built around a grapevine step that had developed primarily in Caribbean and African American dancing communities.559 Typically set to reggae singer Marcia Griffith’s “Electric Boogie,” a poppy calypso/disco record released the early 1980s, the dance indexes both the crossover and appropriation of disco in the 1970s, as well as the persistent creativity of black club dancers.560 At 2012’s Chosen Few Picnic, dancers improvised embodied connections to both the electric slide and “Electric Boogie’s” original club context, troubling the idea of the slide as a simplistic and corny throwback mediated by an aggressive intellectual property troll. The middle ground between the cool of the slide’s black roots, and the uncool of its appropriation, connects, in part, to Leroy Burgess’ ambivalently received old school performance. Even though his group Black Ivory’s 1979 song “Mainline” is one of the most enduring house classics, much of his other material seems less familiar to dancers at The Picnic.561 This less familiar repertoire soundtracked the sharing of knowing glances, full-bodied laughs, mock-serious scowls, and lazy rhythmic elisions among audience members as they performed a choreography of ambivalence. Breaking in and out of the communal pulse, dancers at The Picnic moved between spectatorial and participatory modes of engagement, expressively minimizing the effort required to shift their weight and sync back up.562 200 When Burgess did finally perform “Mainline,” there was nothing ambivalent about the audience’s response. Rocking a black collared shirt with a pair of silver slacks and a silver necktie, he pranced back and forth along the length of the stage like a peacock, letting his backing vocal track hit the harmonies on the chorus while he juggled wordless Afro-melismatic interjections and shouts of “check it out.” As the instrumental break hit, Burgess shuffled his shoulders in time with his track’s iconic horn stabs, popping into a grapevine that effortlessly matched the electric slide taking place in the audience just minutes before. Much like the classic house music repertoire, which is continually recycled through remixes and sampling, elements of black social dance, like the grapevine step that anchors the electric slide, are embedded in the warp and weft of new dances again and again. Older dancers at The Picnic emphasize the Afro-Diasporic roots of black social dances while they celebrate and share in making and learning new steps. Katrina Hazard-Gordon connects this phenomenon to black social dance’s high degree of “intergenerational permeation,” claiming that, unlike white social dance cultures, which often recycle black popular forms but do not pass them across generational lines, black social dance is often learned by youth directly from grandparents, parents, aunties, and uncles at social functions, like The Picnic.563 The sharing of older movements by elders, and newer variations by youth, can bind four and perhaps even five generations of audience members together while helping re-circulate The Picnic’s ethic of self and communal love. It should come as no surprise that Picnic performers, both DJs and guest vocalists, straddle the line between performance and spectatorship. Scholars of black popular culture have been emphasizing the critical non-distinction between the creativity and virtuosity of those on, and those in front of, the stage, for over fifty years.564 The Picnic scene complicates 201 performer/audience elision by introducing what might be thought of as a dancing avatar to the mix, a performer who sweats on stage for the DJ and acts as an intermediary between him and the thousands of dancers at his feet. Most often this avatar is Gucci Production’s David Risqué, also known as the Global Groove Guru. A captivating sight, with his Afrocentric tribal headdresses and masks, cargo shorts and bare chest, Risqué holds court for the entire day on the Chosen Few Stage, twirling, jacking, and communing with dancers on the ground for nearly all twelve hours of programming. He says his adornment, his dancing, and his percussion are designed to call attention to his roots in Chicago club culture, specifically gay/mixed nights like Boom Boom Room at Red Dog where he worked both as a security guard and a go-go dancer, and New York clubs he frequented that were influenced by The Paradise Garage.565 Risqué’s performances, beyond archiving important moments in house culture’s trans- local history, are the connective tissue linking the stage show and the performing audience. Alternately introspective and coercive, the Global Groove Guru at times seems to be meditating, lost in his own spiritual communion as he gazes towards the sun or doubles over to gather energy. Most of the time he straddles the edge of the stage with his hands raised, begging the dancers and DJs to help him intensify the loving vibes consecrated there. He amplifies his call for ecstatic communion by using non-musical props like balloons and an alien mask, as well as auxiliary percussion instruments like sleigh bells, cowbells, tambourines, claves, and a large rain stick. By adding layers of visual and sonic density to his percussive gestures, while helping the DJ and dancers mark their collaboration in time, Risqué’s innovative house rituals articulate the local specificity of the Chosen Few Picnic and magnify the loving exchanges among its performers and audiences. 202 5.E - House Masculinities and Queer Elisions While the Chosen Few DJs don’t consistently address the gender disparities in their field, they continually upset the idea that black masculinity is one-dimensional by presenting diverse, non-hegemonic masculinities, like that performed by Risqué, on The Picnic stage.566 The collective models masculinities characterized by tenderness, expressive joy, nonaggression, and an overarching quality that multi-talented Chicago-based musician Malik Yusef calls “softness.” In an interview with Steve “Silk” Hurley, Yusef describes the ways that house music has been crucial to shaping the ways that he embodies a soft masculinity. He sees his soft comportment as having everything to do with a respect for learning and sharing knowledge across generational and gendered lines, as well as other axes of social difference.567 bell hooks might call this soft masculinity that challenges patriarchal thinking a “liberatory” one.568 The liberatory potential of black self/communal love that The Old School Reunion Picnic celebrates requires that one not just challenge patriarchal thinking, but abandon it altogether. However, this utopian horizon is in tension with life under late capitalism and the familiar representational regimes it coheres to. Even as Picnic promoters elevate diverse, non-hegemonic black masculinities on stage, there are regularly no female DJs in the Picnic mix. Additionally, the event producers at times rely on familiar, hyper-sexualized representations of women to command the audience’s attention, complicating any easy reading of The Picnic’s counter- hegemonic potential. In 2012 a chorus line of four caramel-skinned dancers joined David Risqué on the center of the stage in front of the DJ booth for much of the program. Costumed in bikinis and feathered head dresses, much like those worn by Risqué, these dancers’ bodies and adornment physicalized 203 the Brazilian and South African influences present in Chicago house music, a gesture that helped to thicken the density of Afro-Diasporic visibility at the Picnic. While the event’s producers indexed important African and Latin American presences by sharing the stage with these “Risquettes,” they did so by consolidating hegemonic, hyper-sexual representations of black and brown women. Fig 5.1 - David Risqué and Carnival Dancers, Chosen Few Picnic 2012; photograph by Micah Salkind. A year or so after the Risquettes performance, I heard from a friend that she thought one of the dancers had been a transwoman. This piece of hearsay, which in certain contexts might be read as transphobic, wasn’t divulged in hushed tones or by way of censuring the dancers or The Picnic. Rather it was presented by way of further complicating assumptions about gender presentation at the event. While often a place where heterosexual masculinities and femininities, 204 like those of Risqué and The Risquettes, are on display, The Picnic stage also features many other performers who more clearly disrupt heteronormative assumptions about the composition of Chicago’s house music community. In 2013 The Chosen Few nodded explicitly to their queer of color roots by inviting Crystal Waters and her virtuosic backup dancers to perform a live PA. Waters performed her three biggest hits, “Makin’ Happy,” “Gypsy Woman,” and “100% Pure Love,” hailing The Picnic’s many queer and gender-nonconforming audience members and incorporating queer sexuality into the event’s expansive narrative of self/communal love.569 At nearly 50 years old, Waters’ fierce styling challenged ageist notions of black femme propriety. Perhaps more significantly, the choreography she moved through with her male backup dancers hailed her queer audience from the stage. My main point of context for Waters’ live stage show, one that left me feeling as though she was being featured at The Picnic in part because she is a queer cultural icon, was her performance in Barry Shils’ 1995 documentary, Wigstock: The Movie.570 In this appearance Waters was at the height of her commercial success; “100% Pure Love” was not only a number one club hit, but the single had also reached number 11 on the Billboard pop chart.571 In that earlier performance Waters donned a tweed suit and a tight Jheri curl in front of an enormous crowd at New York’s Chelsea Piers. At the 2013 Picnic Waters traded this butch ‘90s look for that of a grown and sexy femme fatale: a slick, pin-up bob, black leather hot shorts, a black netted top and a flowing sleeveless house coat. Her masculine-of-center back up dancers joined her on the stage like they were her private security; all slim suited with tie clips and dark Ray Bans. It wasn’t long before the dancers were popping and locking with their tops off, 205 grinding on Waters, even vigorously mock spanking her. They alternately danced with and on her, and each other, enjoying their strength, flexibility and agility, as they body rolled, waacked and tutted like pros.572 Regardless of whether Waters’ dancers identify as same-gender-loving, they, and The Picnic stage, were queered by their movements. According to dancer and historian Naomi Bragin, waacking in particular, as a style developed by queer men of color dancing on Soul Train in LA during the height of the show’s popularity, has been adopted in street dance classes and competitions around the world by women looking to channel the power and resilience embodied by queer men of color without necessarily mimicking their sartorial expressions. Bragin calls this a type of corporeal drag, “a process of queer play in which performers try on and refashion movement as sensory-kinesthetic material for experiencing and presenting the body anew.”573 This queer play, joyful as it was, diffused from center stage into the audience after a brisk fifteen minutes. The brevity of Waters’ performance indexes debates about whether and how to represent the fundamentally queer history of house music culture at The Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic, and in other officially sanctioned spaces making recourse to house as black/Chicago heritage. Often queer bodies or movements authenticate Picnic performances without queer people being identified and elevated to a level befitting their status as innovators. This is in part because same-gender loving people in the larger South Side house music community are incorporated into the seemingly straightened cultural fabric of the scene, much in the way that queer black and Latino people in Chicago have long been central, rather than exceptional to, Bronzeville and South Shore cultural life. Even so, the haphazard inclusion of queer house progenitors at times seems like an afterthought, a type of casual disrespect that undermines the 206 potential power of the event’s expansive love ethic to heal and unite a heterogeneous group of black and brown dancers.574 The delicate line between eliding queer contributions, and celebrating cross-orientation affiliations often becomes framed at The Picnic via a disregard for queerness or straightness as significant factors in the development of Chicago house music culture – a sort of analog ethos to colorblindness, one might call it sexual orientation indifference. As emcee Dr. Luv, a popular DJ from local black radio station WGCI, told the 2012 crowd, “we don’t do black, we don’t do white, we don’t do straight, we don’t do gay, we do house music.”575 Luv’s call must also be understood in a black social context where diversity within diversity, while perhaps limited on the picnic stage, is a critically important dimension embodied in the event’s performing audience and further developed through its sartorial expressions. Since 2012, I have seen attendees wearing Nehru suits and tank tops; women sporting asymmetrical bobs, naturals, and perms; dancers with light skin, dancers with dark skin; seemingly queer people and seemingly straight people breaking bread; babies, grannies, and disabled folks, all of them partying together. The heterogeneous amalgam of participatory performances that represent a diverse segment of black and Latino Chicago in terms of class, skin tone, age, and sexuality overwhelms The Picnic’s representational field. In addition to this visual/embodied representational diversity, Picnic DJs sound the ethnic diversity of their scene in their sets, rejoicing in house music’s Afro-Latin rhythmic grounding and sonically incorporating Latinos into The Picnic’s communal embrace. Tambores, timbales, clave, and other sounds rooted in the Cuban son anchor newly incorporated house tracks performed at The Picnic, like Dennis Ferrer’s “Red Room,” as well as countless classic tracks, 207 such as River Ocean featuring India’s “Love and Happiness.”576 In individual tracks, and across the long day of DJ performances, Afro-Latin rhythmic figures symbolically join black and Latino house artists and audiences at The Picnic, even if at times house DJs and producers tokenize Latinidad as a type of Afro-Diasporic exoticism.577 From a curatorial perspective, The Chosen Few seem to book artists that will appeal to segments of the Chicago house audience that they might not otherwise reach. In 2012 and 2013, the presence of Latino DJs Louie Vega and Jesse De La Peña, visible on stage and in the crowd, augmented the Afro-Latin sonic ground. Neither Vega nor De La Peña spun records that indexed Latino sonority to any greater extent then the African American DJs at the picnic, but their names on the program created an important connection to the Latino history embedded in Chicago house music and acknowledged the centrality of Latinos as innovators in Chicago’s contemporary house scene. De La Peña, who began his career as an eclectic hip hop and house DJ at Pilsen loft parties, was the only performer I encountered in the picnic grounds hustling a mix CD. By circulating on foot through the densely packed crowd while distributing his mix, he was not only embodying the entrepreneurial hustle that has kept Chicago’s most visible old school DJs relevant to younger audiences, he was also embodying Latinidad within Chicago house music’s predominantly African American narrative. Representational fidelity at The Chosen Few Picnic is not merely a function of reproducing a mix of who was there in the early days, how they danced, and how the party sounded. It is also maintained through invocations of the various sites of memory important to the Chicago house music community. In 2014, Wayne Williams used his track “There Was a Place” to roll-call various venues: “The Penthouse, The Loft, Sauer’s, The Playground, Mendel, C.O.D.’s, A.K.A.’s, The Candy Store, Resurrection, The Music Box, The Underground, 208 Bismarck, Power Plant,” suddenly Williams dropped the treble, creating sonic space for the audience to roar with approval, before pulling the highs back up and letting his roll call conclude: “The Racquetball Club, The Warehouse … let me tell you, there was a place.” Williams used “There Was a Place” to assert the spatial continuity of house, bringing the sites of memory from the South Side and beyond to the forefront of picnic consciousness.578 While performances by DJs are often the primary vectors transmitting house music heritage and culture at The Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic, producers also use didactic speeches, bureaucratic pronouncements, sponsor acknowledgments, and awards to position the event as a venerable cultural institution that continues to evolve. In 2013, Jesse Saunders engaged with the audience in a nostalgic back-and-forth from the festival stage: Look at all the tents man. I remember way back … Who was behind the museum with us when we used to go back there? No wonder we had to move. All y’all out there! Y’all remember when we were over in the Midway [Plaisance]? We outgrew that one too. Where’d we go next? Who remembers? We were on that side [points to the West] Remember that? How long we been over here? Three? Nope. Y’all house heads, you supposed to know, right? Alright. So what year? This is the twenty-what? Twenty third? Y’all gonna be with us for the next twenty three?579 The Chosen Few DJs instill a sense of stability for their chosen family by persistently retelling the history of The Picnic. This stabilizing effort thickens the texture of crossover community memory in Chicago, helping diverse audiences around the city connect to each other via a shared love of house music, and the love ethic that it reiterates. Continuity and change are both central to Chicago house music’s sociality, music, and dance. This past-in-present aesthetic shapes The Chosen Few collective’s inclusion each year of lesser-known Chicago DJs, like Eric Jacques Mosby and Kevin McSwain, in addition to well- 209 known out-of-town headliners. It also helps explain the collective’s recent moves to institute not only a yearly Lifetime Achievement Award, but also a House DJ Hall of Fame. In 2013, Saunders exhorted the crowd to honor its ancestors, name checking Chicago inductees Frankie Knuckles, Ron Hardy, and Lil’ Louis to enormous applause. He said that the Chosen Few, in determining who would be inducted in the Hall of Fame, “went back to people who were doing this in 1976,” adding radio station WDAI, radio DJ Herb Kent, and disco DJ Michael Ezebukwu to his roll call, and formally extending the legacy of house history into the disco era. In 2012 the State of Illinois issued a formal proclamation honoring The Chosen Few’s accomplishments, indicating that even politicians had begun to take note of the important political work the collective had done to a cultivate a communal love ethic on The South Side. Signed by Illinois State Senator Annazette Collins, the document refers specifically to Chosen Few’s unification of people through the “peaceful medium of house music.” It acknowledges that The Chosen Few have “influenced thousands, entertained the masses, and brought together several generations with their craft.”580 This resounding endorsement speaks volumes, especially considering that the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs remains uncommitted to yoking its fortunes to the global dance music culture that Chicago gave birth to.581 210 5.F - Conclusion During his acceptance of his Chosen Few 2013 lifetime achievement award, D.J. International Records’ controversial founder, Rocky Jones, addressed the challenge of maintaining a commitment to Chicago house music’s living legacy in the face of narratives that relegate it to a distant past: “Chicago is the only place that could make house music. A lot of cities want to lay claim to it and a lot of countries want to lay claim it. Whether you want to call it EDM, whether you want to call it whatever, it always was house music.”582 In re-claiming house/EDM for Chicago, Jones may have been alluding to the fact that the producers of the for-profit Wavefront Festival decided to program a “heritage stage” that conflicted with that year’s Picnic, disrupting the good work that The Chosen Few DJs had been doing as ambassadors and conveners in Chicago’s local house music community. Despite the fact that the collective’s in-group mentality may create resentment among those who have not been “chosen,” each year past performers and local house heroes are invited to join the collective backstage, and onstage, to share in the event’s success. In 2012, for example, The Chosen Few DJs gave Frankie Knuckles VIP status and shuttled him backstage in a golf cart from the VIP entrance even though he was not performing. This type of connection and continuity was made less likely in 2013 since many of the city’s best known artists, including Knuckles, were booked miles away for Wavefront, which was held at Montrose Beach on the city’s North Side. To add insult to injury, Wavefront’s producers relegated Chicago house to a heritage stage in the larger curatorial arc of their “EDM” festival, separating it from the many forms of dance music it has influenced and continues to influence. “Local” or home grown artists like Frankie Knuckles, Gene Ferris, Jamie Principle, Diz, Ralphie Rosario, Michael Serafini, and Derrick Carter were set apart from “global” EDM artists, containing, whitening, straightening, 211 and globalizing the sound of house while covering over the dynamic connections its progenitors have forged across spatial, racial, sexual and generational lines. Again, Chicago house became a cultural antecedent or memory culture, rather than a contemporary music scene that is still a font of cultural influence, resilience, and creativity.583 I address multiple, braided cultural elements at play in The Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic’s production to place the event in an expansive local context where it is both singularly important as memory-rich homecoming for a subset of Chicago’s house music community, and merely one option on Chicago’s expansive cultural menu. The Picnic is a series of nested performances – individual tracks within DJ sets, sets within the arc of a festival, each festival in a series of yearly festivals – that activates Chicago cultural history archived in dance, music, and foodways. It is also an integral cultural product in conversation with Chicago’s other local cultural offerings rooted in house music traditions, like the Fiesta Del Sol in the Pilsen neighborhood and The Silver Room Block Party, an event produced for over ten years in Wicker Park. In the following chapter, I show how club nights produced by queer collectives highlight and archive different but related facets of Chicago house music history in the service of cultivating similar, but distinct, self/communal love ethics. 212 Chapter Six - “Are You Ready to Get Your Life?” Queer Neostalgia and Wild (Re)visions of House Music Culture 6.A - Introduction It is March 11, 2014 at 11:00 p.m. when I pull up to the corner of Damon and Dickson. My friends Justin and Paul, who I drove tonight from Hyde Park, both need cash for the bar (which does not accept credit cards) so I breeze past Claire, smoking outside, and present my ID to the Danny’s doorman. Latham “The Lady Speed Stick” Zearfoss is in control of the sparsely populated dance floor, and playing downtempo, so I post at the bar and request the lightest beer on the list. When Justin and Paul return from the ATM, we form a little triad on the dance floor, at times dancing with other new and old friends. The vibe is particularly female/femme-presenting here tonight; I think to myself that maybe weather keeps the casual cis men who aren’t scene devotees from braving the night, but who is to say. It’s nice for me as a dancer because I can stretch out. I find one of the few blue lights and bask, extend my shoulders, articulate my wrists. Paul screams when Rita Bacon drops Janet Jackson’s “Empty” and wonders why more people aren’t moving to the song, which has a very sparse rhythmic backing track. Sometimes a song that can feel like it calls one or some dancers will elicit very little response from others. This happens for me when Rita plays “Thinking About Your Body” by Bobby McFerrin and when Latham plays “I Know What I Know” by Paul Simon. The downside of these moments is that they break the communal flow; the upside is that they give dancers a chance to learn more about each other. We are different from each other; as much as we share a love for dancing, we 213 don’t have identical tastes, we aren’t from the same places and we don’t have to pretend like we are. *** It is the 21st of April, 2014, early Monday morning. It must be about 2:00 a.m. by now. I’ve soaked through my tank top already, but I refuse to stop moving; the energy at Smart Bar is about to peak and I want to be right in the middle of the dance floor when it does. I’m not by myself in this groove; I’m building off the movement and sounds of some my favorite Chicago artists and performers: Queen! resident DJs Garrett David and Michael Serafini, and the superlative Mister Wallace and Shaun J. Wright, of the group Banjee Report and the Twirl party, and label, respectively. DJs Will Automagic and Nita Aviance of New York’s Carry Nation are here tonight too, connecting joyfully with the Queen! audience in Chicago’s longest continually operational house music venue. I’m overjoyed that I get to see Wright perform his new track with Australian production duo Stereogamous. “Sweat” updates the acid house sound inaugurated in Chicago, and might become a classic for we dancers who live to get baptized under the strobe lights. The boys of the Carry Nation serve up their instrumental remix for Wright to chant over, hamming the EQ and launching what sounds like live embellishment underneath its elastic bass line. Wright belts, moans, and whispers over the top: “my body’s drenched in, sweat … swirling around, heat rising from the ground … don’t stop it now, let it rise up till we drown.”584 When the lights come on, I stagger from the mouth of the club as the pre-dawn sounds of chirping birds ring in my ears. I let the wind dry my plastered hair as I drive down Lake Shore from the North Side to Hyde Park and catch the first rays of the new day’s sun, thinking to 214 myself how lucky I am to be in Chicago for what people are calling the city’s house music renaissance, and in particular its queer house music renaissance. *** Smart Bar officially launched its Sunday night Queen! party on April 3, 2013. On the club’s website, it says that the night celebrates Smart Bar’s “LGBT family” and welcomes “everyone else who wants to shake a tail feather.”585 Queen!’s mission statement attempts to recuperate the energetic and political ethos of Chicago’s early house music culture, which developed in primarily, though not exclusively, queer, black, and Latino dancing communities alienated from racist white gay discotheques, while stopping short of promoting itself as explicitly gay or queer. The event’s promoters sought to preserve the open-ended possibilities of house music and culture for new audiences, as one of Queen!’s creators and resident DJs, Michael Serafini, puts it, sharing house with “a new generation of kids to carry on … musically and party-wise.”586 Chances Dances, by way of compliment and contrast with Queen!, was always conceived of as an explicitly queer suite of parties. A five-person organizing body promoted and DJ’d at them between 2013 and 2014, though this group had shifted in its composition since the inception of Chances Dances in 2005. While Queen!’s DJs, hosts, and promoters took on specialized roles in the production of their event, Chances DJs called themselves “organizers” in part to signal that they thought of their work, which encompassed event production, promotion, and DJing, in terms of its activist orientation. They had no particular commitment to programming Chicago house music per se, and yet they fostered a wild culture that was redolent of the early Chicago house music scene that took shape in the maroon spaces of South and West Loop lofts during the late 1970s and early 1980s. 215 Chances Dances and Queen! were sites where intergenerational, multiracial, and pansexual collectives of DJs, promoters, and performers took house music culture’s history seriously, explicitly acknowledging its value to their projects in structured oral history interviews with me and during public panels. While both parties preserved and passed on Chicago house history, making strategic recourse to it as a font of inspiration, they did so in different ways. Queen! was a “neostalgic” party celebrating memories of an idealized golden age in Chicago house music culture, speculative visions of the queer house worlds that might have been, and those that might yet become.587 Chances Dances harnessed a wild aesthetic. It was a party focused on the cultivation of a queer utopia where trans-phobia, misogyny, and white supremacy no longer exist.588 By creating spaces for managing affiliations with established house music traditions while remaining flexible to ways that new times call for new social rituals and cultural interventions, the crossover communities at Queen! and Chances Dances “got their lives” together in spite of Chicago house music culture’s generational cleavages.589 Although nightlife is experienced on multiple semiotic and sensational registers simultaneously, I have deliberately disaggregated my ethnographic accounts and analysis of the two parties to elucidate the complementary ways that space, sound, visuals, and dance worked to make meaning for their audiences. However, I don’t intend to simply compare and contrast Queen! and Chances Dances!; a reductive comparative frame might fail to take account of the many productive synergies that can be drawn out by examining Chicago house music culture’s esoteric genealogies.590 Rather, in crossfading between the two parties, I test and blur their edges, teasing out the ways that each one’s dominant stylistic impulse, neostalgia at Queen! and wildness at Chances Dances, elevated intersectional experiences of racial and sexual marginality in Chicago house culture on spatial, sonic, visual, and kinesthetic registers.591 216 6.B - The Hermitage of House It is May 5th, 2014 at about 1:00 a.m. I just showed up at Smart Bar for a night of dancing at Queen! with my friend Steve, a Chicago music critic, label owner, and DJ. We descend the stairs leading from the venue’s entrance on the ground floor to the basement club, pass through the more relaxed front bar, and enter the main room. I stumble around trying to get my bearings; the lights are particularly disorienting tonight. With the addition of a thick foggy cloud cover I’m barely able to keep my footing among the scattered dancers, but I do my best.592 After all, I want to show respect. This isn’t just some shoddy hole in the wall, it is Chicago’s longest running venue presenting house music, its veritable hermitage of house. Smart Bar is divided by a mirrored bank of raised seating in the smaller of its two adjoined spaces. This elevated banquette is flanked by doorways on both sides that lead directly to the main dance floor, which is recessed about half a foot and faces the DJ booth on the far wall. Another secluded seating area with low tables can be found beyond the venue’s supporting columns, to the left when facing the DJ booth. There is also a small artist area to the right, separated from the bar and the dance floor by a waist-high guardrail. Smart Bar is painted almost entirely black with red up-lighting, multi-colored lasers, bright white strobes, a central spinning disco ball, high-powered smoke machines, and a multi-colored mural on the wall behind the DJ booth. Its main bar takes up nearly the entirety of the wall past the small semi-private section. 217 Fig. 6.1 - Cabaret Metro and Smart Bar exteriors; photo by Robert W. Krueger courtesy of Chicago Public Library, Sulzer Regional Library. According to my interviewees, Smart Bar has gone through many transitions over the past thirty years. No longer merely the little sister of the rock club Metro, it boasts a powerful Funktion One sound system and an attentive, professional staff that help keep it running smoothly. Much like Chicago’s first underground house club, The Warehouse, the venue was born as a quintessentially second city institution looking to New York for inspiration. Owner Joe 218 Shanahan had returned from a one-year sojourn to The Big Apple inspired to throw dance parties and art events in his residential loft. Perhaps realizing that it wasn’t a great idea to mix too much business with pleasure, he set up shop in a nearby Swedish Community Center instead, transforming its first floor into a rock club (Metro) and its basement into a dance club.593 Queen! DJ Garrett “David” Shrigley came to Chicago with an already-formed idea about what gay parties, and post-industrial spaces, meant to house music culture. His understanding is in part attached to his sense that space and place matter as much as a club’s sound and audience: I just have an … idea of the history and ... the importance of building ... the importance of environments that played a role in the history of things … like the importance of a place like The Paradise Garage, or The Warehouse, or The Music Box. That was the first thing that stuck out to me, was that it wasn’t just these people or this music, but there was these structures that are associated with it, and that really interested me, kind of like in the legacy of it, because it gave you ... these tangible spaces to like dream of what it could have been like. Shrigley brings a new energy suffused with ideas about how Chicago house history can inform the music’s present and future, but he also brings a deeply held set of expectations based on a mostly self-taught Chicago house history – a “neostalgic” viewpoint that connects the oft- recounted sexual and social freedoms of ancestral venues to the musical liberties taken by their DJs: “I just feel free musically [at Queen!/Smart Bar] to play whatever. In the same way that people feel free to be themselves, or whatever. I think that’s just the mentality of the party.”594 Queen! doesn’t merely attempt to recreate those legendary Chicago parties at The Warehouse or The Music Box, it sees itself as connecting to and re-establishing the things that these parties did well for “a new generation of kids to call their own.”595 According to Queen! founder and resident DJ, Michael Serafini, when Smart Bar opened in 1982 the intersection of Clark and Racine was at the top of a strip of divey punk bars and rock music clubs where sex workers, skin heads, and Cubs fans all crossed paths.596 Once a relatively 219 affordable working class neighborhood, by the end of the 1990s, home prices in the area had doubled and many older residents were selling property under pressure from condo developers.597 In spite of the gentrification that upended the racial and socio-economic composition of Lakeview’s “Wrigleyville” neighborhood, Smart Bar remained committed to the cultivation of diverse styles of Chicago house music and audiences, hosting residencies by the city’s biggest local exports and hometown heroes alike. Real estate boosters and journalists suggested that speculative investment in Lakeview was a positive inevitability, but artist Doug Ischar’s photographs at the Belmont Rocks documented the neighborhood’s crossover community before its transformation. 2009’s Marginal Waters exhibition, as well as the published monograph through which I experienced it, archive the “messy details” of 1980s Lakeview. They become a visual index of the social world that brought Smart Bar into being, specifically the social mix of the The Belmont Rocks, a lakefront area that Chicago house DJ/producer/vocalist Shaun J. Wright refers to as the city’s only “black gay beach.”598 Taken by Ischar during the summer of 1985, the 26 color plates published in The Goldin Gallery’s 2009 catalog for Marginal Waters make visual the tenuous balance between Lakeview’s working class people of color, in particular its queer people of color, and the neighborhood’s increasingly white, gay milieu, a group often assumed to be homogeneously upwardly mobile. 220 Fig 6.2 - Plate 18 by Doug Ischar, from the exhibition Marginal Waters; image courtesy of the artist. In “Plate 18,” Ischar portrays a young white sunbather resting peacefully in the foreground of a family picnic, his blue speedo and skin almost glowing in the summer sun. Although he is attuned to his subject’s white gay presence at the Rocks, Ischar fills 3/4 of his frame with the vibrant family picnic in its background. The photograph seems to suggest that white gay public life wasn’t actually so separate from that of Lakeview’s other residents, indeed it was the co-presence of people of color and white queers that animated the sociality and cultural vitality of the neighborhood. In 2003 the City of Chicago paved over The Belmont Rocks, obliterating what Ischar called the “most central and visible gay beach in North America.”599 The destruction of one of the few public spaces in the city where interracial queer conviviality took place by the light of day, a terrain some house fans remember fondly as the site of Frankie Knuckles’ post-pride 221 parade DJ sets, was the third strike in a series of structural changes that helped to purge public black, Latino, as well as white working class and youth cultures, from Lakeview.600 First, Chicago’s city council had voted in 1987 to force juice bars to abide by a 2:00 a.m. curfew, restricting the ability of night life promoters to produce non-alcoholic, all-ages dance parties in the neighborhood (see Chapter Four).601 Then, in 1988, Illinois state legislators repealed a 1982 ordinance against night games at Wrigley Field, enabling Cubs’ owners to illuminate previously occluded residential and commercial areas of Wrigleyville after dark and exposing the neighborhood’s sex workers and homeless populations to increased scrutiny.602 In late 1991, the Chicago City Council reinforced their first strike against Lakeview’s queer, black, and Latino publics by forcing juice bars to get special zoning permits and abide by a 12am curfew.603 This intensified “squeeze” upended the economics of house music culture by undermining the viability of non-alcoholic spaces. Teenagers who became involved in house music during the mid-1980s at North Side clubs like Medusa’s; hotel and ballroom parties at The Riviera and The Bismarck; and underground clubs like The Music Box and Power Plant, often had older siblings and friends who could acculturate them in the teen scene. Without juice bars, this informal passing on of social norms and cultural traditions diminished. As a result of these structural changes and other cultural shifts relating to the gentrification of queer culture in Lakeview’s Boystown neighborhood, black, gay house music promoters working in the neighborhood began to shift their promotional efforts to the industrial area between the Kennedy Expressway and the Chicago River. According to Bob Yeaworth, co- owner of The Clubhouse at 440 North Halsted, a pioneering venue catering to the black gay crowd between 1990 and 1996, he and his partner, the late Sam Davis, had made a move to take over the liquor license of Lakeview’s Windy City Bar after the legendary Club LaRay closed in 222 1989. Yeaworth says he met resistance from the community area’s alderman, Bernie Hansen, only when it became clear that he and Davis would be operating a black, gay establishment: “All of a sudden, all the doors had closed. This was from the zoning department, from the liquor commissioner, everybody. Our first ad went out in Gay Chicago magazine … and he made sure the liquor license transfer was denied.”604 By 1997 Lakeview’s Boystown had become what many call the United States’ first officially designated “gayborhood,” replete with tax-funded rainbow pylons along its North Halsted Street corridor.605 Unlike black-owned or-produced gay clubs farther south on Halsted, like Yeaworth and Davis’ Club House; The Generator, where DJ Dana Powell held down a residency; and Prop House, where Bernard Johnson’s Rails collective promoted house, hip hop, and r&b parties for queer men of color, Smart Bar hadn’t ever been produced by, or conceived of, as a space explicitly catering to gay people, let alone gay blacks and Latinos. Rather, it was always conceived of as a place with a special relationship to Chicago house music’s utopian vision of inclusion and freedom. House music imaginaries of inclusion and freedom, though founded on queer of color modes of spiritual expression that took place in Chicago’s post-industrial maroon spaces, have often been mediated by straight, white music entrepreneurs. In a post on his personal blog, Smart Bar owner Joe Shanahan refers to his transformational first experience as a white, straight, underage, non-member trying to get into the mostly black, gay, and members-only Warehouse at 206 South Jefferson, as well as his life-long friendship with its inimitable resident DJ, Frankie Knuckles: “I opened Smart Bar, trying to recapture the magic of that night in my own way, keeping with Frankie’s music first philosophy.”606 By “music first,” Shanahan means that the vision for his venue was predicated on musical excellence as being the common denominator for 223 great nightlife, and that a heterogeneous, open-minded audience, a crossover community, could only come together in a space where great musical programming was the number one priority. It is also notable that he saw the venue as trying to “recapture” the magic, suggesting that programming Chicago house music is always in some way about taking ownership of something inherently evanescent, a fleeting feeling that can only ever be experienced as a utopian horizon or a rose-tinted memory. Up until his transition in April of 2014, the Godfather of house music played an outsized role at Smart Bar’s Queen! and the one-off Sunday events that preceded its weekly launch. He performed on the Sunday evening of his birthday weekend in 2013, which he shared with Martin Luther King Jr., as well as on Labor Day and Thanksgiving holiday weekends that year. Knuckles’ DJ sets at Queen! helped confirm the party’s status as a function extending and preserving Chicago house music’s legacy, indeed the party played host to a yearly benefit celebration on Knuckles’ birthday weekend. Even as the Godfather’s legacy loomed large in the minds of Queen!’s creative team, and Smart Bar’s owner, the sets spun by the party’s residents, DJs Michael Serafini, Derrick Carter, and Garret “David” Shrigley, kept it moving forward while looking back. Serafini and Carter connected Queen! to countless legendary venues and parties that have come and gone in Chicago since the 1980s. They understood their venture to be rooted in the inclusive ethos of fondly remembered parties/spaces like Boom Boom Room, Red Dog, Shelter, Medusa’s and the long- running mixed/gay dance bar, Berlin. Boom Boom Room, in particular, was often invoked as an antecedent to Queen! The sole weekly “gay” party usually held at otherwise straight/mixed venues, Boom Boom’s most famous run took place at Wicker Park’s Red Dog during the 1990s, when it was, as DJ Lady D puts it, “a 224 house party for gay people,” and also “a gay party for house people.”607 According to the night’s mythological doorman and host, Byrd Bardot, Boom Boom was the brainchild of a promoter named Jack Walls/HiFi Bangalore: “He pulled together … a few straight guys, a handful of silly queens and two of the most beautiful transsexuals in Chicago.”608 Boom Boom was built by this motley crew as an industry night catering to the tastes of the artists who produced nightlife in Chicago, but who couldn’t go out with the weekend warriors; it was also, in its infancy, a showcase for pioneering Chicago house DJs. Queen! residents understood from their experiences at Boom Boom Room, which ran in some shape or form for over 20 years, that to keep things true to the spirit of house as it had evolved from its queer of color roots, they had to think beyond being an exclusively gay party, but at the same time cater to a core group of queer people who would take on the often underpaid/unpaid affective labor of preserving the neostalgic vibe.609 Former Smart Bar talent buyer Marea “Black Madonna” Stamper said that while she hesitated to speak for the Queen! DJs, she knew they wanted the party to avoid falling victim to what she called, somewhat jokingly, “the dumb shit that gay dance clubs in this city often have now.”610 She went on to recall her early days partying in Kentucky when gay parties had the best music, and the most inclusive dance floors, pondering if cultural assimilation (she mentions marriage equality specifically) may have inadvertently diluted the radical inclusive potential of underground gay nightlife. Queen! harkened back to a moment in the rear-view of queer cultural maroonage, before mainstreaming and assimilation, while it moved forward on the road ahead. 225 6.C - Safer Spaces on The West Side Today is February 1, 2014 and it’s snowing again. At this point I’m well versed in the poetics of prying my station wagon from hard packed ice. Indeed, I have already broken a sweat thrice tonight shoveling out. Needless to say I’m elated to find a plowed spot to park in out front of The Hideout. I pull up my hand brake and hop into the backseat, trading my snow boots for high tops before rushing through the cold to pay a $5 cover. My friend Patrick and I make our way past the throngs of rockers still crowding the front bar after the 12:00 a.m. Chances transition while the doorman argues with a woman who wants her cover back; I guess she didn’t know the queers would be here tonight.611 While Queen!’s relationships to the spatial legacies of house music were made manifest through its resident DJs, as well as the longevity and importance of Smart Bar as a house music venue, Chances Dances had a less direct relationship to Chicago house music’s queer social geographies. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when many of the Chances Dances organizers arrived in Chicago as young adults, house music was mostly unfamiliar to them. They hadn’t come of age in the City of Big Shoulders, nor did they come up in the Midwestern rave scenes that ramified from its sonic wellsprings. Despite having come to the city unaware of ways that they might tap into its musical histories, organizers found they often had the tools they needed to build dancing communities in a number of non-commercial spaces that recalled Chicago house music’s maroon origins. Rita Bacon threw her first rock show in Columbia, Missouri at a roller rink, booking bands, printing flyers, and promoting the event through word-of-mouth marketing.612 Aay Preston-Myint, who grew up in New York City, moved into a Chicago loft space in the Bridgeport neighborhood variously called Texas Ballroom, Nightgowns, and Diamonds, contributing his curatorial chops 226 and production prowess to DIY shows there while honing DJ skills.613 These were not, as Bacon claims, clueless hayseeds; they were creative, entrepreneurial transplants. In October of 2004, Preston-Myint’s loft played host to a nationally advertised punk television studio designed to produce autonomous media for “feminist trespass.”614 The four-day Pilot TV project – fueled by the efforts of Chicago art students who rented as much school- owned media equipment as they could – brought together queer and feminist media makers from around the country. After doing so much with access to a marginally legal space and AV equipment from the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois, a group of local Pilot alumnae began to imagine what could happen after the end of their rogue TV station. According to founding Chances organizer Latham Zearfoss, “the [Chances Dances] project started as an idea of both harnessing … that utopian energy of Pilot, but also that practical desire to see one’s community and friends in a more sustained, frequent capacity. So ... and that sort of led to us being like, let’s start a dance party. Why not?”615 In September 2005 the original Chances organizers began throwing parties on the third Monday of each month at The Big Horse Lounge, a taqueria on Milwaukee Avenue in Wicker Park. In 2013-2014, the organizers co-produced a trio of monthly parties at distinct, but consistent, host venues on Chicago’s West Side, along with occasional special events and one- offs at spaces like Old Town’s long-running gay porn theater, The Bijou. The parties were born from affirmative desires, like wanting to be together, as well as imperatives to rebel against Boystown’s failings when it came to including gender non-conforming people, fat people, queer women, and people of color.616 Named after an imaginary small-town gay bar where all manner of queers would be likely to cross paths, Chances Dances grew from frustrations that seem similar to those 227 animating Chicago’s original house music entrepreneurs: its organizers believed that existing cultural offerings in the city were not meeting their needs, and rather than agitate for inclusion in spaces beyond repair, they would be best served by producing their own events. While the original US Studios/Warehouse cohort had become fed up with racist door policies at venues like The Bistro and Carol’s Speakeasy, the informally constituted maroon culture of the Chances Dances organizers was forged in response to the socially dystopian landscape of a whitened, gentrified Lakeview. Unlike the original Warehouse board, which was comprised almost entirely of black, gay men, and a few black women, the organizing collective of Chances was multiracial; its flat organizational structure foregrounded the voices of queer people of color, as well as women and gender non-conforming members. After throwing their first monthly parties at Big Horse Lounge, organizers realized that they were tapping into a wild zeitgeist. According to organizer Rita Bacon, “you couldn’t breathe in that place. Everybody was naked. It was like this ecstatic, ecstatic moment … we weren’t really used to like being in this really inclusive dance space.”617 Much like the parties at 206 South Jefferson, Chances Dances became functionally accessible to precocious teenagers interested in queer nightlife as well. As Zearfoss puts it, the restaurant “had this back door so we could kind of sneak in underage people, or other people could sneak them in and pretend to not know about it. So there was a really awesome energy there. I remember there were times when you would literally be lifted off the ground by bodies around you.”618 Within a year, organizers decided that the excitement of the crush at Big Horse was less desirable then having access to a larger space where they might be better equipped to welcome new dancers. They moved around the corner to Wicker Park’s long-running Subterranean, a venue whose managers had offered them a monthly slot on third Mondays with better amenities and profit sharing terms. 228 Wicker Park had already felt the pains of gentrification by the time Chances Dances began throwing parties at Big Horse and Sub-T. Indeed, its transition had taken place on roughly the same time line as that of Lakeview to the east. However, unlike Lakeview, it wasn’t upwardly mobile white gays, but a “bohemian” cohort of artists, designers, and musicians who helped to shift the area’s racial and socio-economic character from poor/working-class Latino to upwardly mobile white. Like many formerly hip urban neighborhoods all over the US, by the early 2000s many of the folks who had given Wicker Park its artsy cultural cachet could no longer afford to live there.619 Wicker Park had also been home to a vibrant loft party scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a scene that gave way to the house dancing communities at venues like Red Dog and Shelter in the decade preceding the advent of Chances Dances. During the early 1990s, underground venues in the area were known only by their street addresses, and many of them, like 1355 and 1471 Milwaukee, were around the same “six point” intersection as Sub-T and Big Horse.620 While Chances organizers haven’t referred to the neighborhood’s house music histories when speaking with me, these spaces still charge Wicker Park’s social geographies in ways that have augmented their political project. In 2007, with a successful couple of years under its belt, the Chances’ organizing body slimmed down into a streamlined group of four and began producing a second monthly night on second Tuesdays at Danny’s Tavern in Bucktown, just northeast of Wicker Park. “Off Chances” became the collective’s “nerdy” little sister party.621 Its self-proclaimed cruisey/nerdy vibe was fostered in part by the pocketsize of the venue, a small Victorian house on a residential side street with a bar in the front room and a compact dance floor in the back. Between 2013 and 229 2014, Danny’s was decorated with a simple disco ball and a few foil-covered, cardboard stars; tea lights illuminated tables budding off from the dance floor. In 2009 the Chances Dances organizers began producing yet a third monthly party at another dive bar a mile west of Danny’s. Nestled into the armpit of the North Branch of the Chicago River, The Hideout is, according to its website, “a regular guy bar for irregular folks who just don’t fit in, or just don’t want to fit in.”622 Built in a balloon frame house over 100 years ago, and run by “undocumented bootleggers and gin runners” in the decades since, The Hideout’s mythical aura was perfectly suited to Chances Dances’s wild musical and social approach. The venue is also just steps from the old Prop House, home to the long-running house and hip hop party promoted by Bernard Johnson of the Rails Marketing Group. Between 2009 and 2014 the Chances Dances crew took over The Hideout’s minimally appointed dance floor from midnight till 3:00 a.m. on the last Saturday of each month. The venue has a small bar in front and a back ballroom with a spacious, checkered linoleum dance floor, as well as a lit stage, high-top tables, and some twinkle lights. Since it regularly charged a $5 admission for its Saturday night dance parties, the Chances organizers decided that they would make their Saturday event the only one where guests would be forced to pay. All surplus funds from The Hideout went directly to a fund designated for the organization’s two granting programs. 230 Fig 6.3 - Artist Sofia Moreno, and Chances Dances DJs Justin “Swaguerilla/Hijo Pródigo” Mitchell and Jacqui “CQQCHIFRUIT” Guerrero on stage at The Hideout, May 4, 2014; photograph by Micah Salkind. On its website Chances stressed that it was dedicated to building “safer spaces.”623 As historian Christina Hanhardt points out, anti-racist queer activists, like the Chances organizers, have often attempted to make recourse to the concept of safety as a utopian future where all people can truly feel safe in their neighborhoods without re-inscribing the racist terms under which the settled term “safe” often operates as a veiled reference to whiteness and upper middle class cultural norms.624 The Chances organizers used the term “safer” to resist the trap of safety that is created by displacing working class whites and people of color. By implying that the work of creating safety is never done, they gestured to the ways that being in communities characterized by musical and social difference always involves some risk. 231 The peripatetic status of Chances parties was a critical dimension of the collective’s vision of safety as well. Because events did not recur in the same location more often than once a month, organizers were able to spread their cultural influence across, and connect to the histories of, several distinct venues in mixed commercial/residential areas like Wicker Park and Bucktown, neighborhoods that had already gentrified, for the most part, or were at no risk of doing so because they were, like the River North area surrounding The Hideout, persistently industrial. Organizers also kept events safer by making them free and low-cost for dancers, with no door charge or suggested donation exceeding $5. 232 6.D - Queen!’s Neostalgic Musical Mix You’ve got to steep young people in house music in order to make it continuous and that’s what failed to happen in the past. The DJs did not shoulder the responsibility of showing it to the next generation, and the next generation, and the next generation. So that’s the shit that I’m on right now, because I do have 21 to 35 year olds dancing in front of me and I’m trying to give them as much house music as they can stand, so that they know … it’s the old with the new.625 DJ Craig Cannon, who was spinning regularly at the South Side’s predominantly, black, gay Jeffery Pub in the spring of 2014, laid some of the blame for generational dissonance in Chicago’s black, gay social dancing communities on DJs like WGCI Chicago’s Steve Miggidy Maestro, once the resident hip hop and r&b DJ on Fridays at the Prop House. Beginning in July of 1998, Bernard Johnson and the Rails Marketing Group promoted Friday night parties at the venue. They booked some of Chicago’s biggest house stalwarts in the main room, like longtime Boom Boom Room resident Lego; the legendary Craig Loftis; local favorite DJ Sedrick; and internationally renowned Baltimore spinners Spen & Karizma. Yet, despite Johnson’s firm commitments to programming house, and its connection to black, gay culture, the Friday party, and the venue, became strongly identified with what is at times referred to by elders in the black, gay Chicago house community as a traumatic cultural split along generational lines: even though they remain strongly influenced by house music, younger black, gay men have somewhat abandoned house in favor of ballroom tracks, chart hip hop, and r&b. 626 Younger queer, black, and Latino audiences in Chicago have supplemented house music with other genres for over two decades, in part because they want dance to music that will set them apart from older dancers. HIV/AIDS has contributed to a generational dissonance too, disappearing the griots that might otherwise have passed down stories about the importance of the Chicago house sound, as parents often do for their children in heteronormative social dance communities.627 According to Mister Wallace, a former Queen! host now based in New York, 233 and a member of queer hip hop group Banjee Report, sexually fluid pop artists like Azealia Banks have re-energized young queers of color around recuperated forms, like hip house, once abandoned by mainstream audiences for being too queer. 628 This new interest in genre-defiant forms may help bring young audiences back to classic house sounds. Craig Loftis confirms the importance of working against the dictates of generic stability, saying one of his biggest commercially successful musical productions came out of working at Prop House, where he had to bring together the ball kids, a younger cohort that just liked “the beats,” and the older audience rooted in soulful house sounds. “Mary Mary” begins with a heavy spread, drum sound and glimmers of wobbling bass, its chugging rhythm accentuated by shimmering vocalizations from Aretha Franklin’s 1972’s “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep.”629 In both the original bootleg version of the track, the one that Loftis designed as a noncommercial DJ tool, and the commercial re-release featuring vocals by Chicago house icon Karen “Dajae” Gordon, the “Mary don’t you weep” line cycles again and again, foregrounding the sanctified soul of classic house music. Loftis invokes the flavor of ball culture by using a re-sampled “Ha” sound from Masters at Work’s 1991 “Ha Dance (Pumpin Dubb).”630 He layers the Franklin vocal and “Ha” sample with a deep, carnivalesque bass kick and a driving snare drum cadence, inviting the beat kids to the floor as well. Despite the best efforts of DJ/producers like Loftis, Chicago house music became relatively less prominent in black and Latino gay youth cultures during the early 2000s. However, parties like Boom Boom Room at Red Dog maintained and continued to develop the Chicago house sound for crossover communities of intergenerational, multi-racial, and pansexual dancers well into the new millennium. In 2013 and 2014, Queen!, and parties produced by regular participants in the Queen! scene like the after-hours Men’s Room at Wang’s and The 234 Bijou Theater, and TWIRL at Berlin, actively promoted Chicago house music as a set of specific sonic signifiers, and a queer cultural touchstone, introducing, and in some cases re-introducing, the music to a new generation of multiracial dancers. The neostalgic house repertoire played by Queen!’s resident and guest DJs incorporated songs that had been popular staples since the late 1970s, new and experimental tracks, bootleg pop remixes, and other surprises that indexed a history of house through sampling, instrumentation, and other recursive “associations with a ‘history’ of house.”631 While I loved dancing to Michael Serafini and Garrett David’s sets, I found that Derrick Carter hailed me most often with songs I recognized. Carter said in a panel at the Chicago History Museum that he plays things in his sets “that are house, but not house,” because he comes from a time “when there were a lot less genres, and a lot less subdivisions of what the music actually is and what people played, and gave to consumers in the clubs.”632 During Carter’s Queen! sets, I often got the sense that he was using the vocals of consecutive songs to spin long-form lyrical narratives for dancers. Narrative mixing, often associated with Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan, is quite difficult to master in that it requires a DJ to consider an additional semiotic layer on top of energy level, tempo, instrumentation, and key as they program their set.633 When executed well, the technique can provoke audiences to seriously get their lives, to see themselves and their participation as essential to the living history of house music as an inclusive, queer of color repertoire in motion. 235 Fig. 6.4 - Derrick Carter spinning on his birthday at Queen!, October 20, 2013; photograph by Micah Salkind. On October 20, 2013, Carter spun a blistering hot set for his birthday celebration, including three tracks that, considered together, help to get at the heart of Queen!’s neostalgic sonority: a remix of the r&b/pop group Destiny’s Child’s 1999 single “Bills Bills Bills,” Adonis’ 1986 “No Way Back,” and Black Ivory’s 1979 “Mainline.”634 Each of these tracks relates, and connects dancers to, a particular era of house music’s sonic and social development. Carter’s performance of them together preserved and extended the scope of Chicago house music as a repertoire in motion, inviting old and new audiences of the music to identity with each other, and get their lives together, on the Queen! dance floor. “Mainline,” a driving disco anthem from The Warehouse era also championed at The Chosen Few Picnic, is one of the most ubiquitous tracks played in Chicago. Its lyrics compare singer Leroy Burgess’ lover to an intoxicating drug: “I just can’t stop ‘cause you’ve struck my mainline; can’t stop this feeling inside my brain.”635 The song’s longevity, especially for the 236 queers of color belting it ecstatically this particular evening from the edge of Derrick Carter’s DJ booth, speaks not only to its catchy melody and masterful instrumentation, but also to the poignancy of songwriter Russel Patterson’s creative lyricism. In 1992, when Carter was making his name as a DJ at Wicker Park loft parties, over 250 drug cases might be tried by Cook County courts in a single day.636 Chicago residents, especially people of color finding release in house culture, needed, and still need, opportunities to cathartically transform narratives of drug addiction and abuse into ones of love and sustenance. Some Chicago house anthems, like “Mainline,” open space for dancers to transcend despondency and depression by reframing oppressive themes, and others invite them to push through their pain until it is transformed. Released on Chicago’s Trax Records in 1986, “No Way Back” endures in many of the city’s contemporary venues and scenes. It was recorded in a home studio by then-19-year-old Adonis, and came out at the height of Chicago house music’s popularity in the city, squarely in the middle of Derrick Carter’s high school years at Walther Lutheran in the suburb of Melrose Park. “No Way Back” leans heavily on its ethereal robotic vocal, elastic TR-808 drum line, and a synthesized bass melody: “Release my soul, I lost control … too far gone … ain’t no way back.” Its lyrics call out to Chi-town’s mid-80s house audiences by indexing Ron Hardy’s legendary Music Box, (“bang the box”) and the signature libidinal dance move of the city’s teen party scene, the jack (“jack your bodies”).637 When Carter played “No Way Back” at Queen! he connected to the social and spatial history of the golden era of his music culture and taught his audience about its persistent relevance. In the edit Carter played of “Bills Bills Bills,” which may have been his own production or another artist’s bootleg remix, he traded the song’s original production, by Kevin 237 “She’kspere” Briggs, for a bouncy piano track and a jacking four-four beat that recalled the early ‘90s Chicago sound he helped to pioneer.638 In the era of the Shazamable DJ set, there is something special about not knowing how to find the remix, who edited it, or whether it ever had an official release. This deferring of pleasure, a pleasure in sitting on the edge of knowing rather than fully comprehending, relates to the “participatory discrepancies” of live music performance.639 The gap between the track’s unknowable remixer augmented its otherwise radio- friendly silliness, creating interest for seasoned audiences, even as its familiarity allowed dancers who came of age in the 1990s and 2000s, and who may not have known all the house classics from the 1970s and 80s, to get their lives too. On the night of November 3, 2013, Carter opened his set with Danny Tenaglia and Celeda’s “Music Is The Answer.”640 The song’s diva vocals hailed a shift in tone from the other residents’ largely instrumental programming, its lyrics setting up a longer story that Carter followed for the next several tracks: “Music is the answer, to your problems, keep on moving, then you can solve them.” Carter segued from the uplifting tone of “Music” into a version of Mass Order’s “Lift Every Voice (Take Me Away).”641 The title and lyrics of this second track explicitly reference James Weldon Johnson’s Black American National Anthem, connecting a short, didactic account of house music’s history and evolution in “the Windy City,” to the black freedom struggle while also alluding to the culture’s social diversity (“all colors and creeds”). “Lift” explicitly invokes the gender-queer disco diva Sylvester in its lyrics: “we all know that Sylvester rules.” As one of the few ancestral figures binding Chicago’s trans-temporal queer club scenes together, Sylvester “exposes the dynamic of becoming intelligible” on the dance floor for queers of color specifically.642 This articulation of mutual intelligibility is a critical component of the transcendental possibilities at play when one is “getting one’s life.”643 238 Additionally, “Lift” features re-sung vocalizations from Chicago’s Loleatta Halloway’s oft- sampled 1980 track “Love Sensation,” a house classic that has often functioned as a humanized femme-of-color facade for electronic dance music produced by white men.644 Carter recuperates her voice in the service of neostalgic queer celebration. Next, Carter blended out of Mass Order into MFSB’s “Love Is The Message,” yoking an older generation of disco lovers, many of whom had likely heard this Philly Soul masterpiece countless times, to a younger generation of queer people who have been inundated with the images and sounds of Jennie Livingston’s 1992 documentary, Paris is Burning.645 “Love Is The Message” is conspicuous on the Paris soundtrack as it scores one of the film’s beloved ballroom competition scenes.646 Even without the full vocal, “love is the message that I sing to you, love is the message that I bring to you, love is the message for us all,” the song creates an instrumental bridge pregnant with meaning because of the way it signifies broadly to an intergenerational audience. It connects new and old dancers to Chicago house music’s expansive love ethic, an ethic that firmly resists the social fragmentation created by homophobia and racism. The final two lyrically dense songs of Carter’s narrative mix this evening added depth and nuance to the texture of the love ethic he had only begun to articulate: Chaka Khan’s “Love You All My Lifetime” and Robert Owen’s “I’ll Be Your Friend.”647 The first track, sung by one of Chicago’s most iconic r&b singers, moves from a story of communal love, to one of lost romantic love. The second, by the singer of Chicago’s deep house super group, Fingers Inc., added life-long platonic friendship into the set’s recipe for cultivating a communal love ethic. Like a movement in a larger symphony, this suite of tracks featuring memorable, repetitive lyrical themes was just one of many clusters of musical ideas that Carter put forth in his performance, but it played a large role in animating and circulating a neostalgic affect on the 239 dance floor, even when heard, connected to, and experienced passively or in brief, evanescent bursts. Carter’s Queen! sets weren’t didactic, but he clearly saw the party as his space to be himself, a forum where he could tell his own story for a hometown audience and play what he wanted to play the way he wanted to play it. If he wanted to spin a steppers set, and slow the tempo way down with song’s like Bobby Caldwell’s “What You Won’t Do For Love,” as he did on February 9, 2014, he could.648 This was his house and, at least while he was on the decks, we were his guests. Yet, while Derrick Carter’s sound and name, like those of Frankie Knuckles, may have been used to promote Queen!, he was not solely responsible for creating the night’s musical culture. In fact, due to his busy touring schedule, he often left hosting responsibilities, and DJing, to his highly capable co-residents, Michael Serafini and Garrett “David” Shrigley.649 Serafini and Shrigley were committed to cultivating a Queen! sound rooted in Chicago house music’s past, present, and future too. When Carter was away they invited a diverse group of the city’s DJs to join them in this endeavor. During my 10 months of fieldwork, Queen! featured the soulful, South Side sounds of Jamie 3:26; the Italo-disco and techno-inflected grooves of Chez Damier; the chugging disco edits of David “Cratebug” Macias; the bathhouse high energy of Harry Cross & Jacob “JPEG” Meehan; the brilliant esotericism of The Black Madonna; the Chi-town bounce of Alinka, and the sublime techno and acid house of Shaun J. Wright. The night also played host to several brilliant out-of-towners like The Carry Nation, Steffi, Virginia, and Prosumer. These artists augmented Queen!’s soundscape in 2013 and 2014, but countless other artists have contributed to the night since its inception. Queen!’s neostalgic sound was rooted not only in shared ideas about what Chicago house had been and should become, but also in how Chicago related musically to other dance music 240 capitals around the world, like Detroit, New York, London, and Berlin. The party’s neostalgic vibe was in part made by managing a sense of the local and the global simultaneously, and attempting to touch the musical sweet spot where they meet. Artists affiliated with the night developed this nested spatial relationship to house music – the local in the global in the local – through their original production work, DJing, and promotional labor. The Black Madonna, aka DJ and producer Marea Stamper, got her start in the dance music industry selling cassette tape recordings of popular DJ sets out of her car at Midwestern raves. When she settled down from this peripatetic life to attend college in Louisville, Kentucky, Stamper taught herself to DJ with vinyl gifted to her by friends as well as a collection of rare groove and soul records she and her mother had purchased out of a tobacco barn.650 She moved to Chicago after college went straight to work for dance music entrepreneur Radoslaw “Radek” Hawryszczuk, who hoped she would be able to help him launch the digital distribution arm of his Dust Traxx label. She eventually took over as label manager. When Stamper began to gain acclaim as a dance music producer, she was earning money writing ad copy for online purveyors of ladies underwear and dreaming about a sustainable career as an artist.651 Her success, which begat her international touring opportunities, began with a chance encounter. Garrett “David” Shirgley was working as an intern at Dust Traxx when he overheard Stamper playing her original production, “Exodus.” She had built the song around a sampled piano and vocal line from The Joubert Singers’ 1985 “Stand On The Word,” a gospel house classic often attributed to the Celestial Choir, and a favorite of Larry Levan and New Jersey club pioneer Tony Humphries.652 Shrigley asked Stamper if he could release “Exodus” on his fledgling Stripped & Chewed label, which he was launching with a Kickstarter campaign. The collaboration helped launch both the label and The Black Madonna. 241 By the spring of 2014 Stamper was booking multiple dates across Europe and had taken over the venerable duties of booking talent at Smart Bar. Despite these enormous markers of commercial success, she said she was still trying to write one legendary vocal track to solidify her position in what she described as the “transient” international touring economy of dance music: “if you make a really great vocal house or disco record, it’s the key to dance immortality. There are guys that are still sailing on one good vocal house record they did in the 90s. It’s so simple and so difficult all at the same time.”653 “Exodus” may not be that once in a lifetime track, but it is an amazing condensation of the neostalgic soundscape enshrined at Queen!. It sounds old school, but it is built with sophisticated production tools, including subtle digital delays that intensify the time/mind-bending capacities of the Joubert Singers’ piano and bass groove. Stamper uses a steady kick drum, delayed congas, and fluttering, decaying snares and high hats to fashion a rhythmic cocoon. This container envelopes the song’s piano line, organ, and the stacked “oohs” from the sampled recording, foregrounding a catchy melodic cadence guaranteed to draw interest while its dense layers of percussion keep the dance floor moving.654 Like The Black Madonna, Queen! resident DJ Garrett David extended the neostalgic imaginary of Smart Bar’s Sunday party with his own production work. “That Queen! Track,” which he released on Stripped & Chewed in May of 2013 when Queen! was in its infancy, is a bright, bouncy, slice of the ‘90s, a neostalgic sonic invocation of his residency’s connection to the Boom Boom Room legacy, and the future of Chicago house music culture. Shrigley’s up- front piano, ride cymbal, and insistent shekere are peppered with vocal interjections from Sal-E and Ruby D, two of Queen!’s first drag hostesses. He weaves their diva catch phrases, “It’s wrong honey!” and “Did you know?,” around silky synth pads and organ sounds, conjuring a 242 particular vintage of 90s house made popular in New York and Chicago before Shirgley was even in middle school.655 When pressed to describe his production aesthetics, Shirgley refers to the murky, ill- defined notion of the underground: “It’s just like, I think it’s underground. I think this ... what we’re all trying to contribute to, we’re all trying to stir up, or get going again is an underground scene in Chicago.” The sound of the underground, one that was present, but is now gone and in need of being stirred up, is conflated for Shirgley with other aesthetic markers of the Queen! scene – a scene which he sees as being very separate from the nostalgic old school world of the city’s South Side DJs: “The two scenes don't really cross. But to me it doesn’t seem like they do much music. I mean I know The Chosen Few DJs have a few tracks and stuff, but like, I don't know, they just seem more like DJs.”656 Shrigley obliquely notes the importance of incessant production work to the collective efforts moving Chicago house music forward, and seems to suggest that DJs alone cannot call forth the dormant power of the underground. “That Queen! Track,” like the other sonic elements that helped give form to Smart Bar’s Queen!, queers the pitch of contemporary Chicago house culture, recalling, and identifying with, the scene’s queer of color progenitors. It also mediates the experiences of the queen through the creative expression of a white, straight producer with a vision for a party where people feel “free to be themselves.”657 In Chicago house production, the experiences, utterances, and expressive styles of queer people of color are often filtered through the work of white collaborators, but understanding those affiliations as always asymmetrical and exploitative does a disservice to all participants. The queens recorded by Shrigley gain more than a modicum of agency through hosting and carrying on the dance floor, as I will show through my analysis of the party’s visual repertoires. 243 Rather than try to undermine the value of cultural production by white, and in Shrigley’s case straight, participants in the Queen! scene because their subject positions do not align with the marginalized voices central to house music culture’s original maroon spaces, I suggest that critics instead listen to the desires for connection at play.658 Shrigley’s attempts to allow the queen to speak are most notable for the humility with which they are articulated in the cultural context of the social world that has grown up around the party. Reducing them to exploitative interpolations alone misses the forest for the trees. 244 6.E - Sounding Wildness at Chances Dances It’s January 14, 2014 and I am walking into Danny’s Tavern at about 11:00 p.m. As I peel off my layers, Rita Bacon cues up the Kygo remix of Ed Sheerhan’s “I See Fire.”659 I have never heard Sheerhan’s voice, and I have no idea that in the coming months I will grow quite sick of him and this particular remixer; in this moment some blue eyed soul feels like a warm ember in a radiant fireplace and it is too damn cold outside. Aay Preston-Myint calls this 10:00 p.m. to midnight zone the period during which the Chances Dances audience is most receptive to music that isn’t expressly for dancing: “it’s more atmospheric so you can kind of relax and see what people respond to.”660 This particular Tuesday is a snowy, moody night, and Kygo’s synthesized pan flute seems to fit the cozy vibe at Danny’s perfectly. The chill doesn’t last long though; only a few songs later Bacon is turning up the heat with Beyoncé’s “XO.”661 Beyoncé’s eponymous album, which she released in December 2013 on iTunes with not so much as a whisper of official pre-release publicity, had by January 2014 become a staple on Chicago’s queer dance floors. I had even heard its most popular single, the relatively downtempo “Drunk in Love,” at club nights and venues that otherwise programmed only 120-130 BPM sounds.662 When “Drunk” came on later that same evening, even the most radical queers couldn’t help but belt out Jay-Z’s unfortunately-chosen Ike Turner quote, “Eat the cake, Anna Mae.” This line’s queer recuperation at Chances is a perfect example of what José Esteban Muñoz famously described as a “disidentification;” folks weren’t condoning domestic violence, rather they were championing a thinly veiled reference to analingus.663 *** Sound at Chances Dances functioned much differently than it did at Queen! because the Chances parties had never been bound by a commitment to programming house music, or its 245 kissing cousins disco and techno. 2013-2014 Chances DJs Justin “Swaguerrilla/Hijo Pródigo” Mitchell, Jacquelyn “CQQCHIFRUIT” Guerrero, Aay “Nina Ramone” Preston-Myint, Latham “The Lady Speedstick” Zearfoss, and Rita Bacon (no appellation needed) favored a wild approach to musical programming over fidelity to genre, or the fluidity of seamless beat matching. Ironically, this jagged-edged, genre-defiant impulse connected them to sonic energies that Queen!’s Derrick Carter remembered as being central to mid-1980s house DJs, who he says “could go all over the place and kind of add these really crazy disparate elements … the synergy of it all became something more.”664 While the musically extra, or what Carter called the “something more” of the house DJ’s set, might relate explicitly to the sonic freedom invoked in the neostalgic performances of DJs at Queen!, it also remained an important component of the musical culture of Chances. Indeed, the very ways in which Chances organizers invited dancers to get their lives were grounded in an appreciation of wild musical diversity as opposed to neostalgic sonic fidelity to Chicago house. Chances DJs committed to harnessing the crepuscular energy of house history through what Muñoz referred to as the “wild mix.”665 Each of the five DJs had a unique musical perspective, and on any given night two performing together created a unique, wild amalgam of styles as they traded off playing every half hour. This particular night at Off Chances, Bacon and The Lady Speedstick played well- worn Chances classics like Annie Lennox’ “Walking on Broken Glass,” Ciara’s “Ride,” and Black Box’ “Everybody Everybody,” as well as a new track by Chicago’s Big Dipper and Mister Wallace called “Cute 2 Me.”666 The three hours of sound they crafted together leaned heavily on vocals, and, for the most part, eschewed the alternative rock and bass-heavy tracks that some Chances DJs wove throughout their sets. 246 The thirty-one unique sonic combinations the Chances DJs created together, and their constant shuffling, helped ensure nobody’s particular musical narrative was wholly prioritized. The format challenged Chances DJs to manage the areas where their musical tastes overlapped, and challenged audiences, who often felt themselves pushed and pulled unexpectedly out of their grooves, to get used to awkward transitions. For those too jarred by Chances’ punk, kiss off to musical linearity and seamlessness, there were plenty of other places in Chicago to hear flawlessly beat-matched music.667 The Chances parties were founded to be spaces where different sounds could be juxtaposed, if not seamlessly integrated; a sonic rebuttal to what organizers perceived to be Boystown’s oppressively homogenous soundscape. As Zearfoss explains, “all of us felt disconnected from the bland, trance techno that was the particular musical flavor of Chicago’s gay male scenes.”668 What he calls “trance techno,” or “circuit party” music, was less offensive to Chances organizers and audiences for its particular sonic textures than for its ubiquity, and the hegemonic social script it had become the soundtrack to: “We wanted [Chances] to not be homogenous in terms of who was there, who was playing music, who was participating and the organizing, but also the kind of music that we played.”669 The fact that the Chances collective was expressly trying to program music that might seem out of synch with a Boystown club in fact connected them in surprising ways to the genre- defiant approach to musical programming used in the early house scene. Rita Bacon cites the punk sound of the B52s to express the wild approach to musical programming at the parties: “Nobody wanted to dance to techno. We just wanted to dance to, you know, the B52s.”670 Derrick Carter also referenced B52s with respect to house music’s once wild musical mix: “You know, you can play a B52s song and back it right up against an Italo song, and something proto- 247 house like a Farley … beat track made with like a LinnDrum, and people would just go crazy. Throw a Martin Luther King speech over it, and call it Saturday.”671 The notoriety Carter has as a global house music star gives him the authority to teach the wild history of house music at parties like Queen! where the four on the floor, 120-130 BPM thump is almost never broken by other danceable sounds.672 Chances DJs were all free to take such risks. The fact that the B52s sound became indexical of the naively redundant, wild soundscape of Chances, and a neostalgic house sound referred to by Queen!’s resident DJ, indicates that the two parties, while in some ways sonically disparate, are in fact connected. Bacon didn’t try to distance herself, or Chances, from dance music, rather she emphasized the diversity of danceable sounds the party helped bring together. Carter wasn’t claiming that he plays the B52s in every set, but rather that the group, and the punk sound it indexes, played an important part in the early development of house music, and that their music still matters – it is not relegated to house music’s past, but integral to its present, and future. The fluidity of a wild musical genealogy, and the inclusivity it portended, appealed to the Chances organizers, especially those who grew up in and around small-town and urban punk rock communities. Rita Bacon remembers feeling punk as she ate food out of dumpsters and paid $68 a month for rent, but, she says that Chances was punk because no one else in Chicago seemed to be promoting queer nightlife outside of Boystown: “that first year there was like not a public space for queer people that wasn’t Boystown … there wasn’t like public space where you could be trans, or be fluid.”673 Musical expression at the event was about creating a messy but hopeful musical counterpart to the party’s utopian vision for inclusive queer social space. For founding organizer Latham Zearfoss, Chances’ connections to punk have not only been about the sonic and spatial contours of the parties, but also the ways that organizers have 248 disbursed material resources to Chicago’s multiracial queer artist communities. As he says, the granting program the collective instituted with its surplus funds around 2008 was a way for it to continue to foster creative expression and community dialogue.674 Punk, in this genealogical thread, is not only about making do with less, but also about refusing the capitalist logic of upward mobility and ceaseless accumulation. Rather than line their pockets beyond what they needed to sustain themselves, Chances organizers used their proceeds to support the dynamic artist community that coalesced at their events. Dr. Deb Vargas’ concept of “puro pedo,” or the laidback, no bullshit temporality of the working class Tejano cantina, can be mobilized to think about how Chances Dances’ DJs accommodated queer, punk sociality that refused to break with old markers of cultural affiliation. Organizers often yoked together five or six decades in a single hour of music, taking care to foreground the femme pop heroines of yesteryear – b-team divas like Khia, Brandy, Kandi, and Trina that Vargas might describe as being punk for “failing, stagnating, and malfunctioning,” or being “stuck in time.”675 Mariah Carey, while hardly on the b-team, occupied a special sticky place in Chances Dances’ punk diva pantheon.676 First, she spanned the musical memories of nearly all participants at the parties, both those born in the late 1970s/early 1980s and those born in the 1990s. Second, she was one of the first pop divas to exert creative control over her remixography, re-recording songs for release as singles with hip hop and house producers to ensure their suitability in all kinds of club environments. This capacious sonic approach has made Carey’s oeuvre ripe for wild recuperations by DJs, like those at Chances, who queer the sonic gaps between what pop scholar Pier Dominguez calls “hip hop realness and white pop innocence.”677 249 Punk stickiness was not only enshrined in the diva politics of DJ sets at Chances Dances, it was sounded on the mixed CDs that organizers gave out at Danny’s each month. With names like Pure Shit IV, Final Fantasy, CLOUDS, and Writhing Slowly Back To Open Sea, these anachronistic “mixtapes” were radical gifts that represented the anti-capitalist, punk spirit of the parties. They serve as vital records of the evolving soundscape produced by Chances organizers, yet they are also artifacts that trouble their own ephemeral qualities, burned in small batches and presumed to be available in perpetuity online.678 The mixtapes, as Muñoz points out with respect to other types of queer ephemera, expand understandings of materiality in that they are at once permanent, and evanescent.679 There is nothing inherently concrete or stable about them as physical artifacts or digitally archived materials; here now, they may yet disappear tomorrow. Not all of the members of the 2013-2014 Chances crew connected in the same ways to punk sensibilities, in part because they didn’t all grow up in communities where punk ideologies were named as such. While Zearfoss, Bacon, and Preston-Myint were pogoing at punk rock shows and seeking out hard-to-find records, Justin “Swaguerilla/Hijo Pródigo” Mitchell and Jacquelyn “CQQCHIFRUIT” Guerrero were coming of age under the aegis of Latin freestyle and the Roland TR-808’s synthesized clave.680 By the time they moved to Chicagoland for college – Mitchell matriculating at DePaul and Guerrero at Northwestern – house was up front in the mixes they were hearing as well, not only as a Chicago-specific club sound, but also as one connoting comfort and domesticity in multiply marginalized communities. Guerrero says they learned about house after moving to the Uptown neighborhood after college: I moved in with somebody that … would play a lot of music in the house, so that’s really where my knowledge of house music and juke … comes from … He would just be sewing and listening to music, or organizing, cleaning listening to music. So I would just wake up to that, and hear that every day. 250 Guerrero describes their artistic practice as one built around study, and careful consideration of the DJ’s role as a storyteller who determines what needs to be said and heard in nightlife spaces: “I’ve been studying since I first started going out and dancing, and really being invested in this scene and this practice, and starting my performance practice which is also in clubs.”681 As cultural critics Fred Moten and Stefano Harney put it in The Undercommons, to take one’s participation in nightlife seriously as study “is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.”682 I take Guerrero’s use of “study” to indicate that they take the labor of making a party seriously, and that they see musical programming as particularly worthy of deep attention and consideration. Guerrero’s thoughtfully produced club performances have a divine feminine quality to them that honors house music culture’s early maroon spaces, where the scenes revolutionary DJ midwives held space for queers of color to come together in spiritual congregation. The first time I saw them on stage they weren’t just DJing, they were presiding over Glitter Beach, an installation/altar and multimedia performance (including DJing) they created for the 2013 Revival program at Chicago’s Pritzker Auditorium. Guerrero reprised the piece in collaboration with Chicago multi-media artist Sophia Moreno in December 2013 at MANA Contemporary, a Pilsen contemporary art space, and re-staged it a third time in 2015 for the Making Chances 10- year exhibition at The University of Illinois’ Gallery 400 as A$$Mutation X Glitter Beach. While I didn’t catch the second performance, and only got to see the static ephemera left over from the third, my first glittery encounter with Glitter Beach was a revelation. I was stunned into sonic submission by Guerrero as they danced atop a sea of sparkling sand and crushed mirrors, their bare chest framed by sequined tapestries. 251 While Guerrero has cultivated a wild artistic practice during their time organizing with Chances Dances, one that has expanded beyond the realms of promoting, curating, producing, and DJing into performance art, Justin “Swaguerrilla/Hijo Pródigo” Mitchell committed, perhaps more than any of the party’s other organizers, to making a career out of DJing and music production. His dynamic DJ sets provoked Chances dancers to interrogate the dark sides of their moods and whether club spaces could function without steady four-to-the-floor bass. As he puts it, his deep commitment to his craft has allowed him “to be a little more weird … take stronger chances with some sound work that’s not expressly for the dance floor.”683 On December 16, 2013 Mitchell warmed the Subterranean crowd up with the melancholy Mos Def single “Umi Says,” the lyrics of which suggest that “tomorrow may never show up, for you and me, this life is not promised.”684 As his first set continued to take shape with a Jamie xx song I couldn’t pin down, I got the sense that Mitchell was exploring how much bass he could get away with during the early, loungey part of the night.685 When he turned up the energy with 1998’s “Make It Hot,” by Missy Elliot and Nicole, dancers were already primed and ready to move. In the same way that the South and West Side house heads who came of age in the 1980s recall the music they heard during their teenage years with nostalgia, Chances DJs’ wild approach was firmly rooted in the 1990s; they favored a mainstream, if left of center, r&b repertoire produced by artists like Darkchild and Elliot, and the contemporary vocalists and producers who reference their work, like Kelela, Mapei, and Tinashe. This facet of the Chances repertoire foregrounded what Alexander Weheliye calls “a mechanized desire at the cusp of the human and posthuman.”686 Performances of 1990s r&b by Chances DJs not only called up the limned sonic space at the edge of grainy soul sounds and synthetic digital processing, hailing 252 those born under the sign of the 808, they also charged the Chances Dances audience to revisit, and refashion, the hetero-patriarchal pop music narratives of their youth. In addition to their queering of popular genres like r&b and hip hop, Chances DJs often took wild approaches to post-colonial bass sounds reductively assumed to be homophobic. Aay “Nina Ramone” Preston-Myint, who was DJing in conversation with Mitchell on December 16th, yoked Jamaican dancehall to the many queer, femme, and gender-fluid dancers giving themselves their lives on the Chances dance floor. In queering the genre, Preston-Myint took a wild approach to drawing from what Nadia Ellis has called the “out and bad” aesthetics of Jamaican music, those that rely on simultaneous performances of butch hyper masculinity and femme glamour.687 The Chances sound was always situated on the edge of old and new, hard and soft, dark and light. Its wild mix threatened to shift wholly into sonic territories alternately over-and underexposed. Most of the time, the audience ended up getting what it wants in the middle because the party’s organizing DJs cared deeply about giving and receiving pleasure. They were not positioning themselves solely as teachers, or maestros, but always also as students of sound. Ramone and Swag, to that end, closed the night at Sub-T with Lauryn Hill and The Fugee’s 1996 cover of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly.”688 Nearly everyone filled the floor, raising their hands above their heads as they exuberantly sang along to Flack/Hill’s anthemic vocal. This moment epitomized the wild aesthetic of Chances Dances; the willingness of its organizers/DJs to respond affirmatively to the extant tastes of their audiences even as they persistently challenged them. As Mitchell puts it, Chances Dances was an exercise in balancing “what they want, versus what you want to tell them.”689 253 Chances Dances organizers not only balanced listening and narrating through the musical give and take of their performances, they also gave and took with the visuals they used to promote the night. Before attending more fully to the ways that artifacts and images made meaning at their various events, I will first address the ways that Queen!’s visuality got steeped in neostalgic Chicago house history and futurity. 254 6.F - Queen!'s Neostalgic Visuality Fig. 6.5 - Smart Bar logo and Queen! logo, ca. spring 2013; courtesy of Smart Bar. The very name of the night Queen!, with its punctuating exclamation point, is a visual reference to Chicago’s iconic Wax Trax! record label, an entity that persists in Smart Bar’s neostalgic cultural imaginaries (most concretely, in June 2014, as a pop up store in Cabaret Metro).690 Smart Bar’s designers have developed marketing collateral that fortifies the party’s neostalgic cultural imaginary by showing prospective patrons that it is grounded by its long- running venue, but driven forward by the creativity of its DJs, as well as by the performances and lqqks of the many drag queens and nightlife personalities that have played official and informal roles in its production. For some of Queen!’s earliest publicity, designers created an insignia that riffed explicitly on Smart Bar’s iconic circular logo. Appropriating what appears to be a vintage, hand-drawn image from a domestic product advertisement, not unlike the ads featuring Chicago’s iconic Morton salt girl, the double-queen image appeals to the idea that Smart Bar is an authentic, dependable, cultural institution. The logo’s appeal to authenticity relies on a promotional logic that, as historian Sharon Zukin puts it in her work on urban branding, plays off a potential 255 consumer’s desire to root him or herself “in a singular time and place to a cosmic grasp of larger social forces that remake our world.”691 The authentic, old-timey look and feel Queen!’s circle insignia, an extension of the Smart Bar brand, connects to the temporal and spatial stability implied by the original, but it also disrupts the illusion of permanence. By adding two crowns and using a lyrical, hand-drawn font, designers queer the parent logo, suggesting that Queen! is Smart Bar’s evolved, femme-powered daughter, a neostalgic iteration of the original time-tested brand. Before Queen! became a consistent weekly residency in April 2013, Smart Bar’s designers played with several other brand identities that helped create a neostalgic visual lexicon for the night. A flyer from January 2013 riffed on the cut and paste punk aesthetic of Jamie Reid’s 1977 album artwork for the Sex Pistols’ “God Save The Queen” single; a March 2013 flyer built off the iconic design of a playing card (the queen of hearts, naturally).692 Designers set off bold, sans serif fonts by placing them against darker, saturated backgrounds, and used pop art colors and clean typographic elements to suggest that Queen! was a professional, but playful, endeavor. Additionally, designers included the names of both the Queen! DJs and hosts on these early marketing materials, connecting pioneering Chicago promoter Luis Lazu, of Paradise Soul fame, and legendary host Byrd Bardot, from Boom Boom Room, to the party’s developing identity, while still giving top billing to up-and-coming talents like Ruby D and Sal-E.693 When Smart Bar launched Queen! as an official weekly residency in April 2013, designers settled into a more consistent, less flowery marketing regime, maintaining the neon pops and all-caps style elements they were using on older flyers for the night and adding an outer glow effect to the text of both the Queen! script and the Smart Bar logo. This move helped 256 connect the look and feel of the night’s marketing materials to the neon-accented, black box feel of the club. Fig. 6.6 - April 2104, November 2013, and October 2013 Queen! pluggers; author’s personal collection. When I first started attending Queen! in fall 2013, Smart Bar’s design team was using a distinct visual identity with a different set of fonts, colors, and images each month. The pluggers I picked up at Gramophone Records (the legendary Chicago record store co-owned by Michael Serafini) incorporated vintage photographs of drag queens and circus strongmen, a crown icon, and a shaggy beard without a face. Like the new facing ladies icon created for Queen!, many of these graphic elements, built around images with veneers of patina, portrayed the queerness of the party subtly, as though it were an open secret. 257 Fig. 6.7 - Queen! Hosts Luis Lazu, Ruby Dee, and Sal-E at Queen!, August 5, 2013; photo courtesy of Tasya Menacer. While the graphic design used to promote Queen! has played an important role in shaping the night’s neostalgic imaginary, the party’s brilliant hostesses, and the fearless sartorial shapes they cut at the door and on the floor, put the visual contours of the Queen! brand into motion. Chicago drag artists, transwomen, and gender non-conforming club kids that carried lqqks at Queen! paid homage to the goth/punk vibe at Medusa’s and the legacy of gender-fuck underground parties like Boom Boom Room by ripping their fishnets, literally and metaphorically.694 Their “Everyday is Halloween” aesthetics (to pun on the classic 1984 Ministry single released on Wax Trax!) nodded to the lqqks of the past, present, and future of Chicago house music culture. Ruby Dee was the first scream queen to turn my head, and turn me out on the dance floor. With her flawless face, and dominatrix threads, Ruby’s lqqks always referenced iconic Chicago 258 nightlife predecessors, like Boom Boom Room’s Jojo Baby and Byrd Bardot, while pushing the sartorial, and otherwise embodied, possibilities of drag into new performative territories. On October 28, 2013, there was a Japanese videographer at Queen! shooting video footage of a b- boy uprocking to the sounds of guest DJ David “Cratebug” Macías. Ruby Dee, in fully cinched corset and sky-high, platform heels, strolled around this polished, masculine dancer with a fierce, playful grin. She dropped to the floor, whipping the tresses of her pinned up wig, simultaneously offering him hospitality, and suggesting that his masculine braggadocio was out of time and place.695 I felt like Ruby was protecting Queen!’s queer patrons in that moment; I know I didn’t want a spotlight and camera shoved in my face without consent, especially while I was trying to get my life. Moments such as these drew out my own complex relationship to spectatorship on the Queen! dance floor – I was at once a participant, fully involved in the co-production of the event as a member of its performing audience, and yet I was always trying to simultaneously attend to the night as a dynamic cultural object.696 The Queen! hostesses guarded the queer vibe of the night, forcefully interjecting a femme presence into what often felt like a masculine sonic space where thick, up-front beats pervaded. They reminded patrons that even if Queen!’s DJs put on a good show, they wouldn’t be holding the crowd’s attention alone. On November 3, 2013, I walked up to the door at Smart Bar ready to flash my ID and was greeted warmly by Ruby and Sal-E, her partner in crime. They were doing full Dia De Los Muertos face: jet black hair pulled back into tight buns, high lace collars, and big, Spanish fans. The attention to detail and the commitment to craft they presented through their gorgeous calaveras hailed other Latino subjects at the party, reminding audiences that Latinos helped build the culture and sounds of house. 259 While the night’s advertised drag hostesses ruled the party, there were always other dancers, many of them regulars at Queen!, taking inspiring, neostalgic approaches to their sartorial self-presentation. Indeed, the lqqks of Queen!’s hostesses bled into those of the performing audiences at the night, with groups of dancers working similarly involved garments and makeup most evenings. On November 3rd, 2013 there were two cliques on the floor when I arrived, one decked out in rubber fetishware, and the other rocking more street oriented ready-to- sweat lqqks: backwards caps, foppish hair, and drop-crotch trousers. These fashion-conscious dancers helped the paid hostesses and door queens maintain the neostalgic queer vibe of the night, especially since neither Queen!’s promoters and DJs, nor Smart Bar’s staff, seemed interested in marking the party as being explicitly designed for queer patrons. Fig. 6.8 - Dancer and choreographer Darling Shear cutting a rug at Queen!, August 5, 2013; photo courtesy of Tasya Menacer. 260 On December 1st, 2013, dancer and choreographer Darling Shear twirled around the Queen! dance floor, pearls swinging. Shear was wearing her hair short and platinum blonde that evening and it was set off against her brown skin by the club’s strobe lights.697 She wasn’t advertised on the flyer as a host, but she held the space for dancers with the best of them, her classical training shining as she pirouetted through the darkness. The Queen! scene relies on its paid hostesses and skilled dancers like Shear to keep it feeling underground, to maintain its neostalgic connection to the queers of color who ditched Chicago’s racist gay discotheques back in the day. This representational charge for the night’s queer of color audience members, while potentially burdensome, isn’t always a nefarious prospect; at times it even seems like a deliberate attempt on the part of night’s promotional team to share their authority to represent Chicago house culture. Shear, who came of age as a club dancer in the Boom Boom Room scene, says when she isn’t hosting she gets in for free, and when she is hosting, she drinks for free. Either way, Queen! gives her a place where she can “cut a rug.”698 For emcee and club performance artist Mister Wallace, the boundaries between masculine and feminine, as well as formal hosting and feeling an informal charge to hold neostalgic space at Queen!, were blurry. On February 9th, 2014, she was working a red silk kimono with gold brocade and thick, crimson braids – giving Lisa Bonet club realness. She wasn’t on the Facebook flyer as a host, but she was treating the room as her runway anyway, twirling her hair and duck walking.699 When she first started coming to Queen!, Wallace says she noticed that there were older black and Latino house heads holding it down at the party who felt they needed to represent and uphold the legacy of their musical culture, but that there weren’t so many younger black faces. When I interviewed her she said she was “seeing more black kids 261 come out [at Banjee Report nights and 18+ clubs].”700 When she went to Queen!, and her house worlds, she brought them with her. Wallace suggested that Queen! helped to preserve the queer of color soul of house music culture. She saw her work as a performer, in particular one who vogued on the Queen! dance floor, as contributing to this collective project. Wallace recalled the pride she felt when an older Queen! dancer who went by “Miss Thing” spotlighted her with a flashlight and honored her as a cultural torch-bearer: “he said, ‘honey … you get it, and you’ve got it, and we support you to take it wherever it is that you want to take it. We need people like you to keep what we had alive.’”701 Miss Thing verified Wallace’s talent, ferocity, and determination, and confirmed her capacity to perform in the neostalgic spirit of Chicago’s queer of color house history at Queen!, keeping what “we,” black and Latino queers, “had” in the past, sustained in the present. Queen! promoters realized that they may not have many personal connections to the queer of color youth cultures of South and West Side Chicago, where vogue performance traditions are maintained and developed at competitive balls and other community functions. Despite this lack of personal connection, they knew that vogue was an important part of the neostalgic kinesthetic lexicon of the underground they wanted to preserve. According to DJ Garrett David, the night’s promoters thought about trying to integrate a free whacking and voguing class early in the night to draw in young, queer of color dancers.702 They were hoping to get Wallace and DJ/producer/dancer Shaun J. Wright, who sometimes guest DJ’d at the night, to help Queen! “promote dancer culture.” Wright was trained in African dance and belonged to a footwork crew growing up in the Austin area of Chicago’s West Side. For him, learning to vogue didn’t happen in a class or dance studio; it was a constituent part of participating in Atlanta’s ball scene: “It’s the air I breathe, and 262 other people don’t know how to do it per se, but there’s a certain understanding of what’s happening, that doesn't lend itself, to me, [to] safari time. And it’s not unfamiliar, and it works exactly with the music. It’s built with the music, and the music is built for it.”703 Like many house dancers, Wright sees his movement as an extension of the music, not something that exists apart from it. Although he has trained in modern and classical styles, and worked as a professional dancer with African companies, he favors the gestures of vogue when he is at the house club because they allow him to perform variously gendered identities. Wright thinks of vogue as a quotidian ritual act with meaning and significance beyond “what appears” to be happening for spectators. Yet, he knows that no matter how familiar it is for him, its quotidian nature can’t be taken for granted, especially in the years since the form has been hyper-mediated through YouTube. This hyper-mediation has played into the ways that vogue gets consumed as what he calls a “safari” style, or what bell hooks refers to as “spectacle.”704 Mister Wallace realizes, like Wright, that vogue was at risk of being wrenched from its queer of color historical context because of its whitewashing in popular media: “you’ll see the Ukrainian boys, you’ll see the boys out in LA giving the vogue poses, in the heels, and they think that’s cool, so I hope it brings them across the line in to discover, you know, what are these kids referencing?” The line Wallace referred to could mean the color line or the line separating underground club culture from mainstream commercial culture. According to dance scholar Kyra Gaunt, hyper mediation via YouTube contributes to the “context collapse” of black social dance scenes, and the uneven remuneration of black social dancers. She suggests that promiscuous online circulation can also reify old media’s tendencies to segregate audiences.705 Despite these issues, YouTube has been a generative “amateur-to- amateur” learning environment for middle class queer of color youth who connect with each 263 other, and to cultural practices, like vogue, they might not otherwise have in-person exposure to.706 While vogue plays a special role on the Queen! dance floor because of its explicit connections to queer of color scenes and spaces, there are other visible, kinesthetically rich performances taking place on any given night at the party. On March 23, 2014, I was in one of my usual spots near the back DJ-booth/stage right bass bins, doing my approximation of the jack on the speaker as my body shook with the thunderous bass of Smart Bar’s Funktion One. There was a short Latino guy in a beanie there too, a dancer who I recognized from being at Queen! before. As I let the heavy bass waves course through my chest, I periodically took breaks to watch his quick footwork and dexterous spins. Around 2:00 a.m. another one of my favorite dancers showed up and pulled dude with the beanie into an ebullient embrace.707 That dancer, I later learned, was Nishi Roothan. Roothan, a belly dancer trained in Chicago dance studios and through Columbia College’s dance making BFA program, said that for her, Queen! felt like a safe space to express herself because it wasn’t specifically a gay night, nor was it a de facto straight night: “I don't really identify as gay or straight. I like who I like, but I still feel like I identify in that community because it’s not just like being okay with being gay, it’s about being okay with who you are, and I think that’s something about Queen! that's really special to me and something I don't see as much of in the other sectors that I see in Chicago.” Roothan said that Queen! functioned for her as a space of freedom because she could sense the ways that harmonious interactions between all its constituent elements sustained her, in particular the affective support she got there from her “deep acquaintances.”708 They cared for her in a very particular ways by sharing and amplifying her moods on the dance floor. Roothan saw this inchoate quality of dance floor interaction, what affect theorist Luis-Manuel García has 264 described as “liquidarity,” as connecting to the space/time of underground house music parties in general, and the neostalgic scene at Queen! in particular. 709 Before attending more expansively to the way that dancers, and dancing, helped constitute the neostalgic cultural imaginary of Queen! and the wild world of Chances Dances, I will first attend to the ways that visuality, image-making, and other techniques of ocular-centric address help constitute the connections that the Chances Dances parties make to Chicago house music history. 265 6.G - Cuteness and Wild Visuality at Chances Dances Fig. 6.9 - Chances Dances logo; courtesy of Chances Dances. The C*D logo was figured, and re-configured, in various shapes and sizes, placed against multiple tessellating jewel-tone backgrounds, and sometimes done away with entirely during the year I spent conducting fieldwork at Chance Dances. The icon seemed to reference opulence and glamour by quoting French fashion house Chanel’s iconic interlocking “Cs,” but perhaps that’s just a happy accident. One might also consider how the Chances Dances logo, with its bold black letters, placed here on a gold field against a blazing white celestial body, functioned as a seal, sigil, or coat of arms for a world apart, a wild utopia on the horizon of the sensible. On the collective’s website the C*D logo sat just above a tagline reading: “Queer Community In Chicago – Keepin’ It Cute Since 2005.”710 Organizers and audience members at the party often made recourse to the “cuteness” of their cultural work, using what affect theorist Sianne Ngai has described as the soft, edgeless, or bottomlessness, capacity of the cute as cover for radical politics. The cuteness of Chances Dances’ wild visuals and associated cultural products helped them to function in activist contexts without alienating dancers from the pleasure and release they needed on the dance floor.711 Cuteness, as theorized through its 266 everyday utterances at Chances, was also a hedge that acknowledged promising aesthetics, political organizing, or creative labor without committing too much emotional investment. As Ngai points out, the term moves aesthetic evaluation out of the spiritual/theological realm into the everyday register of taste, hiding the razor’s edge of critique in seemingly innocuous fluff.712 When critics derided Chances for not being authentic to Chicago, or to particular imaginaries of working class cultural authenticity, they often dismissed the party and its organizers as “art school” or “hipster,” implying that they had too much education and class privilege, and that the uncritical irony and heterogeneous aesthetics they employed in their work weren’t relevant to the marginalized groups they saw themselves connecting to or empowering. This facile reading of the collective’s cultural work belied the ways that Chances Dances organizers and dancers have co-created shared spaces for freedom dreaming, in particular for trans and gender non-conforming people. Fig. 6.10 - Chances Dances bathroom signage. Image on the left designed by Garrett Hansell; courtesy of Chances Dances. 267 Chances Dances’ wild aesthetics may have been strongly grounded in its affiliations with particular spaces and sounds, but the visual language of inclusion it used set the tone for its parties. In particular, Chances’ bathroom signage, which organizers placed over the male and female symbols on or near bathroom doors of the venues they work with, functioned on two complementary semiotic levels. First, these signs signified on a textual level, offering varying degrees of explicit written context explaining Chances’ gender inclusive policies, and second they disarmed potential critiques using cute design elements. The didactic on the left, designed by Garrett Hansell, uses a saloon-style all-caps font with a yellow and white on black color scheme to make its point succinctly: “GENDER NEUTRAL BATHROOM … ALL BODIES WELCOME!” Below the block text is a scrawled cursive message, “Let My People Pee. XOXO – chances.” The infantilized, no caps handwriting and pee-soaked aesthetic of the partially yellow-on-white block text frames the project of creating gender-neutral bathrooms as one that even a child should understand. Just like the African American spiritual it references, “Go Down Moses,” the textual message of the sign commands that its audiences permit people to do what comes naturally, suggesting that gender neutrality isn’t some hard-to-understand or grandiose political project, just common sense kindness. The second of the two bathroom signs, which the collective used at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) for its performance-based takeover, Summoning a New Queer Reality, goes into a great deal of detail about why gender neutral accommodations are necessary. There is a cute, hand-drawn element referencing Marlo Thomas’ 1974 feminist children’s record “Free To Be You and Me,” but the majority of the yellow and purple slanted text is printed in a much smaller font and contains the meat of the message. The rhetorical question posed at the top of the page (“SURE, WE CAN BE COOL WITH WOMEN AND MEN SHARING THE SAME 268 SPACE, RIGHT?”) bookends the conversation about bathroom inclusivity with cute rhetorical affirmations. The use of “sure,” and “right?” indicates that this is an informal address being made to someone who is already part of the Chances Dances community and sees themselves as caring and inclusive. Fig 6.11 - Chances Dances Summoning a New Queer Reality float and parade participants, June 24, 2007; photo courtesy of Chances Dances. Fig. 6.12 - Summoning a New Queer Reality Sylvester DIY mask; courtesy of Chances Dances. 269 In addition committing to fostering gender inclusivity, Chances Dances’ wild project queered the ways that experiences of ancestry and family were visualized. The collective’s 2007 pride parade float epitomized this work. Sewing and hot gluing down to the wire before Boystown’s annual pride parade with little more than donated craft supplies and a crew of dedicated volunteers, organizers Latham Zearfoss, Aay Preston-Myint, Dylan Mira, Chris Pappas, as and a crew of Chances dancers, turned a Uhaul-cum-mobile disco into a spikey, phallic, dragon/cartoon dinosaur covered in witch hats. Like they would later do with their MCA takeover, they called their mobile wearable/visual art/participatory action Summoning a New Queer Reality. Marching in the parade alongside the plush, purple truck, organizers and volunteers passed out paper masks depicting half-tone images of queer (s)heroes; a wearable set of foremothers and forefathers that included queer of color, trans, and punk activists, musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists. The half-tone black and white graphic quality of the masks emphasized artist biographies rather than encouraging easy cross-racial or cross-gender masquerade. Indeed, participants were invited to identify and connect with these icons because of their words and deeds first, and with and against the grains of their various intersectional subjectivities second. In circulating these cute paper masks, the organizers pushed parade spectators to make believe they were part of an expansive genealogy of queer art-makers as they critiqued the corporate pink washing of Pride. Aay “Nina Ramone” Preston-Myint recalls seeing on-lookers being taken with the masks: “It was really nice to see a connection with history that was personal, outside of these advertising images, and to connect with people on the street through those images instead of the Altoids float or whatever.”713 Chances organizers and dancers used 270 cuteness to counter and manage the power differential between subjects and fetishized objects of desire in their commodity-oriented world.714 In addition to using iconic bathroom signage, and producing one-off projects like the Summoning float, Chances organizers yoked cuteness to their wild ethos through guest performances and granting. On March 14, 2014, organizers awarded their biannual Critical Fierceness grant, which had been given to self-identified queer art-makers working in Chicago since 2008, and their Mark Aguhar Memorial Grant, which had been given to feminine spectrum artists of color in the city since 2012. The term “critical fierceness” was borrowed from the introduction of José Esteban Muñoz’ Disidentifications in which the author describes the manner in which filmmaker Marlon Riggs addresses the assumed whiteness of homosexuality in his film Tongues Untied (1989).715 The Mark Aguhar Memorial Grant is named for an MFA student at UIC Chicago, and a member of the Chances community, who passed away tragically in 2012. According to her personal website, Aguhar’s work “is a continuous exploration of queer expression and what it means to have grown up gay on the internet.”716 Zearfoss says the creation of a grant in her name was not only made possible by increased revenues from Danny’s and The Hideout, but also through a generous donation made by Aguhar’s family to Chances Dances following her transition.717 271 Fig. 6.13 - WITCH HAZEL at Subterannean, November 18, 2013; photograph by Micah Salkind. In the winter 2014 Chances granting cycle the award for Critical Fierceness was split between trans*queer performance project WITCH HAZEL and Margaret Bobo-Dancey; the Mark Aguhar grant went to multi-faceted performance artist Nic Kay. None of the grantees performed that evening, but WITCH HAZEL had performed at Subterranean on November 18, 2013. Their goth lip synch to Rihanna’s “Birthday Cake,” a one and a half minute anthem in praise of analingus from her 2011 release Talk That Talk, is paradigmatic of the ways that wild queer of color culture making gets played at Chances Dances in the key of cuteness.718 WITCH HAZEL emerged from the dancing audience to the sound of “Birthday Cake”’s staccato claps and aggressive lead synthesizer. Dressed in black tank tops and boots with bare arms and pearls, the trio comprised of Devin Casey, Imp Queen, and Ariel Zetina, mounted the small stage adjacent to the Sub-T DJ booth carrying a birthday cake covered in chocolate frosting and a bouquet of balloons. The song was over almost before it started and WITCH 272 HAZEL marked its brevity with some 60s girl group choreography (think wagging fingers and popping hips) before processing back into the audience. They twinned the low, bottomless, fluff of a Top 40 pop/r&b track and old school movement vocabulary with wild, goth makeup and self-fashioning, transforming what otherwise might have been a trivial throwaway dance number into a delicious, genre-defiant trifle. The ex-organizers who sat on the Chances Dances advisory board and made decisions about grant-making deployed cuteness as a minor aesthetic of wild collectivism, acknowledging the essential nature of their curatorial labor for queer of color revelers while refusing to celebrate art world exclusivity, power, and prestige. In the spring 2014 granting cycle they awarded Nic Kay the $1,000 Mark Aguhar Memorial award for the development of their new solo performance piece “Lil Black _____ Gone Wild.” According to Nic Kay’s application, quoted on the Chances website, the new work they proposed, which eventually became the touring performance “Lil BLK” (2015), was to be “heavily influenced by ballroom culture, live punk performance, butoh and praise dance.” Organizers said that Nic Kay’s project stood out among the applications “for its critical exploration of the tensions between belonging and difference, competition and collectivity, and tradition and innovation within queer, POC and activist communities.”719 Months later, in the summer of 2015, Nic Kay and I had a studio visit during their artist residency at ACRE in Steuben, Wisconsin. As we discussed the sound design, costuming, and staging elements of “Lil BLK,” I came to understand that Nic Kay’s use of cuteness as a minor affect in their performance was in part related to the way that the category allows for performance genres, and generations, to overlap queerly.720 “Lil BLK” staged a bildungsroman that would never end, 273 rather it was constantly looping back in on itself as Nic Kay developed enhanced self-knowledge and deeper self-love. Some performers at Chances, like Katy Albert and Sophia Hamilton of feminist duo Mothergirl, made use of cuteness in their work even as they critiqued its inability to destabilize consumer culture. In the remixed version of their piece “If You See Two of Something, Buy It,” which Albert and Hamilton performed the night of the Chances grant awards ceremony, the duo explored the ways that hyperbolic cuteness in distress can carry a haunting affective charge. In the original performance of the work, Mothergirl put pressure on consumer commodities like pretzels, lemons, and false eyelashes by presenting them as uncanny pairs, and then consuming or using them simultaneously until they became grotesque. They revisited this troubled cuteness on the Sub-T stage, setting it against a score created by Chances’ guest DJ RMX Reality. While RMX played their chopped and screwed vocals: “I own everything that you own. If I find something to have value, then it is split down the center and we each have half of the value …” Mothergirl consumed large pitchers of liquid the blue shade of Windex while the paused Chances audience looked on in a combination of shock, awe, and indifference. The performance suggested that cuteness might be effective cover for biting political critique, but it couldn’t cover over all the disturbing facets of commodity fetishism. At the Tuesday night Off Chances parties organizers helped increase the cute quotient by offering up vegan baked goods in addition to the free mixed CDs/online podcasts they furnished. According to Zearfoss, these saccharine offerings were an expression meant to reflect the sweetness of conversations that the Chances community was having around the pleasure of radical gift giving. Organizers hoped that by giving out snacks they would harness the wild “anti- capitalist potential of providing without the end-goal of profit.” Zearfoss called this cute cultural 274 work a “subtext” of the overt world-making happening on sonic and kinesthetic registers at the parties, noting that organizers hoped it would contribute to their radical project, even if temporarily.721 Fig 6.14 - Borderless Musical Imaginaries, performance and panel, January 26, 2014, featuring left/top to right bottom, Micah Salkind, Latham Zearfoss, Rosé Hernandez, Ali McDonald, Precious Davis, Juana Peralta, and Mister Wallace; images courtesy of Link’s Hall. The gifting of food and music at Chances struck me as a way in which organizers were connecting to Chicago house music culture’s legacy of buffet flat hospitality. I initiated a conversation about this seemingly unintentional parallel with Zearfoss at The Hideout and he agreed that there were significant connections between the wild, anti-capitalist ethos of Chances 275 and the maroon, low-profit and gift economies of early house music culture. When we spoke, Zearfoss had just been invited to imaginatively interrogate Chicago’s bygone arts institutions and aesthetic movements for the Extinct Entities performance series being produced by curators Anthony Stepter, Erin Nixon, and Anthony Romero at the experimental performance venue Links Hall. He thought that some shared work on the connections between house music history and the origins of Chances Dances could work well for the project.722 I said I would be delighted to collaborate him, knowing that it would be a ton of fun and would certainly help me further explore Chicago house music’s living legacies. Zearfoss and I began our research together driving around Chicago and shooting video footage of the exteriors of defunct house music venues. We filmed ourselves walking across the thresholds of these spaces of memory as well as those of spaces relevant to the Chances Dances community. During these trips we got a better sense of just how proximate many of the early house music venues had been to each other, and the Chances venues, spaces that artist Edie Fake called “memory palaces” in her magisterial illustrated series memorializing Chicago’s bygone sites of queer conviviality.723 We used our car time together to begin brainstorming ways we would bring the sonic and visual components of Chances Dances and Chicago house history together in the performance/lecture we hoped to create, settling on Arthur Russel’s 1978 masterpiece, “Go Bang,” as the opening salvo for our performance’s musical score.724 “Go Bang”’s celebration of a desire to see all one’s friends at once felt like an important inaugural gesture for a project that would attempt to connect dots between over forty years of wild, queer art making. The song is iconic for the generation that came up during and after the original Warehouse days, but it has also, like many of the Chances classics, remained legible to younger audiences who might hear themselves in baritone Julius Eastman’s masculine growl, or 276 in Lola Blank’s femmerotic exhortations. While “Go Bang”’s lyricists explicitly invoke the connections it helps cement across time, its meandering organ progressions, plucked cello, and distorted trombone accents fill out the story. The artists on the recording, and the dancers their music continues to hail, never stopped banging.725 Zearfoss and I performed the first iteration of the Borderless Musical Imaginaries Mixtape at Links Hall to a packed room on January 26, 2014. Our mixed musical score, comprised of sounds that had sparked passionate responses at ten years of Chances Dances parties as well as Chicago house classics, moved through recordings like Detroit super group Inner City’s techno pop classic “Good Life,” Sister Sledge’s disco masterpiece, “Lost in Music,” and contemporary house remixes of tracks like Frank Ocean’s “Thinking About You.”726 The score became the sonic backdrop, and sometimes foreground, for our dialogic performance of short essays, mine on Chicago house music culture’s history, Zearfoss’ on Chances Dances. We live EQ’d the volume for each other while we projected the video that we had shot. Zearfoss overlaid this visual score with a neon-colored track-list for the mix, as well as footage from past Chances Dances video shoots; bodies and text burned through and blurred across Chicago’s queer memory palaces. We even focused a multicolored strobing party light on an adjacent wall to augment the visual palimpsest, alluding to and evoking Chicago’s defunct and extent queer club cultures in another small way. Following our lecture/performance, Latham and I were joined by a group of nightlife personalities and producers who we hoped would help us expand the conversation and offer up other nuanced perspectives on Chicago nightlife’s queer of color and gender non-conforming club cultures. This representational shift, from two white cis men dominating the space and narrative, even if it was a narrative about the histories of queer people of color and allies, to a 277 more heterogeneous group where our voices would be de-centered, deliberately mirrored both the politics and optics of Chance Dances. The panel discussion moved from considerations of appropriation, and meditations on navigating the world of Boystown, to a conversation about creating alternative spaces, negotiating paranoia, and performing wild acts of defiance in front of mainstream audiences. The group discussed the visual and sonic aspects of being a part of Chicago club communities, and how those experiences related to the particularly emplaced memories of participating in and producing queer nightlife. Rosé Hernandez brilliantly called nightlife “social sculpture” and described the thrill it gets when it infiltrates even the most unwelcoming super clubs; Mister Wallace emphasized the importance of the non-commercial, intimacy of the after- hours, and the post-after hours diner run, to concretizing social bonds formed in queer nightlife; Juana Peralta connected intersectional historical perspectives to both material wellbeing and psychic survival; and Ali McDonald described their thrill at helping people find themselves on the dance floor. In addition to noting the importance of emplaced memories in Chicago’s queer nightlife cultures, each of the panelists emphasized the importance of dance in creating the wild utopian ethos they felt like Chances Dances preserved in Chicago. Zearfoss said that dance was critical, especially in the digital era, because “having an embodied moment is so rare. It’s what makes dancing so powerful, its what makes sex so powerful …You’re just having this moment where you’re like, ‘here I am. I’m all here.’” Precious Davis, a trans activist and club performer who, like Mister Wallace, bridged the Queen! and Chances Dances scenes, seconded Zearfoss’ emphasis on dance, saying that for her, dance is the form through which all the different sensual possibilities of nightlife come together and give her life: 278 Those moments for me are everything. I am channeling; I am embodying; I am feeling like a goddess. I don’t care what space I’m in, I’m twirling; I’m socking my hair; I’m whirling; I’m feeling the music. I was at Queen! a couple weeks ago and I felt like I got the holy ghost. Derrick Carter was like spinning, he is up here playing gospel house! I could not believe it … I was just so moved.727 In the final concluding section of this chapter I will unpack the ways that dancing in the brave spaces of Chances Dances and Queen! helped me to get my life, and better understand the integrative qualities of Chicago house music’s neostalgic and wild genealogies too. 279 6.H - Conclusion: Dancing in Brave Spaces It’s April 21, 2014 and I’m still at Queen!, but it is long before the lights will come on. Garrett David is on the decks spinning something with a halo of Harold Melvin’s “Bad Luck,” and there are several couples moving in synch. I am having a blast watching a duo bust out their partner dancing. They roll from their embrace and march in lockstep, shoulder to shoulder, sharing their moment. Their moves look very lindy hop, but they have that house bounce. There’s another dancer nearby. He is facing the rear of the club, spinning arms like windmills. He has his back to the DJ booth, legs akimbo, collard white oxford buttoned up almost to the neck, his greying hair slicked back. He is in a trance. As for me, I’m lost in music, in my feels, getting my life. Michael Serafini is on the decks now playing a track with an up-front sample from Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls:” “toot toot, beep beep,” it doesn’t much matter what the DJs play though, we are here to work tonight.728 *** It might seem counter-intuitive to end this chapter with an auto-ethnographic account of dancing in Chicago’s contemporary queer nightlife spaces. I would suggest, rather, that dance is the envelope that all sensual club experiences reside in. It makes sense to conclude with dance, because it assembles the non-teleological experiences of queer nightlife – it is the mode of expression through which the integrated elements of queer dance music culture are incorporated into the body, and the primary means through which a club’s performing audience responds to the DJ. I experience the dancing of those around me as performance, even if they aren’t aware of my presence as an audience of one, and even as I am deeply engaged in my own movements and feelings. In these encounters, club dancing is aural as well as visual. It is the expression that gives physical, embodied form to sound. It is also a spatially inflected practice, a means of 280 kinesthetically organizing time queerly while moving through the various territories of the dance floor.729 In this concluding section of the chapter, I move through, and theorize, from some of my experiences dancing at Queen! and Chances Dances to explain how my interpretive work on these parties has been mediated through my body in motion, and its interactions with the bodies of other dancers. While much of my thinking about “Chicago house dance” as an archive of Chicago’s queer of color and subaltern histories in motion has been developed in deep dialogue, and through study, with Chicago house dancer and scholar Boogie McClarin, this section will forego exploring the complex, contested, and critically important politics and histories of particular movement vocabularies and teaching practices. I will instead explore the ways that I, as an untrained but practiced social dancer, got my life and tapped into the expansive love ethic of Chicago house music culture in the specific neostalgic and wild club environments of Queen! and Chances Dances. The alchemy of a great club dancing experience begins with evaluating the space you have to move in. Are there enough people to fill the floor so that you won’t feel lonely or on display? Are there so many that you won’t be able let go and really throw yourself into your movements with abandon? Too many people means constrained dancing, as well as the possibility of unwanted touch. The social norms of touch at dance music events are certainly more expansive than they are in most public spaces, but for dancers in queer club spaces, many of them sexual minorities who experience their club dancing as an essential component of their mental health regimens, a dancing experience shaped by “haptic aurality,” or touch-oriented listening, can be both delightful and challenging.730 Sometimes I relish the casual touch of a stranger, but other times it 281 can be disturbing and unwelcome. Negotiating this ambivalence and risk becomes a constituent part of going out. More often than not my nights at Queen! were characterized by expansive rather than restrictive terrain, and a room that wasn’t too crowded to move. If I wanted touch, or close dancing, I could find it, but I could also keep to myself and claim large amounts of floor space by the back speakers for spins, kicks, and other big movements without worrying too much about whether I might accidentally touch someone in an unwelcome way or knock a drink over. Because Queen! was built on the Boom Boom Room model of an industry weeknight party, the so-called weekend warriors, or casual nightlife denizens who seem to drink more, have less control over their bodies, and often don’t respect the haptic norms of underground spaces, were few and far between there. Additionally, as several of my interviewees pointed out, unlike Red Dog, the longtime Boom Boom Room venue, Smart Bar has a dancer-friendly mentality. It is one of a few proper dance clubs in Chicago that has consistently allowed dancers to come early with their sweat rags, stretch out on the floor, and take up extra space with flips and partner-dancing routines.731 Unlike Smart Bar’s purpose-built dance floor, none of the spaces used for Chances Dances parties were intended for primary use by dancers with big moves. I found myself clenched in these spaces, my legs and arm muscles tensing in ways that inhibited my ability to get my life. However, like The Warehouse before it, Chances (especially Off Chances) could be socially loose even if it felt physically tight.732 When I dance, I always want to be big, to take up space, but I don’t want to be the center of attention. I’m being big for me, not for the other dancers in the room. I never look for a cypher, and if I end up in the middle of one, or processing in a Soul Train line, I try to get out as 282 quickly as possible. I’m always negotiating a simultaneous need to open up and to become smaller. Both impulses are embodied responses to spending a good quarter of my life trying to retreat into a fetal position. My default as a teen was a posture of submission – as if I could make myself small enough to disappear from the radar of those who might call me out for having too femme a vocal inflection, for swishing when I walked, for somehow comporting myself in a way that marked me as queer. Being in house music spaces has been a reprieve from this embodied retreat. I open my heart, extend my limbs, and revel in my own voice and gait. I need to spread out, to feel the fascia connecting my muscles to my bones pull taut. I want to take up physical space and become a bigger presence. While I always hoped to feel good taking up space at Chances Dances and Queen!, I was simultaneously sensitive to the demographics of their dance floors, hyperconscious of whether my white, masculine body was taking up too much space. I nervously considered whether my limbs were under control; whether I was at the center of the dance floor or the periphery; whether I was blocking out a short person or a femme. Dance spaces rooted in queer of color culture easily transform into colonized free zones for white queers to explore the contours of their relative privilege against an anonymous tableau of brown bodies. I’m thinking here of Shaun J. Wright’s critique of vogue safari and hooks’ notion of spectacle versus ritual. I repeatedly asked myself, as a white ally and comrade in crossover communities: what were the ethics of my participation? Queen! and Chances Dances were comprised of multiracial, sometimes majority-white, performing audiences, the former more masculine of center, the latter more femme of center. My decisions to gravitate to the peripheries at both parties reflected my sensitivities to what I perceived to be certain non-white, non-cis subjects’ more pressing needs for centrality. These 283 decisions also reflected my own psychic needs to physically enact a politics of yielding, to step up when asked for support, and then step back. I also wanted space to register the changes in the musical mixes at these parties, to show that as a DJ, and dance music aficionado/scholar, I could sense when a blend was taking place. I sang the lyrics of songs I knew, I shouted and whooped, I looked around me to see who else knew that something novel was being brought in. Often I would try to engage the DJ with a knowing look as I marked some new rhythmic element they were introducing with one of my outstretched limbs, still registering the primary pulse of the previous track’s kick drum in my feet as my hand, shoulders, or head grasped for fresh 808 high hats, snares, and other higher frequency rhythmic elements coming in. My performative acknowledgement of DJ technique helped me place myself as an expert of sorts even though I couldn’t perform with the virtuosity of a highly practiced club dancer. In these moments, when I was deepest in the mix, it was critical that I had somebody to share my dance, whether it was a new “party friend,” a developing “deep acquaintance,” a crush, or a lover; I need to be seen, to be recognized in my body.733 That all-important nod of a head, smile, or arm around my shoulders confirmed that our cultural work as a performing audience was a collective project, and that we could feel the experience of that collectivity through our loving gestures and touch. This “hapticality” was core to the experience of getting our lives together, to becoming mutually intelligible in our lived complexity.734 When I arrived in Chicago in October of 2013, I had a couple close friends in the city, but I did not want to have to rely on them to be my constant fieldwork companions. I tried my best to accustom myself to being with myself rather than by myself. I got a therapist, and I developed a consistent routine of going out, trying to better know my own needs and desires on the dance 284 floor even if I felt depressed or anxious about spending hours alone at night. It was amazing to transition from this space of solitary dance floor introspection to one where I felt I as though I was embraced by the Chances Dances community and included in the Queen! scene. I use these differing configurations – embraced by the community and included in the scene – to indicate that I experienced the sociality of these two parties in complementary ways, but that the relationships I developed at Chances Dances extended much farther beyond the dance floor than those I developed at Queen! Chances Dances may be best known as a suite of monthly dance parties, but it grew out of the activism and art-making of a group of friends that had already been connected by day. When dancers came to party on a Chances dance floor, they were augmenting relationships that may already have had very deep foundations. This was certainly true for the organizing cohort at Queen! too. The resident DJs, hosts, and guests affiliated with the night, especially those like Garrett David and Jacob “JPEG” Meehan who worked with Michael Serafini by day at Gramophone Records, were clearly friends and collaborators beyond the club. Many of the night’s producers and some of its regular dancers became better than acquaintances with me once I conducted interviews with them, and while nobody in that crew has yet become a bosom buddy, I felt welcomed and acknowledged by them in spite of my status as a researcher and temporary resident in Chicago. The connections I made at Chances were deeper, and more intimate; I feel sustained by them in a more substantive way, which has a great deal to do with the fact that I spent so much time outside of the club getting to know Latham Zearfoss through our work on the Borderless Musical Imaginaries Mixtape. As Jafari Allen says, to get your life is “to recover something that you profoundly need— perhaps parts of yourself, gathered together for once. All laid down together, side by side. To 285 find a deep and authentic truth of existence.”735 Allen writes specifically about the experience of black queers, for whom “survival has always been about finding ways to connect some of what is disconnected, to embody and re-member.”736 What does it mean for white folks to empathize with, and try to learn from and connect to, culturally specific experiences born in the alterity of black and or brown queerness? The experience of “getting your life,” as I have come to know it through my fieldwork at Queen! and Chances Dances, is profoundly connected to feeling historical connection despite ongoing fragmentation and rupture, both from my own subject position, and by listening and empathizing across various axes of social difference. If, as the Generator’s longtime resident DJ Dana Powell says, 80% of the dancers from The Warehouse days aren’t with us anymore, how do we come to know them and the art they might have made?737 How do we honor their memories on our dance floors? I suggest we do it, in part, by showing up, by caring for each other, and by telling the stories. In many ways my own participation and investment in Chicago house music spaces relies on my sense of privileged access to queer of color histories, a sense of benevolent entitlement not unlike that of other white, masculine of center, music entrepreneurs in and beyond the Chicago scene. Like Smart Bar owner Joe Shanahan, or DJ Garrett David, I at times fetishize the experiences of freedom and creativity born from simultaneous racial and sexual alterity in ways that cover over the work of the queer people of color whose voices I hope to amplify. My experience as a queer person differs in some ways from Shanahan’s or David’s too. Having grown up searching for queer ancestry, role models, and cultural traditions to which I could connect, and finding Chicago house as a way into these connections as a teenager, my engagement and interests in shared authority are shaped by sameness as well as difference. This is not to say that straight people don’t have a way in, indeed they do, and this is why house 286 music remains such a fruitful site of possibility and promise for those interested in working against the fragmenting logics of racism, heterosexism, neoliberal capitalism, and, as dancer and scholar Boogie McClarin puts it, “all the other isms.” The working out of shared history across axes of difference through the matrices of neostalgia, at Queen!, and wildness at Chances Dances, despite the various generational cleavages caused by HIV/AIDS death and shifting trends in dance music consumption, demonstrates why “going in,” rather than coming out can be a useful way of understanding the affective possibilities of queer nightlife. As debates rage on in Chicago about who has the right to represent or define house, the artists involved in these functions continued to innovate and remember, to stay rooted while creating new routes into and through Chicago house music’s history while sustaining themselves and the dancers who got their lives together on their dance floors.738 287 Conclusion The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) began programming Chicago’s Summerdance series in 1996 with the support of philanthropist Frances Comer, a socialite inspired to endow free, public, dance lessons and live music performances after visiting Lincoln Center’s Midsummer Night’s Swing in New York City.739 In just a few years, Summerdance became hugely popular with Chicago’s social dance communities, drawing thousands to its flagship salsa and swing nights.740 In 2004, seeing an opportunity to honor Chicago’s local, and under-represented, house music heritage, DCA director Mike Orlove, and curator Brian Keigher, began booking house DJs as part of Summerdance programming. Keigher says DCA staff produced the Wednesday night Summerdance DJ series on a shoestring the first year – he even used his own turntables and mixer – but that their speculative gesture paid off. The series was an immediate success with a younger, more ethnically diverse demographic than that which typically attended DCA programs. In 2005, Mayor Daley, partially by way of recognizing the huge success of the Wednesday programming, declared August 10 House Unity Day in Chicago.741 Keigher says that DJ series programming outgrew Grant Park’s modest Spirit of Music garden at 601 S. Michigan that same year. He imagined that future programming would take place not only in the Loop, but in all of the city’s neighborhood parks. Orlove and Keigher booked artists from the many generations, and scenes, important to house music culture’s development in Chicago, self-consciously curating with the knowledge that the DJ series was the city’s first highly-visible, public program acknowledging house as an important contribution to Chicago cultural heritage. Godfather Frankie Knuckles; pioneering producers like Jesse Saunders and Steve “Silk” Hurley; hot mixing radio stars like Badboy Bill, Ralphi Rosario, and Farley “Jackmaster” Funk; gay icons Psychobitch and Teri Bristol; and 288 second and third generation scions like Derrick Carter, Diz, Ron Trent, and Terry Hunter all performed for the DJ series. According to Keigher, it was a beautiful, intergenerational convergence: That was the most amazing thing and what made it so special to me … seeing grandparents pushing strollers … they grew up with house music and even seeing … Ron Trent’s mom coming to see her son spin, or to see how like Jamie Principle would come and sing on top of somebody’s set over there [gestures to Millennium Park] and like everybody knows the words.742 On the evening of June 26, 2006, during a performance by acid house legend and Chicago native DJ Pierre, several teenagers got into a fight and the Chicago Police shut down the Summerdance DJ series early. According to Valencia “Mother Diva” Dantzler, who introduced DJ Pierre that evening, the event was remarkably peaceful; nobody even knew that there was a fracas going on behind the scenes.743 This peaceful vibe permeates a video shot at the event by 411house collective. In their footage, now archived on YouTube, an unseen interviewer asks various audience members what it is about house music that they like. The multigenerational, racially diverse respondents say that house makes them feel alive, like they can be themselves.744 Following the incident at Daly Plaza, public safety officials told the DCA that it needed to produce the DJ series inside because the events were hazardous to public safety. As Keigher puts it, the Chicago Police Department had no connection to house communities and was equating DJ culture with gang culture: “we basically got reprimanded for booking DJs out in the public.”745 Keigher scrambled to call in a favor with Joe Shanahan, who agreed to host the remaining scheduled performances of the 2006 series at Metro/Smart Bar. For the next ten years DCA’s house music programming was inconsistent at best. Today the DCA and the mayor’s office of special events offer, or sanction, several regular house music programs, including hour-long “Wired Friday” lunchtime DJ sets at the 289 Chicago Cultural Center, and open-air performances in Daly Plaza, Millennium Park, and at The Taste of Chicago. The City of Chicago has also extended a few hard-fought-for olive branches by commemorating sites of house music memory, such as the block of Jefferson Street outside the original Warehouse, which was given the honorary name “Frankie Knuckles Way” in 2004, and the corner of Randolph and Halsted, which received recognition as “D.J. International Boulevard” in 2014. There was even a small Chicago house music exhibition at the DCA Cultural Center during the summer of 2015 named Move Your Body after the hook from Marshall Jefferson’s “House Music Anthem.” When Mayor Harold Washington established the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) in 1986 his team left house music out of any official language about the city’s heritage or its developing cultural priorities.746 Blues and western classical music earned mentions, but despite the fact that the sounds and spaces of house were already firmly enmeshed in the cultural fabric of queer, black, and Latino Chicago, it was conspicuously absent. Even if one assumes that house music culture wasn’t on the Washington administration’s radar, the extant omission of house music from Chicago’s 2012 Cultural Plan speaks to the ways that the city remains committed to a vision of its cultural heritage that reifies generic specificity. House is a sonic and kinesthetic product of people who never gave up on the sounds of jazz, blues, doo wop, r&b, soul, funk, punk, and disco, despite being told that they were no longer commercially viable. It is also something extra, a queer of color cultural constellation that cannot be accounted for using the language of genre and a wild harbinger of crossover communities that resist social fragmentation. Scholars of popular music must consider the many ways that house is a cultural reservoir that speaks to and archives histories of displacement, rootedness, and freedom. These are 290 American experiences, widely shared, and yet, they remain specific to Chicago’s African American migrants, their progeny, and their many musical interlocutors. Sounding house as a culturally specific Chicago amalgam made for ecstatic, spiritual, social dancing, rather than merely a style of music that emerged sui generis at the nexus of new technologies and ambitious entrepreneurialism, gives scholars of pop a chance to understand its relationships to a wide spectrum of ambivalent cultural experiences born in the shadow of late capitalism. Over a decade before Blaze composed “Do You Remember House?” there were already plenty of didactic, musical tutorials suggesting the proper ways to authentically remember and experience house music culture. Beginning with Rhythm Controll’s 1987 “My House,” house artists from Chicago and beyond have used their music to teach audiences not only how to hear and move to house music, but also how to feel through and across the social differences bridged by its foundational communities of dancers.747 When we remember house, we remember these differences, we remember these feelings; our remembering becomes a constitutive part of our dance, and our dance becomes our way of being together in crossover communities that transcend our many differences. 291 Notes on Terminology and Citations I use the term “gay” throughout this dissertation to account for people who use it describe themselves or their same-sex-desirous communities. Otherwise, I use queer. I often use “queer, black, and Latino” and “queer of color” interchangeably when I am not quoting directly from someone who has a particular way of framing the participation at an event, scene, or space to emphasize that there were often Afro-Latinos and other Latinos of Caribbean and Central American descent in Chicago’s house communities even if they are not always central to the stories being told. Despite the somewhat problematic ways that the second of these two phrasings (queer of color) minimizes the particularity of racial groupings that I am speaking to and for, I have decided to remain more or less ambiguous throughout to acknowledge the vague terms of racial identification used by my informants. Throughout this project I cite a bevy of commercial musical releases. Where possible I have added the version of a recording’s US release that most closely corresponds to the version being discussed to my discography, otherwise I have used the earliest recorded version I have been able to find using the Discogs online archive. For example, I often cite a US-based 12” record’s release date and label except in later chapters when a recording was more likely to have been experienced, owned, archived, or derived from an mp3 or CD. Additionally, I have attempted to make certain artist names consistent in terms of punctuation, even when they are listed in a variety of ways in discographic records. 292 Bibliography Books Abramson, Michael and Nick Hornby. Light On the South Side. Chicago, IL: Numero Group, 2009. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. Bacon, Robin Faith. 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Wilcots, Brett. “A Question about Chicago Importes Etc,” Deep House Page Forums, September 20, 2008, accessed May 30, 2014, http://deephousepage.com/forums/showthread.php?t=173080. Windy City Times. “Yearbook: AIDS First-Hand in 1985.” Windy City Times, September 21, 2005, accessed November 2, 2015, http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=9516. Witter, Simon.“JM Silk: Moving House.” NME, June 20, 1986, accessed April 18, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/jm-silk-moving-house. 318 ——————. “Let’s Get Spiritual - Deep House.” NME, December 10, 1988, accessed May 1, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/lets-get-spiritual--deep-house. ——————. “Time To Jack: The House Sound Of Chicago.” I-D, Summer 1986, accessed April 26, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/time-to-jack-the-house-sound- of-chicago. 319 Conferences, Lectures, Symposia, Unpublished Dissertations, etc. Chaytor, Maurice, Kristen Kaza, Craig Loftis, and Shaun J. Wright with Micah Salkind “The Illinois Humanities Council Presents: Old School/Future Classics.” Panel, The Silver Room, July 10, 2014, http://www.prairie.org/events/28720/old-school-future-classics. Crawley, Ashon. “Nothing Music: The Hammond B3 and the Centrifugitivity of Blankpentacostal Sound.” in Black Fugitivity, EMP Pop Conference, Seattle, WA, April 25, 2014. Dominguez, Pier. “Innocence & Realness: The Racial Kitsch of Mariah’s Carey’s Music Video Theatrics.” in Embodying America/Performing the Dream, Brown University, Providence, RI, December 4, 2015. García, Luis Manuel. “‘Can You Feel It, Too?’: Intimacy and Affect at Electronic Dance Music Events in Paris, Chicago, and Berlin.” Ph.D. diss., The University of Chicago, 2011. Gaunt, Kyra, Brian Polite, Moncell “Ill Kosby” Durden, and DJ Rich Medina. “Everybody’s On the Beat: The Music-Movement Continuum in New York City.” EMP Pop Conference 2013, NYU, New York, NY, April 18, 2013, http://www.empmuseum.org/programs-plus- education/programs/pop-conference/2013/emp-pop-conference-2013-new-york.aspx. Hurley, Steve “Silk”, and Farley “Jackmaster Funk” Keith. “Emerging from the Ashes: Early Creation of House Music after Disco and It’s Current Transformation to Electronic Dance.” Panel presented at the Dance Music Evolution: The History of House Music in Chicago, Columbia College, Chicago IL, February 22, 2014, http://www.colum.edu/Dance_Center/performances/b-real/house-symposium.php. Jones, Omi Joni. “Mapping Black Freedom.” Panel III, Archiving The Black Body, Northwestern University, April 19, 2014. King, Alan, Robert Williams, Derrick Carter, Micah Salkind, and Monica Hairston-Oconnell. “The House That Chicago Built.” Panel presented at Out at Chicago, The Chicago History Museum, January 30, 2014. McLeod, Kembrew. “Forget Absurd, It’s Ridiculous! New York’s Downtown Underground Theater Scene Sets the Stage for Punk.” In Proto-Punk Explosions, Pop Conference, EMP Museum, Seattle WA, April 18, 2015. Melnick, Jeff. “Project Culture: The Popular Arts of Public Housing.” In Reconsidering Race in the Built Environment. Cambridge, MA: Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, 2005. Muñoz, José Esteban. “The Brown Commons: After Paris Burned.” The Non-State of Queer Theory, Brown University, Providence, RI, April 11, 2013, 320 ————————. “X and The Wildness of the Punk Rock Commons.” Feeling Historical: Pop and the Unstoried Present, EMP Pop Conference, New York, NY, April 13, 2013. Novak, David. “Housing The Global Underground: Cassette Culture in the 1980s.” In Old Mobilities. EMP Pop Conference, Seattle, WA, April 26, 2014. Salkind, Micah and Latham Owen Zearfoss et al. “Borderless Musical Imaginaries Mixtape: House, Chances and Recuperating Queer Genealogies.” Extinct Entities, Links Hall, Chicago IL, January 24, 2014. Vargas, Deb. “Cantineras: The Splendid Surplus of Sucias,” in Queer Analysis: Frameworks for Nightlife Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, March 6, 2014. Williams, Robert, Lora “Lori” Branch, Byron Stingily, and Dwayne Woods. “House Music Pioneers: The Entrepreneurs and Artists.” Panel presented at Dance Music Evolution: The History of House Music in Chicago, Columbia College, Chicago IL, February 22, 2014, http://www.colum.edu/Dance_Center/performances/b-real/house-symposium.php. 321 Oral History Interviews conducted by the author, archived with The Center For Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL David Adams (dancer) – April 4, 2014. Celeste Alexander (DJ) – March 15, 2014. George “Georgie Porgie” Andros (DJ, producer) - April 10, 2014. Rita Bacon (DJ, organizer) – April 30, 2014. Marlon “Jo De Presser” Billups (DJ) – April 2, 2014. Lora “Lori” Branch (DJ) – February 20, 2014. Teri Bristol and Valerie “Psychobitch” Scheinpflug (DJs, producers) – March 4, 2014. Jesus “Roy” Bryant (dancer) – January 22, 2014. Craig Cannon (DJ) – February 5, 2014. Maurice “Judge” Chaytor (Frankie Knuckles Foundation) – February 9, 2014. Reggie Corner (promoter) – November 19, 2013. Harry Cross (DJ, promoter) - April 10, 2014. Valencia “Mother Diva” Dantzler (promoter) - March 24, 2014. Reggie “DJ Purple” Davenport (DJ, dancer) - February 7, 2014. Jesse De La Peña (DJ, promoter) - March 26, 2014. Michael Ezebuwku (DJ) – January 29, 2014. Toy “Tonka Toi” Foster and Victor “The Dizz” Blackful (dancer and DJ, promoter) - December 1, 2013. Ozzie Green (producer) - November 23, 2013. Jacquelyn “CQQCHIFRUIT” Guerrero (DJ, organizer, performer) – April 18, 2014. Andre Hatchett (DJ) – March 14, 2014. Felicia Holman (dancer) - April 7, 2014. 322 Larry Hope (designer, haberdasher) – December 7, 2013. Darlene “Lady D” Jackson (DJ) – November 20, 2013. Jevon Jackson (DJ) – December 9, 2013. Bernard Johnson (promoter) – December 17, 2013. Larissa Johnson (promoter, dancer) – March 21, 2014. Alan King (DJ) – February 13, 2014. Craig Loftis (DJ, producer) – February 6, 2014. Steve “Miggidy” Maestro (DJ) – May 7, 2014. Reggio Mclaughlin (tap dancer, bass player) - November 18, 2013. Leslie McClellan and Sherry “Sweet” Barren (dancers) - February 11, 2014. Dr. Meida McNeal (scholar, dancer, choreographer) – April 9, 2014. Jacob “JPEG” Meehan (DJ, promoter) - March 4, 2014. Czarina Mirani (DJ, journalist) - January 29, 2014. Justin “Swaguerilla/Hijo Pródigo” Mitchell (DJ, producer, organizer) - May 6, 2014. Natalie “La Spacer” Murillo (DJ, producer, promoter) - May 4, 2014. Anthony “Ace” Pabey (DJ, emcee, host) – February 7, 2014. Elbert Phillips (DJ, producer) - November 12, 2013. Aay “Nina Ramone” Preston-Myint (DJ, organizer, visual artist) – April 16, 2014. Dana Powell (DJ) – January 14, 2014. Duane Powell (DJ) – April 22, 2014. Zenzile Powell (dancer) – January 24, 2014. Alena “Alinka” Ratner (DJ, producer) - April 22, 2014. David “Global Groove Guru” Risqué (promoter, dancer) – May 2, 2014. 323 Kelsa Robinson (dancer) – March 13, 2014. Nishi Roothan (dancer) – March 10, 2014. Michael Sawyer (dancer) - June 12, 2013. Michael Serafini (DJ, record store owner) – February 5, 2014. Garrett “David” Shrigley (DJ, promoter) – January 23, 2014. Marea “Black Madonna” Stamper (DJ, producer) – April 2, 2014. Reggie Stanton (promoter, videographer, DJ) – December 23, 2014. Erik “Mister” Wallace II (performer, emcee) – January 24, 2014. Robert Williams (promoter, DJ) – January 16, 2014. Michael Winston (DJ) – February 2, 2014. Shaun J. Wright (DJ, vocalist, producer, dancer) – April 8, 2014. Bob Yeaworth (promoter, club owner) – November 22, 2013. Latham “The Lady Speedstick” Zearfoss (DJ, organizer, visual artist) – May 3, 2014. 324 Partial Discography Adonis. No Way Back. Trax Records, TX112, 1986, Vinyl, 12”, 33 ⅓ RPM, Red Label. Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force. Planet Rock. Tommy Boy, TB 823, 1982, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Alicia Myers. I Want To Thank You. MCA Records, MCA-52107, 1981, Vinyl, 7”, 45 RPM. Allesandro Novaga. Faces Drums 1. Shake Records, SR 001, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Annie Lennox, Walking On Broken Glass. Arista, 07822-12484-2, 1992, CD, Maxi-Single. Aretha Franklin, “Mary Don’t You Weep.” Amazing Grace. Atlantic, SD2-906, 1972, 2xVinyl, LP. Bang Orchestra! Sample That! Geffen Records, 0-20510, 1986, Vinyl, 12”, 45 RPM. Beyoncé. “Drunk In Love.” Beyoncé. Columbia, 2013, AAC, Album, 256 kbps, US: Columbia, 2013. ———--. “XO.” Beyoncé. Columbia, 2013, AAC, Album, 256 kbps, US: Columbia, 2013. Big Dipper and Mister Wallace. Cute 2 Me. Self-released, 2014, MP3, Single, 256 kbps. Black Box. Everybody Everybody. RCA, 2628-1-RD, 1990, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM, Maxi- Single. Black Ivory. Mainline / Dance. Buddah Records, DSC 132, 1979, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Blaze and Palmer Brown. I Remember House. Slip “n” Slide, SLIP 151, 2002, Vinyl, 12”. Bobby Caldwell, What You Won’t Do For Love. Clouds, 11, 1978, Vinyl, 7”, 45 RPM, Single. Ce Ce Rogers. Someday. Atlantic, 0-86687, 1987, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Chaka Khan. “I Know You, I Live You.” What Cha’ Gonna Do For Me. Warner Bros. Records, HS 3526, 1981, LP, Album. —————. Love You All My Lifetime. Warner Bros. Records, 0-40377, 1992, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM, Test Pressing. Ciara and Ludacris. Ride. LaFace Records, 88687-70451-2, 2010, CD, Promo, Single. Colonel Abrams. Trapped. MCA Records, MCA-23568, 1985, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. 325 Crystal Waters. 100% Pure Love. Mercury, 858 485-1, 1994, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. ——————. Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless). Mercury, 868 209-1, 1991, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. ——————. Makin’ Happy. Mercury, 868 763-1, 1991, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Coachouse Rhythm Section. Nobody’s Got Time / Time Warp. ICE, ICE 3-12, 1977, Vinyl, 12”, 45 RPM. Da Posse. “The Groove.” In The Heat of The Night. Future Records, FR-1, 1988, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Danny Tenaglia. Music Is The Answer (Dancin’ And Prancin’). Twisted America Records, TW12-55443, 1998, Vinyl, 12”, Single, 33 1/3 RPM. Dennis Ferrer. Hey Hey. Objektivity, OBJ 014, 2009, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. —————-. The Red Room. Objektivity, OBJ 016, 2010, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Destiny’s Child. “Bills, Bills, Bills (A Cappella).” Bills, Bills, Bills. Columbia, CAS 40443, 1999, Vinyl, 12”, Promo. Dinosaur L. Go Bang! #5/Clean On Your Bean #1. Sleeping Bag Records, SLX-O, 1982, Vinyl, 12” 45 RPM. DJ Dolla Bill. How It Started (DJ Dolla Bill Mix). MMP Records, 2014, MP3. DJ Pierre. “Box Energy.” Acid Trax Volume 2. Trax Records, TX5004, 1988, Vinyl, LP, Compilation. Ed Sheeran. I See Fire (Kygo Remix). Unofficial Release, MP3, accessed March 4, 2015, https://soundcloud.com/kygo/ed-sheeran-i-see-fire-kygo. ESG. “Moody.” ESG. 99 Records, 99-04 EP, 1981, Vinyl, 12” EP, 45 RPM. Farley “Jackmaster” Funk. “Acid Trip.” No Vocals Necessary. House Records, HU50, 1988, Vinyl, LP. ——————————. Love Can’t Turn Around. House Records, FU-10, 1986, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. ——————————. Funkin With The Drums Again. Trax Records, TX106, 1985, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM Blue Label. 326 ——————————. “The Funk Is On.” No Vocals Necessary. House Records, HU50, 1988, Vinyl, LP. Fingers Inc. Can You Feel It. Jack Trax/Indigo Music, 1989, Vinyl 12”, 45 RPM. ————. “Music Take Me Up.” Another Side. Jack Trax, FING 1, 1988, 2xVinyl, LP, Album. First Choice. “Let No Man Put Asunder.” Delusions. Gold Mine Records, GZS-7501, 1977, LP. ————. “Let No Man Put Asunder (Disco Madness Remix).” Disco Madness. Salsoul Records, SA 8518, 1979, Vinyl, LP, Compilation, Limited Edition. ————. “Let No Man Put Asunder (Shep Pettibone Remix).” Let No Man Put Asunder. Salsoul, SG 397, 1983, 12” 33 1/3 RPM. Frank Ocean. “Thinking About You (Lonsdale Boys Club Remix).” Thinking About You. Unofficial Release, FRANKOCEAN001, 2012, Vinyl, 12”. Fugees (Refugee Camp), Killing Me Softly. Ruffhouse, CAS 7935, 1996, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Garrett David. “That Queen! Track.” The Queen! Tracks. Stripped & Chewed, SCRS006, 2013, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM, White Label, Stamped. Gene Hunt. Living In A Land. Housetime Records, HT1015, 1989, Vinyl, 12”, 45 RPM. Grand High Priest. Mary Mary (Grand High Priest Hidden Mixes). We-Ze Records, WEZE001, 2006, Vinyl, 12”. Harold Melvin And The Blue Notes. Bad Luck (Part 1 & 2). Philadelphia International Records, ZS8 3562, 1975, Vinyl, 7”, 45 RPM. House Family. No Control. Underground, UN 115, 1987, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Inner City. Good Life. Virgin, 0-96591, 1988, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Isaac Hayes. “I Can’t Turn Around.” Chocolate Chip. ABCD-874, 1975, ABC Records, Vinyl, LP. Janice McClain. Smack Dab In The Middle. Warner Bros., DRCS 8893, 1979, Vinyl, 12”, Promo. Jesse Saunders. On And On. Jes Say Records, JS9999, 1984, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM, Black Label. 327 Jesse Velez. Girls Out On The Floor. Trax Records, TX102, 1985, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM, Red Label. ————. Super Rhythm Trax. Trax Records, CS001, 1985, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. J.M. Silk. I Can’t Turn Around. RCA Victor, 5702-1-R, 1986, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. ————. I Can't Turn Around (House in E♭Minor). RCA, PT 49794 R, 1986, Vinyl, 12”, 45 RPM. ————. Music Is The Key. D.J. International Records, D.J. 888, 1985, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Joe Smooth featuring Anthony Thomas. The Promised Land. D.J. International Records, DJ-905, 1987, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Kraftwerk. “Trans Europa Express.” Trans Europa Express. Kling Klang, 1C 064-82 306, 1977, Vinyl, LP, Album. Kym Mazelle, Useless. Capitol Records, V-15406, 1988, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Le’ Noiz. Wanna Dance? Trax Records, JS 9993, 1985, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Liaisons Dangereuses. Los Niños Del Parque. Roadrunner Records, RR 12553, 1981, Vinyl, 12”, 45 RPM. Lil’ Louis and The World. From The Mind Of Lil Louis. Epic, EK 45468, 1989, CD, Album. Lil’ Louis. The Original Video Clash. Dance Mania, DM 011, 1988, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. MACH. Funky Mix / On And On. Remix Records, 1980, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM, Unofficial Release. Marcia Griffiths. Electric Boogie. Mango, MLPS-7805, 1983, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Marshall Jefferson. The House Music Anthem. Trax Records, TX117, 1986, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM, Black Label. Mass Order, Lift Every Voice (Take Me Away). Columbia, 657748 6, 1992, Vinyl, 12”, Maxi- Single. Masters at Work. “The Ha Dance (Pumpin’ Dubb).” Blood Vibes/ Jump On It/ The Ha Dance. Cutting Records, CR-246, 1991, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. 328 MFSB. “Love Is The Message.” Love Is The Message. Philadelphia International Records, PIR 65864, 1973, Vinyl, LP, Album. Michael Jackson. Love Never Felt So Good (David Morales And Eric Kupper Def Mix). Epic, 2014, MP3, Single 256 kbps. Mos Def. “Umi Says.” Black On Both Sides. Rawkus, P2-50141, 1999, CD, Album. Mr. Fingers. “I’m Strong (Track).” 6 Track E.P., Jack Trax, 1988, Vinyl, 12”, EP, 33 1/3 RPM. Paul Simpson Connection. “Use Me Lose Me (Reprise Me).” Use Me Lose Me. Streetwise, SWRL 2209, 1982, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Phuture. Acid Tracks. Trax Records, TX142, 1987, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM, White Label. Ralphi Rosario featuring Xaviera Gold. You Used To Hold Me. Hot Mix 5 Records, HMF 102, 1987, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Rhythm Controll. My House. Catch A Beat Records, 2160, 1987, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Rihanna. “Birthday Cake.” Talk That Talk. Def Jam Recordings, B0016313-02, 2011, CD. River Ocean featuring India. Love & Happiness (Yemaya Y Ochun). Strictly Rhythm, SR 12231, 1994, Vinyl, 12”, Single. Robert Owen. I’ll Be Your Friend. RCA, 07863 62156-1, 1991, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Sex Pistols. God Save The Queen. Virgin, VS 181, 1977, Vinyl, 7”, 45 RPM, Single. Shaun Escoffery. Days Like This. Oyster Music, Promo 19A, 2001, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Sister Sledge. Lost In Music. Cotillion, 45001, 1979, Vinyl, 7”, 45 RPM, Single. Status IV. You Ain’t Really Down. Radar Records, RDR-12003, 1983, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. Stevie Wonder. “As.” Songs In The Key Of Life. Tamla/Motown, T13-340C2, 1976, 2xVinyl LP. Ten City. “Devotion (A Cappella).” Devotion. Atlantic, DMD 1099, 1987, Vinyl, 12”, Promo. Terry Hunter featuring Terisa Griffin. Wonderful. Soul Heaven Records, SHR014, 2007, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. The B-52’s. Love Shack. Reprise Records, 0-21410, 1989, Vinyl, 12”. ————. Mesopotamia. Warner Bros. Records, MINI 3641, 1982, Vinyl, LP, Mini-Album. 329 The Black Madonna. “Exodus.” Goodbye To All This. Stripped & Chewed, SCRS008, 2014, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. The Emotions. “I Don’t Wanna Lose Your Love (Special Disco Version).” Flowers / I Don’t Wanna Lose Your Love. Columbia, 23-10514, 1976, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. The Joubert Singers. Stand On The Word. Next Plateau Records Inc., NP 50028, 1985, Vinyl, 12”, 33 1/3 RPM. The Manhattan Transfer. Twilight Zone. Atlantic, DSKO 226, 1979, Vinyl, 12”, Promo. The Night Writers. Let The Music (Use You). Danica Records, DAN-1610, 1987, Vinyl, 12”, 45 RPM. The O’Jays. “Now That We Found Love.” Ship Ahoy. Philadelphia International Records, KZ 32408, 1973, Vinyl, LP, Album. Touchdown. Ease Your Mind (UK Remix). Streetwise, SWRL 2201, 1982, Vinyl, 12", 33 1/3 RPM. Tramaine Hawkins. “Fall Down (Spirit Of Love) (A Cappella Vocal).” Fall Down (Spirit of Love), A&M Records, SP-12146, 1985, Vinyl, 12” 45 RPM. Various. Disco Madness. Salsoul Records, SA 8518, 1979, Vinyl, LP. Wayne Williams. There Was A Place (Wayne and Terry In The Beginning Main). T’s Box, TB026, 2011, MP3. Willie Hutch. Brother’s Gonna Work It Out / Slick. Motown, Y 558F, 1974, Vinyl, 7”, 45 RPM, Single. 1 Author’s field notes, February 22, 2014. 2 Harrison, “Chicago Has Been Spared Full Force of Crack Epidemic.” 3 For the past several years Forbes magazine has determined who the top earning electronic dance music DJ/producers are in the world are based on earnings from live shows, merchandise sales, endorsements, recorded music sales, and external business ventures. Not a single artist listed in the publication between 2012 and 2015 is from Chicago: O’Malley Greenburg, “The World's Highest-Paid DJs 2012;” “The World's Highest-Paid DJs 2013;” “The World's Highest- Paid DJs 2014;” “The World's Highest-Paid DJs 2015.” 4 Bachin, Building the South Side, 209. 5 Stamz, Give ’Em Soul, Richard, 52. 6 Spirou and Bennett, It’s Hardly Sportin’, 32. 7 Euchner, Playing the Field, 134. 8 Frank, “Discophobia,” 286-287. 330 9 As Keith Negus points out, the codification of a genre is often abetted by a variety of industry intermediaries, including but not limited to radio station personnel, retailers, DJs and ‘street promotion’ people: Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures, 175. 10 Cheren et al., My Life and the Paradise Garage, 288; Bates, “Setting The Record Straight,” 18. 11 Vare, “Discophobia,” Opinion. 12 Young, “‘When Fans Wanted to Rock, the Baseball Stopped,’” 11. 13 “House Music Documentary Pump Up the Volume Documentary The Complete Series,” 9:26. 14 Valencia “Mother Diva” Dantzler, interview by Micah Salkind, March 24, 2013. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 15 Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, 376. 16 Thomas and Gear, “Rockin’ The House With Roland,” 41; Guarino, “The House That Trax Built,” F1. 17 Saunders and Cummins, House Music—the Real Story, 15. 18 As quoted from an interview with Jon Savage in Rietveld, “Disco’s Revenge,” 6. 19 For excellent arguments foregrounding the demolition’s national impact see Frank, “Discophobia”; Echols, Hot Stuff; and Lawrence, Love Saves the Day. 20 I use underground here as my interviewees do. The term’s use in context might mean that a practice or space is figuratively connected to the Underground Railroad, the covert, the hidden, the fugitive or the profane. Because the profit motive wasn’t the primary one in so-called underground Chicago loft parties, people who could not afford to drink were given space and treated well. Many also define the underground space as one formed in opposition to radio music, which is close to the way it is used in Thornton, Club Cultures, 8. 21 Mumford, Interzones. 22 I mean to emphasize the cultural work of a group of black queer people, and that Latinos and white queers were nearly always part of diverse, of informally constituted, dancing collectives. Indeed, queerness in this work is an operative category underneath an expansive blackness that includes various types of Latinidad as well. This expansive frame allows me to get at the ways various forms of oppression are experienced simultaneously and in concert without reconstructing a hetero-dominant spatial analysis. In this endeavor, I am indebted to George Lipsitz’ use of Earl Lewis’ concept of congregation, a theoretical framework he employs specifically to discuss the complexity of intersectional alliances formed in Chicago as a result of, and in spite of, racial segregation: Lewis, In Their Own Interests, 95; and Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place, 55. 23 Young,“‘When Fans Wanted to Rock, the Baseball Stopped,’” 12. 24 Romeyn, Street Scenes, 207. 25 Dickson, Bill Veeck, 60, 79. 26 Knee, “Jim Crow Strikes Out,” 64. 27 Dan Swanson, “Why Don’t Blacks go to Fenway Park?” 28 Young,“‘When Fans Wanted to Rock, the Baseball Stopped,’” 12. 29 Toni Ginnetti in Chicago’s Daily Herald, July 14, 1979, quoted in Young,“‘When Fans Wanted to Rock, the Baseball Stopped,’”11. According to J Bradford Robinson, Adorno’s main critique of jazz distilled and removed the music from its original social context, much in the same way that Dahl dislocated disco: Robinson, “The Jazz Essays of Theodor Adorno,” 10. 30 López, Dog Whistle Politics. 331 31 “Disco Demolition Night (’79).” 32 For more on surrogacy in performance, see: Roach, Cities of the Dead , 206. 33 “House Music Documentary Pump Up the Volume Documentary The Complete Series.” 34 Euchner, Playing The Field, 152. 35 Wilson, When Work Disappears, 14-15; and Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 72. 36 For more on white refusal, resistance, and renegotiation, see Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 29. 37 Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 323. 38 Deeb, “Tempo TV & Radio.” 39 Brewster and Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, 192-193. 40 Saunders and Cummins, House Music—the Real Story, 35. 41 Lopes, “Innovation and Diversity,” 59. 42 Echols, Hot Stuff, 201-208. 43 Deeb, “Tempo TV & Radio.” 44 Mays, “Steve Dahl.” 45 Billboard Staff, “Disco Not Proving Panacea For Black Artists.” 46 For more on disco’s heterogeneous musical makeup see Kronengold, “Exchange Theories in Disco,” 47. 47 Dugan, “Class Reunion.” 48 Billboard Staff, “Disco Not Proving Panacea For Black Artists.” 49 Lawrence, Love Saves The Day, 369; Penchansky “Chicago WGCI-FM Climbing After Killing Disco Format.” 50 For more on the genealogy of the concept of Afro-Diasporic cultural contagion see Browning, Infectious Rhythm. 51 Lawrence, Love Saves The Day, 33. 52 Penchansky, “Chicago WGCI-FM Climbing After Killing Disco Format.” 53 Cheren et al. My life and the Paradise Garage, 268. 54 Green, “Indie Disco Promoters Look to Pop Crossover.” 55 For more on the development of radio ratings systems see Davidson, “The Rating Game.” 56 See Penchansky, “Chicago WGCI-FM Climbing After Killing Disco Format,” 29; and Alridge, “Tempo TV.” 57 Kot, “The House That Chicago Built.” 58 Saunders and Cummins, House Music—the Real Story, 33. 59 McAllister, “The World According to Jere Mc,” June 2006. 60 Sassen, The Global City, 3-4. 61 The Near West Side and Near South Side are community areas, officially designated bureaucratic zones. The West Loop and South Loop are colloquially referred to sections of The Loop community area. 62 Betancur, “Gentrification and Community Fabric in Chicago,” 384. 63 Ford, “Population Succession in Chicago,” 160. 64 Wille, At Home in the Loop, 6. 65 Squires, et al. Chicago, 155. 66 Washburn, “Condo Conversion Boom.” 67 Wille, At Home in the Loop, 10. 68 Stamz, Give ‘Em Soul, Richard!, 30. 69 Gregory D. Squires et al., Chicago, 156. 332 70 Buck, “Lake Meadows Development a Show Piece.” 71 Merridew, “De Vise Hits Overbuilding.” 72 Merridew, “De Vise Assailed.” 73 Ziemba, “City Loses 123,500 Jobs.” 74 Chicago Fact Book Consortium, Local Community Fact Book. 75 Pruter, Chicago Soul, 76, 153. 76 Cohodas, Spinning Blues into Gold. 77 “Cradle of Rhythm and Blues (Record Row TV Documentary).” 78 Pruter, Chicago Soul, 31. 79 Fuerst and Hunt, When Public Housing Was Paradise, 61. 80 Melnick, “Project Culture,” 19-20. 81 Fuerst and Hunt, When Public Housing Was Paradise, 168. 82 Rudinow, Soul Music, 56. 83 George, The Death of Rhythm & Blues, 70. 84 Stamz, Give ‘Em Soul, Richard, 83. 85 Neal, “Sold out on Soul,” 122. 86 O’Reagan, “Payola (Radio).” 87 “History of Brunswick Records.” 88 Neal, “Sold out on Soul,” 120-121. 89 Keil, Urban Blues, 154; Grazian, Blue Chicago. 90 Reggio Mclaughlin, interview by Micah Salkind, November 18, 2013. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 91 Reckless, Vice in Chicago, 192. 92 “Bronzeville” is a positivist term used to emphasize the vibrant cultural economy of the black belt/Chicago’s segregated black neighborhoods. 93 De la Croix, Chicago Whispers, 149. 94 Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics. 95 Abramson and Hornby. Light On the South Side, 50-51. 96 Mclaughlin, House Music Oral History. 97 Craig Cannon, interview by Micah Salkind, February 5, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 98 Cabello, “Max Smith and Pat McCombs interviews.” 99 Chicago Gay Life Staff, “Disco Picketed.” 100 For data showing how white communities perceive black neighborhood takeover, see Massey & Denton, American Apartheid, 92. 101 De La Croix, “Black Pearls, ” January, 1999, 19. 102 Wille, At Home in the Loop, 15. 103 Kulieke, “Ritz Fires Arson, Says Police.” 104 Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place. 105 Chicago Gay Crusader, “C.K.’s settles race bias charges;” “Interview with Robert Williams.” 106 These New York antecedents are explored in depth in Chapter Two. 107 Baim and De La Croix, “Jacques Cristion Dies.” 108 Cabello, ‘Queer Bronzeville;’ Arnold, “Michael Ezebukwu, The Wanderer.” 109 King et al. “The House That Chicago Built.” 333 110 Slang Musicgroup, “Slang Musicgroup News.” 111 Reardon,“Redlining Drains City.” 112 McAllister, “The World According to Jere Mc,” June 2006. 113 Arnold, “Disco Curator.” 114 Rietveld, “Disco’s Revenge,” 7. 115 Goetze, Understanding Neighborhood Change, 101-102. 116 “Interview with Robert Williams.” 117 Mclaughlin, House Music Oral History. 118 Robert Williams, interview by Micah Salkind, January 16, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 119 Currid, “‘We Are Family,’” 195–196. 120 Saunders and Cummins, House Music — The Real Story, 46. 121 Hardy, Blood Beats: Vol. 1, 59. 122 Arnold, “If You Only Knew (Chip E.).” 123 Baraka, “‘The Changing Same,” 180. 124 Petridis, “Frankie Knuckle.” 125 I am use the term maroonage to emphasize that rather than demand inclusion like many of their Civil Rights-era counterparts, house people, many of them queer people of color, created a culture physically and psychically separate from the club culture of mainstream, white, hetero- patriarchal discotheques. This notion of the maroon space as a place of possibility and power is indebted to Ashon Crawley’s use of the term with respect to Blackpentacostalism: Crawley, “Nothing Music.” My use of the term also builds on the work of Sylvia Wynter, who proposes that maroon communities in a Jamaican colonial context were not cultural cul de sacs, but fertile sites of cultural maintenance and development: Wynter, “One Love — Rhetoric or Reality?” 65. 126 Gibson, “Material Culture and Embodied Action,” 182. 127 Fikentscher, “You Better Work!” Butler, Unlocking the Groove; Katz, Groove Music. 128 Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. 129 Currid, “‘We Are Family,’” 173. 130 Ibid, 171. 131 Larry Hope, interview by Micah Salkind, December 7, 2013. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 132 Cannon, House Music Oral History. 133 Lawrence, Love Saves the Day , 296. 134 Reggie Corner, interview by Micah Salkind, November 19, 2013. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 135 Lawrence, Love Saves the Day , 296. 136 Williams, House Music Oral History. 137 Matos, “How Chicago House Got Its Groove Back.” 138 Mirani, “Who Is Robert Williams?” 139 Lawrence, Love Saves the Day , 24. 140 Williams, House Music Oral History; Knuckles has repeatedly stated otherwise: Knuckles, “Frankie Knuckles.” 141 Mirani, “Who Is Robert Williams?” 334 142 Thomas, “House of Revolution,” 56. 143 Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, 104. 144 Goodman, Sonic Warfare, xiv. 145 Below 30 Hz is largely non-musical and inaudible; sounds like thunder, explosions, and other natural phenomena occupy this range. 146 Long, “State-of-the-Art Discoteque Sound Systems,” 2. 147 Cheren, et al., My Life and the Paradise Garage, 145. 148 Katz, Groove Music, 9. 149 Cheren, et al., My Life and the Paradise Garage, 182. 150 Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, 297. 151 Knuckles may have actually been involved in tweaking the system to make sure it remained acoustically primed: Knuckles, “Frankie Knuckles.” 152 Jesus “Roy” Bryant, interview by Micah Salkind, January 22, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 153 I am using “queer” here in the expansive sense that it is used in Allen, “Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture,” 215. 154 The Emotions, “I Don’t Want To Lose Your Love (Special Disco Version);” These techniques were also developed in New York by disco DJs like Pete Jones and employed by hip hop Djs throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s: Katz, Groove Music, 57. 155 Michael Ezebukwu, interview by Micah Salkind, January 29, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 156 Brewster and Broughton, Last Night a Dj Saved My Life, 137. 157 Ibid, 178-179. 158 Gibson, “Material Culture and Embodied Action,” 184. 159 Brewster and Broughton, Last Night a Dj Saved My Life, 178-179. 160 Veal, Dub, 40, 45. 161 These were similar to the transformations taking place in New York with hip hop: Katz, Groove Music, 161. 162 Arnold, “Disco Curator.” 163 Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret, 85. 164 Ibid, 84-85. 165 Terry, “Jesse Saunders.” 166 Henriques, “The Vibrations of Affect,” 78. 167 Bidder, Pump up the Volume , 32. 168 Williams et al., “House Music Pioneers” 169 Henriques, “The Vibrations of Affect,” 78. 170 Jones, “Mapping Black Freedom;” My use of ‘collective effervescence’ refers to the interpretation of Émile Durkheim’s work by Tim Taylor in: Taylor, Strange Sounds, 182. 171 García,“‘Can You Feel It, Too?’” 177-178. 172 Henriques, “The Vibrations of Affect,” 67. 173 Xue-rui et al., “Changes of Blood Pressure and Heart Rate.” 174 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 7. 175 Nyong’o, “I Feel Love,” 106. 176 Allen, “For the Children Dancing,” 316. 335 177 De la Croix, Chicago Whispers, 126, 148-153. 178 De la Croix, “Black Pearls,” March 1999. 179 Cannon, House Music Oral History. 180 Quoted from Dancing on PBS (1993) in Allen, “For the Children Dancing,” 319. 181 Broughton, “My Kind Of Town.” 182 Bryant, House Music Oral History. 183 Cannon, House Music Oral History. 184 Johnson, “Feeling the Spirit in the Dark,” 407. 185 Crawley, “Nothing Music,” April 25, 2014. 186 Broughton,“My Kind Of Town.” 187 Johnson, “Feeling the Spirit in the Dark,” 413-414. 188 This is a generalized frame for a phenomena dealt with in great detail in: McBride, “Can the Queen Speak?” and Miller, “Legacy Denied.” 189 Allen, “For the Children Dancing,” 318. 190 Eng, et al., “Introduction,” 1-3. 191 Robinson, “A Historical Development,” 248. 192 As a mentor of mine, Providence Black Repertory Company founding Artistic Director, Donald King, once said, the greatest DJs are able to integrate something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. 193 De La Croix, “Black Pearls,” January 1999. 194 Saunders and Cummins, House Music—The Real Story, 31. 195 Broughton, “My Kind Of Town.” 196 Morton, “‘The Rusty Ribbon,’” 589; and Clark, “Making Magnetic Recording Commercial,” 10. 197 Cannon, House Music Oral History; Chicago Tribune. “Display Ad 34 - Pioneer RT - 707 Tape Deck.” 198 Craig Loftis, interview by Micah Salkind, February 6, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 199 Hurley and Keith. “Emerging from the Ashes.” 200 Knuckles, “Frankie Knuckles.” 201 First Choice, “Let No Man Put Asunder.” 202 McAllister, “The World According to Jere Mc,” May 2006. 203 Williams, House Music Oral History. 204 Broughton, “My Kind Of Town.” 205 Ibid. 206 Brewster, “Ron Hardy, Chicago Legend.” 207 Mirani, “Who Is Robert Williams?” 208 Kulieke, “Ritz Fires Arson, Says Police.” 209 Broughton, “My Kind Of Town.” 210 Thomas, “House of Revolution.” 211 Broughton, “My Kind Of Town.” 212 Thomas, “House of Revolution,” 62. 213 Chuck D quoted in Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 24. 214 Gonzalez, “Armand van Helden;” Matos, “How Chicago House Got Its Groove Back.” 215 Eisenberg, “Cassette Tapes Reeling Ahead;” Fantel, “Sound; Fine Tape Decks for Less.” 336 216 Fantel, “A Deck Deals Twin Tapes.” 217 Novak, “Housing The Global Underground.” 218 Thomas, “House of Revolution,” 61. 219 First Choice, “Let No Man Put Asunder (Disco Madness Remix).” 220 Various, Disco Madness. 221 Bradby, “Sampling Sexuality,” 157. 222 Hardy, “Live at The Muzic Box 1983,” 15:00. 223 Paul Simpson Connection, “Use Me Lose Me (Reprise Me);” First Choice, “Let No Man Put Asunder (Shep Pettibone Remix).” 224 Allesandro Novaga, Faces Drums 1. 225 Hardy, “US_Studio_Muzic Box 12_15_1983,” 21:30. 226 Broughton, “My Kind Of Town.” 227 Stevie Wonder, “As.” 228 Thomas, “House of Revolution.” 229 Loiperdinger and Elzer, “Lumiere’s Arrival of the Train,” 90. 230 Countryman, Up South . 231 Griffin, “Who Set You Flowin’?,” 60. 232 Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 190. 233 Hardy, “Live at US Studios/The Muzic Box_1_17_1984.” 234 De La Peña, “JDLP’s Martin Luther King Speech Feature.” 235 King, “We Shall Overcome;” Gene Hunt, Living In A Land; Matthew, “The Armando Project: Armando Gallop: A Life.” 236 For more on the history of the song, “We Shall Overcome,” see Redmond, Anthem,176. 237 Matthew, “Gene Hunt.” 238 Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, 62. 239 Lawrence, Can You Jack?, liner notes, 7. 240 Broughton,“My Kind Of Town.” 241 Dinosaur L, Go Bang! #5/Clean On Your Bean #1. 242 Lawrence, “‘I Want to See All My Friends At Once,’” 157-158. 243 DJ Pierre, “Box Energy.” 244 Matthew, “DJ Pierre.” 245 Butler, “‘Everybody Needs a 303, Everybody Loves a Filter,’” 116. 246 J.M. Silk, I Can’t Turn Around. 247 J.M. Silk, I Can’t Turn Around (House in E♭Minor). 248 Isaac Hayes, “I Can’t Turn Around.” 249 House Family. No Control. 250 Urban, “Tyree Cooper Interview.” 251 Tramaine Hawkins, “Fall Down (Spirit Of Love) (A Cappella Vocal).” 252 The Night Writers, Let The Music (Use You). 253 Petridis, “Frankie Knuckles.” 254 Dana Powell, interview by Micah Salkind, January 14, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 255 Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, “Acid Trip.” 256 Novak, Japanoise, 49. 257 Hardy, “110 ron40 Ron Hardy Live at the Muzic Box, 1985.” 337 258 Johannsen, “Playing Favourites: Traxx.” 259 Keil and Feld, Music Grooves, 107. 260 Touchdown, Ease Your Mind (UK Remix). 261 This formulation of house authenticity in the present differs somewhat from that outlined vis a vis rock music in Auslander, Liveness. 262 Da Posse, “The Groove.” 263 Rose, Black Noise, 65-66. 264 Ten City, “Devotion (A Cappella).” 265 For a British take on the marketability of Ten City and other “deep house” artists with pop presentational elements, see: Witter, “Let’s Get Spiritual - Deep House.” 266 Thomas, “House of Revolution,” 61. 267 Coachouse Rhythm Section, “Nobody’s Got Time / Time Warp.” 268 Goldman, “Eddy Grant: Living On The Ice Block.” 269 Mr. Fingers, “I’m Strong (Track).” 270 Brewster and Broughton, Last Night a Dj Saved My Life, 572. 271 Fingers Inc, “Music Take Me Up.” 272 Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, “The Funk Is On.” 273 Arnold, “Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk, 1987-1988.” 274 Caryl, “Stop Calling it Deep House!” 275 Brewster, “Ron Hardy, Chicago Legend.” 276 Chaytor, et. al. “The Illinois Humanities Council Presents: Old School/Future Classics.” 277 Powell, House Music Oral History. 278 Gaunt, The Games Black Girls Play, 14. 279 Green, Selling the Race, 83. 280 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 6. 281 Acland, “Introduction: Residual Media,” xiii – xxvii. 282 The Chicago Defender, “Soul Train Hit With Teens.” 283 Lehman, A Critical History of Soul Train on Television. 284 Kent and Smallwood, The Cool Gent, 82. 285 Pruter, Chicago Soul, 16. 286 Green, Selling The Race, 83. 287 Stamz, Give ’Em Soul, Richard!, 60, 65. 288 Jack Cooper was Chicago’s first black appeal DJ to play phonograph records on the radio, but Al Benson was the first to blend the gutbucket delta blues familiar to his up-south listeners with the new, up-tempo sounds of the Black Metropolis. His show on 1390 AM, WGES, helped promote the sale of r&b music in Chicago and inspired a generation of radio DJs to play sounds born in the semi-improvisatory settings of the city’s cabarets, clubs, and dance halls. Benson’s show also proved the promotional power of radio in Chicago’s cultural marketplace: “Cradle of Rhythm and Blues (Record Row TV Documentary).” 289 Widder, “The UN of the Airwaves On Channel 23.” 290 Lehman, A Critical History of Soul Train on Television, 28. 291 Austen, “Soul Train Local.” 292 The Chicago Defender, “‘Soul Train’ Is Great: Goes National.” 293 Lehman, A Critical History of Soul Train, 24. 294 Austin, “Soul Train Local.” 338 295 David Risque, interview by Micah Salkind, May 2, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 296 DeFrantz, “Unchecked Popularity,” 133. 297 Darlene “Lady D” Jackson, interview by Micah Salkind, December 9, 2013. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 298 Rroy et al., From The Root To The Fruit of House Music, 8. 299 Cannon, House Music Oral History. 300 Hill, “Roller Rinks Attached to Amusement Parks.” 301 Cohen, “Variety.” 302 Reggie Stanton, interview by Micah Salkind, December 23, 2013. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 303 “Definition of Stepping” Hill, “Remember the Loop Roller Disco on West 95th Street in Chicago?” 304 Ortiz, “Urban Roller Skating Fights for Survival as U.S. Rinks Close.” 305 Lora “Lori” Branch, interview by Micah Salkind, February 20, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 306 Loftis, House Music Oral History. 307 Darlene “Lady D” Jackson, House Music Oral History. 308 Celeste Alexander, interview by Micah Salkind, March 15, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 309 Darlene “Lady D” Jackson, House Music Oral History. 310 Taylor, “Music and the Rise of Radio in Twenties America,” 259. 311 Craig Loftis, House Music Oral History. 312 Saunders et al., House Music — The Real Story, 35; Hernandez, “Steve Silk Hurley;” Teri Bristol and Valerie “Psychobitch” Scheinpflug, interview by Micah Salkind, March 4, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 313 Arnold, “Disco Curator.” 314 Izzo, “Lou DiVito.” 315 Kajikawa, Sounding Race in Rap Songs, 40-41. 316 Arnold, “Disco Curator.” 317 Lou DiVito, “DJ Lou DiVito Hot Mix WDAI 1980 #1.” 318 Janice McClain, Smack Dab In The Middle. 319 The Manhattan Transfer, Twilight Zone. 320 According to Jesse Saunders, WDAI was, for the most part, the first radio station through which the house generation heard these long-form blends: Saunders and Cummins, House Music — the Real Story, 35. 321 Novak, Japanoise, 200. 322 Eisenberg, “Cassette Tapes Reeling Ahead.” 323 Roy et al., From The Root To The Fruit, 30. 324 Saunders, “What Kind Of House Party Is This? (Jesse Saunders Excerpt).” 339 325 Saunders and Cummins, House Music—the Real Story, 119. 326 Galil, “An Oral History of the Chosen Few Picnic.” 327 Risque, House Music Oral History. 328 Arnold, “If You Only Knew (Chip E.).” 329 Alan King, interview by Micah Salkind, February 13, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 330 Risque, House Music Oral History. 331 Andes, “Growing Up Punk,” 214-215. 332 Nguyen and Nikpour. Punk, 8-9. 333 Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 25. 334 Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,” 438. 335 Branch, House Music Oral History. 336 Ibid. 337 Ibid. 338 Alexander, House Music Oral History. 339 Andre Hatchett, interview by Micah Salkind, March 14, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 340 Ibid. 341 Saunders, “What Kind of House Party is This?” (Jesse Saunders Excerpt), 1994. 342 Rroy et al., From The Root to the Fruit of House Music, 27. 343 Corner, House Music Oral History. 344 Rroy, From The Root to the Fruit of House Music, 27. 345 Meida McNeal, interview by Micah Salkind, April 9, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 346 Corner, House Music Oral History. 347 Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 24. 348 Johnson, Appropriating Blackness, 58. 349 Fleming and Mingay, What Kind of House Party Is This?  234. 350 Ibid, 238. 351 Arnold, “Vince Lawrence, House’s Architect.” 352 Green, Selling The Race, 66. 353 Examples of how listeners describe WXFM’s standard programming can be found in Keating, “Words ‘n’ Chords Mailbag.” 354 Matthew, “Still Shockin’.” 355 Arnold, “Vince Lawrence, House’s Architect.” Stanton, “Chez Damier.” 356 Kent et al., The Cool Gent, 243. 357 For more on the rise of the dance music category and Billboard’s promotion of it see Nusser. “Query-Can You Dance To It?” and “Billboard International Dance Music Forum” 358 Chicago Tribune Staff, “Egmont Sonderling.” 359 “WBMX.COM - The Real Story - Part 1,” 0:30. 360 Pechanksy, “Chicago WGCI-FM Climbing After Killing Disco Format.” 361 “WBMX.COM - The Real Story - Part 4,” 9:29. 362 Douglas, Listening in Radio and the American Imagination, 124. 340 363 Green, Selling The Race, 85-86. 364 “WBMX.COM - The Real Story - Part 3,” 3:00. 365 Ibid, 4:00. 366 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 6. 367 Brewster and Broughton, The Record Players, 238. 368 Bidder, Pump up the Volume , 25. 369 Butler, Unlocking the Groove, 166. 370 “WBMX.COM - The Real Story - Part 2,” 7:43. 371 “WBMX.COM - The Real Story - Part 4,” 12:30. 372 Saunders and Cummins, House Music — The Real Story, 50. 373 Saunders, “What Kind Of House Party Is This? (Jesse Saunders Excerpt).” 374 Matthew, “Farley Jackmaster Funk.” 375 Butler, Unlocking the Groove, 64. 376 Vazquez, “Can You Feel the Beat?” 107; Rose, Black Noise, 75. 377 Weheliye, “‘Feenin’,” 33. 378 Kot, “House.” 379 Status IV, You Ain’t Really Down; Colonel Abrams, Trapped; First Choice, “Let No Man Put Asunder;” Keith, “160 farley100 Farley Keith WBMX, ~1985.” 380 “WBMX.COM - The Real Story - Part 5,” 3:10. 381 “WBMX.COM - The Real Story - Part 6,” 10:59. 382 Zenzile Powell, interview by Micah Salkind, January 24, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 383 “WBMX.COM - The Real Story - Part 7,” 7:01. 384 Ibid, 6:50. 385 Ortiz, “Lost in the Mix.” 386 Matthew, “Farley Jackmaster Funk;” Chicago Tribune. “WBMX Radio Sold for $27 Million;” Billboard Staff, “Newsline.” 387 Ross, “Black-Owned Consultancies Emerge on Scene.” 388 This process began in the 1960s and reached a new more complex level of intensity during the 1980s and 1990s: George, The Death of Rhythm & Blues. 389 Weisbard, Top 40 Democracy, 242-243. 390 The Chicago Ambassador, “Joe Shanahan, Chicago’s Most Influential Music Man.” 391 Muñoz, “The Brown Commons: After Paris Burned.” 392 Wilcots, “A Question about Chicago Importes Etc.” 393 Rroy et al., From The Root to The Fruit, 68. 394 Ibid. 395 Bidder, Pump up the Volume, 20. 396 Fleming and Mingay, What Kind of House Party Is This?, 210. 397 Marlon “Jo De Presser” Billups, interview by Micah Salkind, April 2, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 398 Broughton, “My Kind Of Town.” 399 Straw, “Sizing up Record Collections,” 9. 341 400 Michael Serafini, interview by Micah Salkind, February 5, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 401 By 1986 the Imports approach had become standardized across the US: Bessman, “NMS: Breaking Records at Retail.” 402 Fleming and Mingay, What Kind of House Party Is This?, 243. 403 MACH. Funky Mix / On And On; Jesse Saunders, On And On. 404 I use the term mashup retrospectively to indicate the ways that the track makes sonically ambiguous what might have otherwise been thought to be obvious distinctions between emulated material and new musical ideas: Sinnreich, Mashed up, 65. 405 Morey and McIntyre, “The Creative Studio Practice of Contemporary Dance Music Sampling Composers,” 55. 406 Guarino, “The House That Trax Built.” 407 Fleming and Mingay, What Kind of House Party Is This?, 238. 408 Ibid, 235. 409 Brewster and Broughton, The Record Players, 253-254. 410 Fleming and Mingay, What Kind of House Party Is This?, 219. 411 Le’ Noiz, Wanna Dance? 412 Fleming and Mingay, What Kind of House Party Is This?, 235. 413 Jesse Velez, Super Rhythm Trax. 414 Jesse Velez, Girls Out On The Floor. 415 Liaisons Dangereuses, Los Niños Del Parque. 416 Adonis. No Way Back; Marshall Jefferson, The House Music Anthem. 417 Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, Funkin With The Drums Again. 418 J.M. Silk, Music Is The Key. 419 Brogan, “Nation’s Hottest Dance Music Rising from Chicago’s Underground”; Hurley and Keith. “Emerging from the Ashes.” 420 Billboard, “J.M. Silk - Chart History.” 421 Kot, “House.” 422 Witter, “Time To Jack.” 423 Fleming and Mingay, What Kind of House Party Is This?, 219. 424 Witter, “JM Silk: Moving House.” 425 Ibid. 426 Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, Love Can’t Turn Around; Saunders and Cummins, House Music — The Real Story, 99. 427 Arnold, “Vince Lawrence, House's Architect.” 428 MIDEM is billed as the largest international business event for the “musical ecosystem:” MIDEM, “Midem Online Registration.” 429 Baraka, Blues People , 26. 430 Saunders and Cummins, House Music — The Real Story, 99. 431 Loftis, House Music Oral History; Guarino, “The House That Trax Built.” 432 Brewster and Broughton, The Record Players, 272. 433 Boorman, “Marshall Jefferson.” 434 Guarino, “The House That Trax Built.” 435 Ibid. 436 Brewster and Broughton, The Record Players, 247. 342 437 Galil, “The Return of Dance Mania Records.” 438 Donato and Strong, “Council Panel Votes For Lid On Juice Bars.” 439 Saunders and Cummins, House Music — The Real Story, 107. 440 Arnold, “Vince Lawrence, House’s Architect.” 441 Brewster and Broughton, The Record Players, 262. 442 Saxelby, “Back to the Phuture.” 443 Lawrence, Can You Jack?, 10. 444 Renn, “Trax Records, Chicago Acid, Jack Tracks, Phuture, Armando, Liddell Townsend.” 445 Kym Mazelle, Useless; Ce Ce Rogers, Someday. 446 Urban, “Marshall Jefferson: The 5 Magazine Interview.” 447 Phuture, Acid Tracks; Joe Smooth featuring Anthony Thomas, The Promised Land. 448 Arnold, “If You Only Knew (Chip E.).” 449 Joe Smooth featuring Anthony Thomas, The Promised Land. 450 Loftis, House Music Oral History. 451 Renn, “Trax Records, Chicago Acid, Jack Tracks, Phuture, Armando, Liddell Townsend.” 452 Ralphi Rosario featuring Xaviera Gold, You Used To Hold Me; McCormick, “Seagrape Weathers Stormy Times”; Grafton, “Ralphi Rosario.” 453 Bang Orchestra! Sample That! 454 Arnold, “Vince Lawrence, House’s Architect.” 455 Morse, “Plugging in Pop Music.” 456 Popson, “The Wax Trax Method of Making Records.” 457 Lee, “Re-Examining the Concept of the ‘Independent’ Record Company,” 18. 458 Arnold, “Medusa’s.” 459 Cooke, “Richard Cooke’s Discovery.” 460 McLeod, “Forget Absurd, It’s Ridiculous!” 461 Arnold, “Medusa’s”; Burt, “A Look Back in the Mirror at Medusa’s.” 462 Eng, “Some Dance Clubs Cater to Tastes of Teenagers.” 463 Kelsa Robinson, interview by Micah Salkind, March 13, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 464 Bravin, “The DJs.” 465 Bristol and Scheinpflug, House Music Oral History. 466 Arnold, “Medusa’s.” 467 Billups, House Music Oral History. 468 Matthew, “The Armando Project: Mike Dunn Interview Transcript.” 469 Duane Powell, interview by Micah Salkind, April 22, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 470 Brewster and Broughton, The Record Players, 267. 471 Lil’ Louis and The World, From The Mind Of Lil Louis. 472 Rojas and De La Peña, “Club Naked Feature.” 473 Acosta, “A Warehouse of Dreams.” 474 Rojas and De La Peña, “Club Naked Feature.” 475 Ibid. 476 Ibid. 343 477 Larissa Johnson, interview by Micah Salkind, March 21, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 478 Darlene “Lady D” Jackson, House Music Oral History. 479 Jevon Jackson, interview by Micah Salkind, December 9, 2013. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 480 Zenzille Powell, House Music Oral History. 481 Steve “Miggidy” Maestro, interview by Micah Salkind, May 7, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 482 Risqué, House Music Oral History. 483 Donato, “Hanging Out.” 484 Maurice “Judge” Chaytor, interview by Micah Salkind, February 9, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 485 Cannon, House Music Oral History. 486 Moore, “Not for Whites Only.” 487 Ibid. 488 Windy City Times, “Yearbook;” Gretchen Gavett, “Timeline: 30 Years of AIDS in Black America.” 489 Baim, Out and Proud in Chicago, 149-150. 490 Branch, House Music Oral History. 491 Michael Winston, interview by Micah Salkind, February 2, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 492 Bristol and Scheinpflug, House Music Oral History. 493 Dana Powell, House Music Oral History. 494 Arnold, “Medusa’s.” 495 Donato and Strong, “Council Panel Votes For Lid On ‘Juice Bars.’” 496 Park, “Juice Bars.” 497 Davis, “Aldermen out to Put Squeeze on Juice Bars.” 498 Arnold, “Medusa’s.” 499 Author’s field notes July 8, 2012. 500 “Old school” is a slippery term used by house audiences who came of age in the mid-1980s. While it is highly-subjective and generationally-specific, in the context of the Old School Reunion Picnic it is mostly synonymous with “Classic” when used to describe house music. For an example of the highly subjective nature of the term, see Lewis, “Old School Is.” 501 Galil, “An Oral History of the Chosen Few Picnic, the ‘Woodstock of House Music.’” 502 Chosen Few DJs, “About.” 503 hooks, Salvation, 213-214. 504 My ethnographic approach to The Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic is deeply indebted to the ethics of what performance studies scholars Dwight Conquergood and D. Soyini Madison have called “co-performative witnessing.” I also build off insights developed by ethnomusicologist Kyra Gaunt, who offers a generative template for revealing a “‘somatic historiography’ of black musical style that captures the social memory of a community.” Finally, 344 I am deeply indebted to methodological interventions made in the fields of ethnomusicology and performance studies by Kai Fikentscher and Fiona Buckland. These scholars’ participatory fieldwork in New York’s underground house club communities has shaped my attention to the ways DJs and dancers co-create meaning on and around dance floors at Chosen Few and beyond: Madison, “Co-Performative Witnessing,” 827; Gaunt, The Games Black Girls Play: 4; Fikentscher, “You Better Work!”; Buckland, Impossible Dance. 505 Higuchi, “The Billiken Club,” 157. 506 Rutkoff and Scott, “Pinkster in Chicago,” 325. 507 Miller, “Americanism Musically.” 508 Washington, “Proclamation of Black Creativity Days, February 4-12, 1984.” 509 Green, Selling the Race , 72. 510 McCoy, “African American Elders, Cultural Traditions, and the Family Reunion,” 16. 511 Vargus, “More Than a Picnic.” 512 Hatchett, House Music Oral History. 513 Ibid. 514 McCoy, “African American Elders, Cultural Traditions, and the Family Reunion,” 20. 515 Davidson et al., “City Offers Street Kids Escape from Dead-End”; Spielman, “City Budget Cuts Safety, Anti-Gang Programs.”; Education Week, “Chicago School Closures Galvanize Parent Activists.” 516 Baldwin, “The ‘800-Pound Gargoyle,’” 86. 517 The impetus to make family from non-blood kin, which has also shaped informal adoption and non-nuclear extended family configurations, can be traced back to earlier forms of sociality developed under the pressures of plantation slavery as well: Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925. 518 Wilkins, “Beyond Bandung,” 194-195. 519 Heard, “‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,’” 1059. 520 Hagan, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free.” 521 Weston, Families We Choose, 29; Stack, All Our Kin, 59. 522 Nelson, “Whither Fictive Kin?”; Chadiha, Letha. “Urban and Rural African American Female Caregivers’ Family Reunion Participation,” 132. 523 See Robert Williams’ personal photos featured in Arnold, “The Warehouse.” 524 Johnson, “Feeling the Spirit in the Dark,” 407. 525 Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, 22; Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 165; Dodson, Dodson and Gilkes, “‘There’s Nothing Like Church Food,’” 520. 526 Twitty, “Barbecue Is an American Tradition – of Enslaved Africans and Native Americans.” 527 Henderson, “Ebony Jr! and ‘Soul Food,’” 81. 528 McCoy, “African American Elders, Cultural Traditions, and the Family Reunion,” 17. 529 Classical theologists would connect this conceptually to self-giving love: Finn, “Agape.” 530 hooks, Salvation, 46. 531 ESG, “Moody.”; MFSB. “Love Is The Message”; Lil’ Louis, The Original Video Clash; Gaunt, Kyra et al., “Everybody’s On the Beat.” 532 Shaun Escoffery, Days Like This; Dennis Ferrer, Hey Hey; Terry Hunter featuring Terisa Griffin, Wonderful; Michael Jackson, Love Never Felt So Good (David Morales And Eric Kupper Def Mix). 533 Diana Taylor, The Archive and The Repertoire, 17; Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 21. 534 Schloss, Foundation, 26-27. 345 535 Ibid. 30. 536 Ibid. 29. 537 Chaka Khan, “I Know You, I Live You.” 538 I do not mean to imply that there isn’t a great deal of melodic quotation activating similar semantic linkages in hip hop production, rather that the DJ’s performance in house music relies heavily on melodic quotation to a degree that the hip hop DJ does not. 539 Kun, Audiotopia, 17. 540 Kraftwerk, “Trans Europa Express.” 541 Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force, Planet Rock. 542 The O’Jays, “Now That We Found Love.” 543 Stern, “Neural Nostalgia.” 544 I am emphasizing Freud via N’yongo as opposed to Durkheim, whose theory of “collective effervescence” is often employed by theorists of club affect, because Freud’s construct seems to better capture ways that feelings catch from person to person at The Picnic: Nyong’o, “I Feel Love,” 105; see also; Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 208. 545 García, Luis-Manuel. “‘Can You Feel It, Too?’” 2. 546 Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, xiii. 547 I am using Mark Butler’s concept of ontological thickness, which he builds from Gracyk and Zak’s work on ontology in Butler, Playing with Something That Runs, 42. 548 DJ Dolla Bill. How It Started. 549 Willie Hutch. Brother’s Gonna Work It Out / Slick. 550 Harold Melvin And The Blue Notes, Bad Luck (Part 1 & 2); Alicia Myers, I Want To Thank You. 551 Cohen, “From the Big Dig to the Big Gig,” 46. 552 Stanton, Reggie, House Music Oral History. 553 Allen, “For the Children Dancing the Beloved Community,” 319. 554 I use the pronoun “he” here to acknowledge the fact that all of the DJs at the 2012, 2013, and 2014 Picnics I attended were men. For more on this, see Fikentscher,“You Better Work!”, 64. 555 I’m using vibe here as Lawrence quoting Thornton does, to characterize the intensity of the dancing, “the discursive embodiment of the dancing crowd”: Lawrence,“Beyond the Hustle,” 205. 556 For a description of the term performing audience, which breaks down the distinction between audiences and performers in the context of electronic dance music cultures, see Butler, Unlocking the Groove, 47, 72. 557 Friedland, “Disco,” 28. 558 My analysis here is indebted to Barbara Browning’s thoughtful use of, and historicization of a contagion metaphor in Browning, Infectious Rhythm, 54. as well as Ronak Kapadia’s use of the term as indicative of sonic, and performative, processes of transmission, mutation and change in Kapadia, “Sonic Contagions,” 238. 559 Silver, “The Electric Slide.” 560 Marcia Griffiths, Electric Boogie. 561 Black Ivory, Mainline / Dance. 562 Jackson, “Improvisation in African-American Vernacular Dancing,” 44. 563 Hazzard-Gordon, “Afro-American Core Culture Social Dance,” 21. 564 Baraka, Blues People; Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 360. 565 Risqué, House Music Oral History. 346 566 Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 832. 567 “Interview with Malik Yusef,” Chicago’s Finest: The Chicago LP. 568 hooks, Salvation, 146. 569 Crystal Waters, 100% Pure Love; Crystal Waters, Gypsey Woman (She’s Homeless); Crystal Waters, Makin’ Happy. 570 “Crystal Waters Performance,” Wigstock The Movie. 571 McCarthy, “Crystal Waters Joins Harry Romero, Armand Pena & Alex Alicea in ‘Blow’ Video.” 572 Waacking involves jerky motions of the shoulders and arms, and tutting involves changing the angles of the arms on the beat in a way that approximates the arm positions of Egyptian hieroglyphs. 573 Bragin,“Techniques of Black Male Re/dress,” 2. 574 During the 2014 Chosen Few awards ceremony, for example, DJ Craig Cannon, one of the original gay, black, disco DJs who DJ’d at Robert Williams’ US Studios parties, wasn’t present to receive his accolades. I texted him to find out where he might be, hoping to get him back stage in time, and he said he was still at home, having received no confirmation about the day and time of the ceremony. 575 Author’s field notes, July 8, 2012. 576 Dennis Ferrer, Red Room; River Ocean featuring India, Love & Happiness (Yemaya y Ochun). 577 Rivera-Servera, Performing Queer Latinidad, 159. 578 Author’s field notes July 5, 2014; Wayne Williams, There Was A Place (Wayne and Terry In The Beginning Main). 579 Author’s field notes, July 6, 2013. 580 Collins, “Proclamation.” 581 There is no mention of house music in either of Chicago’s published cultural plans: Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, “City of Chicago Cultural Plan;” Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, “Chicago Cultural Plan 2012.” 582 Author’s field notes, 2013. 583 Cohen, “From the Big Dig to the Big Gig,” 46. 584 Author’s field notes April 21, 2014. 585 Smart Bar, “Queen! Sundays With New Residents: Frankie Knuckles & Derrick Carter.” 586 Serafini, House Music Oral History. 587 Madrid-González, Nor-Tec Rifa!, 19. 588 I’m using “wild” as it was used by José Esteban Muñoz in two public lectures: Muñoz, “The Brown Commons;” Muñoz, “X and The Wildness of the Punk Rock Commons.” Muñoz routes the term through Jaques Derrida’s use to index the anachronistic, un-congealed, and simultaneously unifying/dis-unifying moments of sonic effervescence that took shape in brown, punk communities during the Reagan years. 589 Allen, “For the Children Dancing the Beloved Community,” 318. 590 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 146. 591 Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” 592 Author’s field notes May 5th, 2014. 593 Smart Bar, “Smart Bar Chicago.” 347 594 Garrett “David” Shirgley, interview by Micah Salkind, January 23, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 595 Serafini, House Music Oral History. 596 Ibid. 597 Myers, “A Neighborhood Condo on this Booming Lakeview Block.” 598 Shaun J. Wright, interview by Micah Salkind, April 8, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL.; Ischar et al. Marginal Waters, 6. 599 Heinemann, “Sunny and Sheer.” 600 Jano, “Susan Stanley.” 601 Johnson, “Revamp Planned for Juice-Bar Law.” 602 The New York Times, “After 72 Years, Wrigley Field Night Games Hit Home.” 603 Davis, “City Council Panel Recommends Zoning Defense on Juice Bars.” 604 Bob Yeaworth, interview by Micah Salkind, November 22, 2013. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 605 Despite symbolic efforts at including queer people of color, like the 2012 installation of memorials to Bayard Rustin and James Baldwin, actions like alderman Hansen’s kept Boystown white: Ghaziani, “Measuring Urban Sexual Cultures,” 377, 386. 606 Shanahan, “My Guardian Angel, Frankie Knuckles.” 607 Darlene “Lady D” Jackson, House Music Oral History. 608 Mirani, “Byrd Bardot Takes Over at Boom Boom Room.” 609 Boom Boom relaunched in 2016: Mirani, “Boom Boom Room is Back!” 610 Marea “Black Madonna” Stamper, interview by Micah Salkind, April 2, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 611 Author’s field notes February 1, 2014. 612 Rita Bacon, interview by Micah Salkind, April 30, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 613 Aay “Nina Ramone” Preston-Myint, interview by Micah Salkind, April 16, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 614 Salkind and Latham Zearfoss et al. “Borderless Musical Imaginaries Mixtape.” 615 Latham “The Lady Speedstick” Zearfoss, interview by Micah Salkind, May 3, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 616 Salkind and Latham Zearfoss et al. “Borderless Musical Imaginaries Mixtape.” 617 Bacon, House Music Oral History. 618 Zearfoss, House Music Oral History. 619 Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia. 620 Arnold, “From Loft to Warehouse.” 621 Zearfoss, House Music Oral History. 622 The Hideout, “History of The Hideout.” 623 Chances Dances, “The Parties.” 348 624 Hanhardt, Safe Space, 205. 625 Cannon, House Music Oral History. 626 Bernard Johnson, interview by Micah Salkind, December 17, 2013. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL; Matthew, “Jack!” 627 Bogt et al., “Intergenerational Continuity of Taste,” 319; Dana Powell, House Music Oral History. 628 Erik “Mister” Wallace II, interview by Micah Salkind, January 24, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 629 Grand High Priest. Mary Mary (Grand High Priest Hidden Mixes); Aretha Franklin, “Mary Don’t You Weep.” 630 The “Ha” was originally sampled from the Eddie Murphy film Trading Places (1983) but it was made iconic by Masters at Work: Masters at Work, “The Ha Dance (Pumpin’ Dubb).” 631 Currid, “‘We Are Family,’” 171. 632 King et al, “The House That Chicago Built.” 633 Brewster and Broughton, “Paradise Garage and the Lost Art of DJ’ing.” 634 Author’s field notes October 20, 2013. 635 Black Ivory, Mainline/Dance. 636 McMahon et al. “The Drug War at Home In Human Terms, the Casualty List Is Never- Ending.” 637 Adonis, No Way Back. 638 Destiny’s Child, “Bills, Bills, Bills (A Cappella).” 639 Keil and Feld, Music Grooves, 96. 640 Danny Tenaglia, Music Is The Answer (Dancin’ And Prancin’). 641 Mass Order, Lift Every Voice (Take Me Away). 642 Royster, Sounding Like a No-No, 27. 643 Allen, “For the Children Dancing the Beloved Community,” 318. 644 Bradby, “Sampling Sexuality.” 645 MFSB, Love Is The Message. 646 Livingston, Paris is Burning. 647 Chaka Khan, Love You All My Lifetime; Robert Owen, I’ll Be Your Friend. 648 Author’s field notes February 9, 2014. Bobby Caldwell, What You Won’t Do For Love. 649 Legendary Chicago door queen Byrd Bardot, who famously controlled the gate at Boom Boom Room, and promoter Luis Lazu, founder of Paradise Soul, also played important roles in conceiving of and producing early iterations of Queen! 650 Ryce, “The Black Madonna.” 651 Stamper, House Music Oral History. 652 The Joubert Singers, Stand On The Word. 653 Stamper, House Music Oral History. 654 The Black Madonna, “Exodus.” 655 Garrett David, “That Queen! Track.” 656 Shrigley, House Music Oral History. 657 Ibid. 658 McBride, “Can The Queen Speak?,” 377. 659 Ed Sheeran, I See Fire (Kygo Remix). 349 660 Preston-Myint, House Music Oral History. 661 Beyoncé, “XO.” 662 Beyoncé, “Drunk In Love.” 663 Muñoz, Disidentifications; Hat tip to Dr. Ashon Crawley for pointing this out to me. 664 King et al., “The House That Chicago Built.” 665 Muñoz, “The Brown Commons: After Paris Burned;” Muñoz, “X and The Wildness of the Punk Rock Commons.” 666 Annie Lennox, Walking On Broken Glass; Ciara and Ludacris, Ride; Black Box, Everybody Everybody; Big Dipper and Mister Wallace, Cute 2 Me. 667 Fikentscher, “‘It’s Not the Mix, It’s the Selection.’” 668 Salkind and Zearfoss et al. “Borderless Musical Imaginaries Mixtape.” 669 Zearfoss, House Music Oral History. 670 Bacon, House Music Oral History. 671 King et al, “The House That Chicago Built.” 672 The B-52’s, Love Shack; The B-52’s, Mesopotamia. 673 Bacon, House Music Oral History. 674 Zearfoss, House Music Oral History. 675 Vargas, “Punk’s Afterlife in Cantina Time,” 57. 676 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 89-95. 677 Dominguez, “Innocence & Realness.” 678 McGuire, “The Concrete and the Ephemeral of Electronic Music Production.” 679 Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” 10. 680 Vazquez, “Can You Feel the Beat?, 113. Justin “Swaguerilla/Hijo Pródigo” Mitchell, interview by Micah Salkind, May 6, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL; Jacquelyn “CQQCHIFRUIT” Guerrero, interview by Micah Salkind, April 18, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 681 Guerrero, House Music Oral History. 682 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 110. 683 Mitchell, House Music Oral History. 684 Mos Def, “Umi Says.” 685 Author’s field notes December 16, 2013. 686 Weheliye, “‘Feenin,’” 32. 687 Ellis, “Out and Bad,” 9. 688 Fugees, Killing Me Softly. 689 Mitchell, House Music Oral History. 690 Fragassi, “Wax Trax! Opens One-Day Pop-up Shop at Metro.” 691 Zukin, Naked City, 220. 692 Sex Pistols, God Save The Queen. 693 Lazu actually collaborated early on with the Queen! promoters and DJs to bring he and DJ D3’s Paradise Soul party’s audience to Smart Bar: Anthony “Ace” Pabey, interview by Micah Salkind, February 7, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 694 I have adopted the term “lqqk” from Jacqui “CQQCHIFRUIT” Guerrero and the Chances Dances organizers/dancing community because it indicates the sartorial element of turning, or 350 carrying, a presentational element in one’s adornment, clothing, makeup, or other accouterment while registering that this presentational element is part of an artists performance of their own identity as well as their contribution to the total experience of the club night they are attending/working at. 695 Author’s field notes October 28, 2013. 696 The extended nature of my participant observation, and my gathering of oral history interviews, helps me to address the complexity and nuance of Queen! and Chances Dances in ways that might not be obvious to someone attending these parties once or even a few times. 697 Author’s field notes December 1, 2013. 698 Darling Shear in discussion with the author, January 2016. 699 Author’s field notes February 9, 2014. 700 Wallace II, House Music Oral History. 701 Ibid. 702 Shrigley, House Music Oral History. 703 Wright, House Music Oral History. 704 hooks, Black Looks, 150. 705 Gaunt, “YouTube, Twerking & You,” 254. 706 Miller, Playing Along, 184; Salkind and Zearfoss et al. “Borderless Musical Imaginaries Mixtape.” 707 Author’s field notes March 23, 2014. 708 Nishi Roothan, interview by Micah Salkind, March 10, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL. 709 García, “‘Can You Feel It, Too?’ 2-3. 710 Chances Dances Homepage. 711 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 58-59. 712 Ibid, 22, 28. 713 Preston-Myint, House Music Oral History. 714 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 63, 87. 715 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 9. 716 Aguhar, “Artist Statement.” 717 Salkind and Zearfoss et al. “Borderless Musical Imaginaries Mixtape.” 718 Rihanna, “Birthday Cake.” 719 Chances Dances, “The Critical Fierceness Grantees for Winter 2014.” 720 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 69. 721 Salkind and Zearfoss et al. “Borderless Musical Imaginaries Mixtape.” 722 Stepter, “A Brief History of Extinct Entities.” 723 Fake, Memory Palaces. 724 Dinosaur L. Go Bang! #5/Clean On Your Bean #1. 725 Lawrence,“‘I Want to See All My Friends At Once,’” 158. 726 Sister Sledge. Lost In Music; Inner City, Good Life; Frank Ocean, “Thinking About You (Lonsdale Boys Club remix).” 727 Salkind and Zearfoss et al. “Borderless Musical Imaginaries Mixtape.” 728 Author’s field notes April 21, 2014. 729 I see my work as building on the excellent analytical ethnographic and first person accounts of New York club dancing by scholars like Sally Sommer, Fiona Buckland, and Kai Fikentscher, 351 who have identified and unpacked the world-making rituals of underground dance floors and examined how they function, in particular, in queer, and queer of color, house music spaces: Sommer, “‘C’mon to My House’”; Fikentscher, “You Better Work!”; Buckland, Impossible Dance. 730 García,“‘Can You Feel It, Too?’”, 59,61. 731 David Adams, interview by Micah Salkind, April 4, 2014. Micah Salkind Chicago House Music Oral History Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, IL; Robinson, House Music Oral History. 732 Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret, 82. 733 Hall, “Party Friends.” 734 Harney and Moten. The Undercommons, 98. 735 Allen, “For the Children Dancing the Beloved Community,” 318. 736 Allen, “Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture,” 217. 737 Dana Powell, House Music Oral History. 738 DiCrescenzo, “Why Doesn’t Chicago House Music Matter in Chicago?” 739 Keigher, Brian Keigher, personal interview by Micah Salkind, November 13, 2013. 740 Wisby, “Steppin™ out.” 741 Screamin’ Rachael, “House Unity Day.” 742 Keigher, Personal Interview. 743 Dantzler, House Music Oral History. 744 “Chicago Summer Dance Dj Series 2006 Part Three, 2006.” 745 Keigher, Personal Interview. 746 “Chicago Cultural Plan.” 747 Rhythm Controll, My House; Fingers Inc., Can You Feel It. 352