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The Queer History of House Music

The Queer History of House Music

Many people who call themselves EDM enthusiasts today fail to recognize the roots of house music and its distinct connection to the LGBTQ community and the communities of color that created dance music as we know it today. Some have even failed to recognize that the foundation of almost all genres of current electronic music today is house music.

Certain folks seem to think that house, techno, dubstep, drum ‘n’ bass, electro, and the many other sub-genres spawning from the universal need to dance were created by white, European men in the early-to-mid 2000s, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

As a matter of fact, house music has a long and sprawling history that began at the end of the 70s in Chicago.

The nightclub The Warehouse first opened its doors in 1977 in Chicago. It initially operated as a members-only club almost exclusively frequented by black and Latino gay men. At the time, gay bars and clubs were the only safe spaces for queer folk, especially considering the constant barrage of police raids, often without warrants, that terrorized Chicago’s gay community.

The first official city ordinance that even acknowledged sexual orientation as a protected class, The Human Rights Ordinance—which prohibited discrimination against any person because of  “race, color, sex, age religion, disability, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, marital status, parental status, military discharge status or source of income,”—passed in 1988. This meant that the 70s and most of the 80s forced queer people in Chicago underground.

The sounds at The Warehouse first and foremost focused on R ‘n’ B and disco under the musical direction of Francis Warren Nicholls, Jr., aka Frankie Knuckles. His style at the time was a mixture of disco classics, unusual indie-label soul, the occasional rock track, and Euro-disco. Knuckles would use a reel-to-reel tape to create loops of his favorite disco tracks, editing them to last a little longer. Around 1983, Frankie Knuckles got his hands on his very own drum machine. The combination of bare, insistent drum machine pulses and an overlay of cult disco classics defined the sound of early Chicago house music.

Though the name “house” derived from an abbreviation of the Warehouse, the club became inundated with whiter and straighter patrons, prompting Knuckles to leave and open his own club, Power Plant. Ron Hardy took over as the resident DJ of the club, which had been renamed the Music Box.

House fused the symphonic sweep and soul diva vocals of 70s disco with the cold futurism of synthesizer-driven Euro-disco. A response to the anti-disco sentiment in the rock world at the end of the 70s, an attitude directly rooted in anti-blackness, house music became a protest against the forces attempting to chip away at the right to exist for queer, and black, bodies.

Symphonic elements of disco melted away, gradually replaced with synthesizers and drum machines, slowly gaining traction in a city where machination dominated: Detroit. Mixing Kraftwerk with David Bowie, Italo-disco, and funk, prominent artists from Detroit such as Juan Atkins began injecting post-industrialist elements and science fiction imagery into the dance music they created. According to Atkins, house music served as an evolutionary step from disco, and he and his fellow producers took on the task of progressing house music into early techno and electro.

Affluence played heavily into the evolution from house to techno.

While Chicago’s underground club scene catered to marginalized communities, the club scene created by techno in Detroit was a way for suburban blacks in Detroit to distance themselves from “jits,” or “jitterbugs,” slang for lower-class African Americans living in the inner-city.

Clubs named Plush, Charivari, and GQ Productions reflected European fashion and luxury, a signifier for high class and extravagant wealth. Afrofuturist philosophies influenced early techno through the re-purposing of technology to create a new form of music that appealed to a marginalized underground population. Especially within the context of Detroit, where the rise of robotics led to a massive loss of jobs, technology at the time was very relevant.

House and techno continued to rise in popularity in the mid- to late 80s, slowly penetrating the U.K. pop charts in the second half of the 80s. In January 1987, Chicago DJ and artist Steve “Silk” Hurley’s “Jack Your Body” reached number one in the U.K., showing it was possible for house music to achieve crossover success in the mainstream. As house music spread to cities across the U.S. and Europe, each region developed its own, distinct flavor of the genre.

At the tail-end of the 80s, Chicago producers injected deeper bass lines, which, combined with the squelching sequencer of the Roland TB-303 synthesizer, created a distinct “acid house” sound. U.K. producers took this early acid sound and ran with it. Raves in England began cropping up despite its illegality, and with those raves came newer, faster styles filled with breakbeats, early drum ‘n’ bass, and early dubstep—which was a portmanteau of the slower, two-stepping deep beats known as 2-step overlaid with samples borrowed from dub reggae.

House music spread around the globe and inspired a movement of dancing, acceptance, and freedom, but it all started with the queer people of color who founded the genre, dancing their hearts out in a grimy Chicago club.

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