“Is It All over My Face?”

Chapter 5, whose title is taken from dance music pioneer Arthur Russell’s classic vocal house anthem, 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 of the book memorialize and perform affiliations with house music culture at the Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic, a massive yearly celebration on Chicago’s South Side. Drawn from ethnographic fieldwork conducted at The Picnic in 2012, 2013, and 2014, and multiple modes of ethnographic engagement therein, this chapter interrogates Chicago house music’s classic repertoire in motion. Its close readings of musical performances are braided with analysis of Picnic space, foodways, dance, and adornment, elements that help sustain the trans-generational love ethic hailed by the event’s DJs.

Introduction

Do You Remember House? opens with a story about my first tastes of house music. The story picks back up in the present day with an interview with, and later at a birthday party for, one of Chicago house music’s founding fathers: promoter Robert Williams. Williams is celebrating at The Hebrew Cultural Center (aka Da House Spot) and has invited me to see the space before things get going. My thick description of this encounter leads into a discussion of the book’s interlocking research methods: oral history, ethnography, archival research, and textual analysis. The chapter also addresses how I use these methods to engage with the fields of memory studies, critical race studies, urban studies, gender and sexuality studies, dance studies, performance studies, popular music studies, ethnomusicology, and media studies across the span of the book’s seven chapters.

Remediating the Underground

The third chapter of Do You Remember House? traces the routes by which mostly straight, Black, and middle-class teenagers accessed and adapted the social and sonic templates developed by 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 all-ages “juice bar” scene, this chapter also suggests that house music radio was made by an emergent cohort of middle-class, Black, radio entrepreneurs who remediated Chicago musical repertoires for increasingly heterogeneous listening publics. The term remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 1999) helps account for the ways that the WBMX and WGCI hot mix shows incorporated and transformed the aesthetic priorities of teen juice bars, gay discotheques, and Black appeal radio programs to promote house music as a shared, if often contested, soundscape in greater Chicagoland.

Are You Ready to Get Your Life?

Chapter 6 takes its title from club performer Mister Wallace’s invitation to Smart Bar dancers to get their lives, or discover their authentic selves, on the venue’s dance floor. Working from field notes written during over ten months’ performance ethnography at Chicago’s Chances Dances and Queen! parties, this chapter unpacks the often subtle ways that house music’s alternately “neostalgic” (Madrid, 2008) and “wild” (Muñoz, 2013) sonic and social genealogies are performed not only on the dance floors, but also in the DJ booths, and through the marketing and promotional efforts of the city’s queer nightlife producers between 2013 and 2014. It situates Chicago’s contemporary queer clubbing communities in terms of how they intentionally, and unintentionally, invoke house history as they get their lives together.

The Warehouse and The Music Box

Chapter 2 examines Chicago house music’s emergence in post-industrial spaces of queer, Black, and Latino sociality through an analysis of its two foundational spaces, The Warehouse and The Music Box. Working from oral history interviews, newspaper and magazine articles, and autobiographical accounts, as well as through close readings of commercial and amateur musical recordings, this chapter foregrounds the cultural work of promoter Robert Williams and DJs Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy. It builds on scholarship in African American studies, performance studies, and affect theory (Henriques 2010; Johnson 1998; Vogel 2009) to account for the ways that Chicago artists and entrepreneurs adapted New York City’s queer of color social dance traditions to meet the needs of Chicago’s musically omnivorous dancers (Gibson 2006; Novak 2013).

Dancing in Brave Spaces

The seventh and final chapter of Do You Remember House? uses auto-ethnographic research to bring together the theoretical interventions developed in the previous six chapters. Building on work in dance studies and popular music studies, this chapter employs the notion of dancing in brave spaces, rather than what have often been referred to in the extant literature on queer social dance as safe spaces. It suggests that Chicago house culture inculcates a way of living bravely with socio-sonic difference, in part by fostering experiences of inter-subjective intimacy and vulnerability. The theoretical insights articulated in this chapter are grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the spring of 2014 at Chances Dances and Queen! as well as during Boogie McClarin’s house dance classes at The Old Town School of Folk Music.

The End of the First Decade

Chapter 4 draws primarily from oral history interviews and journalistic accounts to track the ways that house music radio, record labels, and specialty DJ stores expanded commercial pathways for amateur house music producers in Chicago. It argues that this constellation of commercial entities helped to codify house music as a corporate genre with simplified sonic contours even as the city’s DIY punk spaces and North Side juice bars integrated ever-more heterogeneous musical programming, and dancers. Chapter 4 concludes by describing some of ways that the ravages of HIV/AIDS affected the preservation of house music’s queer of color roots, and considers how various structural factors and cultural actors helped the house sound spread beyond Chicago during the second half of the 1980s.

Coda

Do You Remember House? concludes with a brief examination of Chicago’s Honey Pot Performance, and the group’s “Chicago Black Social Culture Map.” It also looks at Chicago’s tentative steps towards creating landmarks and official, city-sponsored programming to celebrate house music heritage. This coda suggests that house music’s unstable repertoire in motion, and its maroon, queer of color roots, have made it difficult to codify and market like other popular genres of Black music, such as jazz and blues, and argues for more research that attends to intersectional experiences of social and economic marginality in the cultural sphere. Ultimately, this research has the potential to yield innovative modes of preservation and promotion for musical cultures that, like house, are sustained in and across communities characterized by difference rather than sameness.

Like a Phoenix from the Ashes

Chapter 1 begins with a detailed historical account of rock radio station WLUP’s 1979 Disco Demolition Night promotion at Comiskey Stadium. The infamous event, at which baseball fans detonated a pile of disco records, was a flashpoint that presaged the codification of Chicago house music as a distinct set of cultural practices and sounds. Building on the work of urban cultural historians studying Chicago’s Black and brown cultural economies (Mumford, 1997; Heap, 2010; Green, 2007), this chapter historicizes the geographic and social frameworks that gave rise to house by showing how the demolition of musical artifacts surrogating queerness, blackness, and Latinidad sutured post-Great Migration histories of residential and economic segregation to new spaces for queer of color conviviality near Chicago’s central business district. Unlike previous accounts of the demolition (Cowie, 2010; Echols, 2010) that connect it to a national homophobic backlash against disco music, Do You Remember House? addresses the promotion as a phenomenon tied to Chicago’s particular histories of racial apartheid.