About Me
History of Chicago House Music
MUSIC IS THE KEY....
"The beat won't stop with the JM Jock. If he jacks the box and the partyrocks. The clock tick tocks and the place gets hot. So ease your mind and set yourself free. To that mystifying music they call the key". -Music Is The Key, JM Silk, 1985 House is as new as the microchip and as old as the hills. It first came to widespread attention in the summer of 1986 when a rash of records imported directly from Chicago began to dominate the playlist of Europe's most influential DJs. Within a matter of months, with virtually no support from the national radio networks, Britain's club scene voted with its feet, three house records forced their way into the top ten. Farley "Jackmaster" Funk "Love Can't Turn Around", Raze's "Jack The Groove", and Steve "Silk" Hurley "Jack Your Body", gave the club scene a new buzz-word, jacking, the term used by Chicago dancers to describe the frantic body pace of the House Sound. Whole litany of Jack Attacks beseiged the music scene. Bad Boy Bill's "Jack It All Night Long", Femme Fion's "Jack The House", Chip E's "Time To Jack", and Julian "Jumpin" Perez "Jack Me Till I Scream".
House music takes its name from an old Chicago night club called The Warehouse, where the resident DJ, Frankie Knuckles, mixed old disco classics, new Eurobeat pop and synthesised beats into a frantic high- energy amalgamation of recycled soul. Frankie is more than a DJ, he's an architect of sound, who has taken the art of mixing to new heights. Regulars at the Warehouse remember it as the most atmospheric place in Chicago, the pioneering nerve-center of a thriving dance music scene where old Philly classics by Harold Melvin, Billy Paul and The O'Jays were mixed with upfront disco hits like Martin Circus' "Disco Circus" and imported European pop music by synthesiser groups like Kraftwerk and Telex.
The decadent beat of Chicago House, a relentless sound designed to take dancers to a new high, it has its origins in the gospel and its future in spaced out simulation(techno). In the mid 1970's, when disco was still an underground phenomeon, sin and salvation were willfully mixed together to create a sound which somehow managed to be decadent and devout. New York based disco labels, like Prelude, West End, Salsoul, and TK Disco, literally pioneered a form of orgasmic gospel, which merged the sweeping strings of Philadelphia dance music with the tortured vocals of soul singers like Loleatta Holloway. Her most famous releases, "Love Sensation" and "Hit and Run" became working models for modern house records. After an eventful career which began in Atlanta and the southren gospel belt, Loleatta joined Salsoul Records during the height of the metropolitan disco boom, before returning to her hometown of Chicago.
