Switched on Pop - Breaking Down The House

Episode Date: August 1, 2016

The fingerprints of house music are all over mainstream pop, but much of its sound has been whitewashed. That ubiquitous four-to-the-floor kick and synth bass sound draws from Chicago's queer, black and latinx warehouse club culture. Micah Salkind is working on a book on the history of these communities. Together we break down the sonic origins of this music through a modern track that fully embraces its cultural nexus: "Hideaway" by Kiesza. Micah takes us back to Chicago in the 1980s, and we explore how this sound came to be and where it is going today.  FEATURINGKiesza - HideawayLoleeta Holloway - Love SensationBlack box - Ride On TimeMadonna - VogueMr. Fingers - The JuiceKanye West - FadeRythim Is Rythim - Strings Of LifePaul Oakenfold - You Could Be HappyFrankie Knuckles - Your LoveMFSB ft The Three Degrees - T.S.O.P. (The Sound of Philadelphia)Jesse Saunders - On and OnDiplo - Be Right There Justin Bieber - SorryCalvin Harris - This Is What You Came ForShaun J. Wright & Alinka - Love Inspired  MORE STUFFFind more of Micah's work at micah-salkind.squarespace.com/about/ and his DJ sets at www.mixcloud.com/micahjacksonListen to Shaun J. Wright & Alinka on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/aalinkaa/shaun-j-wright-alinka-love Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding and our co-host Nate is currently on the Isles of Scotland, touring with his band. In his absence, I've been wanting to talk about something for a very long time, which has been the dominance of electronic music on the pop charts. So over the past couple of weeks, I've been investigating the backstory of how these sounds came through the realm of house music.

But before we get there, I want to start today. with a story. No, it was never just about the party. It was about, it was about congregation. It was about getting together with people. We're racism and sexism and homophobia and all the other isms that divide us were not an issue. That's Michael Selkind, and he brings us a story of how music that we listen to when we're young

can be truly transformative to who we become. I was so focused on getting out of Kansas for so long. You know, I really, like, knew that I couldn't really be the person I wanted to become, living in a small town. I used to work when I was a teenager at a shop in downtown Lawrence, Kansas, and I was like the stock boy when I was 16 and washed the windows and did all the kind of like menial labor. And one of my coworkers who's still a good friend today was an out gay guy who was really

into house music and he knew that I was into it because we would listen sometimes to music in the store when we were like closing and we turned off the house music. the store music and he would put on his, his, like, DJ mixes. There were these particular things that he liked that I was tuning into. So he was like, look, I have like an extra wrist band from this club. With my work friends, I would tell my parents I was going camping and I would sneak out. The club was called Tremors, by the way. So Tremors had what was called a family night, which is in the 90s, I guess,

you wouldn't say you had a gay night because you wouldn't want, you know, somebody to come and commit some kind of hate crime or something. So you'd call it family night, and it was kind of code for being the gay night in the, you know, the small town straight bar that had a gay night. So Josh gave me his wristband, and we went in, and I was clearly underaged, and I was super nervous. And I was like, you know, I wasn't out of the closet or anything. But I was like, I really like this music. I'm going to go here, and I'm going to dance, and I'm going to, like, experience this. I remember being super nervous, but also feeling like a kind of sense of freedom.

and like this kind of liberatory possibility in that moment of like, am I supposed to be here? You know, is this for me? Like, what does this mean? You know, this is kind of crossing a line that I can't go back from. House music, when I started to hear that as a teenager, something about it felt like it was connecting me to some sort of incipient sense of who I was or could be or someplace that I, you know, people like me had come from.

There was just something kind of that's hard to put your finger on, but I think a lot of queer people that identify with house culture and house music do get this sense that this is something that is for them and by them or by people like them. I think that those party spaces in Kansas City and in Lawrence really prepared me to like do the next thing, kind of like moving up a ladder, right? Like you get socialized in a particular dance music culture, and then you age out of it and go into the next echelon. of a party culture and the younger people in that community will socialize you and then they'll move on

so it's kind of like like this stair step thing i think for me it meant like getting a deeper sense of not as only a set of sounds or not just like you know what some people that very surface level understanding of that forward-to-the-floor kick drum that you can put on top of kind of anything but as something that was knit to a history of politicized people who were queer and queer of color and like feminine spectrum and all kinds of like different from each other and from people outside the clubs they were going to. I think that leveling up for me meant finding more spaces where more of those people were partying together. And I don't think that really happened for me until I started going out in New York. city and I would go down to parties at MoMA's PS1 in Queens, which is like their kind of

little sister affiliate. The Museum of Modern Art has these warm up parties with house DJs and electronic musicians. It was a collaboration with this crew from a New York City house music institution called Body and Soul. They're like this old school crew who's been probably some of them partying together since the 70s when New York disco scene was really popping off. But I remember that feeling of being in a space where you had probably three or four, you know, generations. You had people who could be the grandparents and the children and the grandchildren. All together, it was just that vibe of being around people who had been doing this for like 40 years. And then also with people that had just started doing it and the kind of loving, like, permissive, um, uplifting kind of energy that everybody was exchanged.

with each other and with the DJ. And that for me was the first time I was like, okay, this is not just something I'm into. This isn't something I casually consume. This is like actually, this is something that's a part of my identity now. This is a spiritual practice. This is something I'm interested in pursuing. Something clicked for me and had a different relationship to house music at that point.

Micah didn't just find himself and his community through house. He found a passion. And he's turned that passion into his work. He's currently working on a book on the history of Chicago House Music music. And I'm really excited to welcome him back to the show to teach us about the origins of House. So, Micah, do you mind reintroducing yourself and telling us what you're up to today? Sure. My name's Micah Salkind, and I'm a recent graduate of the PhD program in American Studies at Brown University. Broadly, I study race, place, and popular culture and how people

kind of make sense of popular culture as an emplaced experience. But my dissertation project is about Chicago house music, how it was born in the mid-70s, in underground queer of color loft spaces in Chicago, and how it continues to be an important archive of Chicago musical history today and a living archive that can tell us so much about how people experience their lives through music. So I thought what would be fun is we could take a modern track, which is drawing from these traditions very explicitly and use it as a way of breaking down what the cultural aesthetics are that we're hearing in house music. And I think you had a good idea for this. Yeah, so I thought the Kaiser track Hideaway, which was released in early 2014, would be a great way for us to talk about

how house music still has a really big influence on the sounds that we hear today. So here's what we should do. Why don't we take a listen to it and then come back and break down the different elements that we're hearing which are quintessentially house. Great. What are you hearing? Anybody who listens to this song is going to hear Kaiser's vocals, right? Like this kind of diva vocal with the really like, she's reaching for notes so she almost can't even sing.

You know, and I've seen her do live takes of this, and she has a phenomenal voice. I think she was trained at Berkeley College of Music in Boston. But that diva vocal, which really, you know, I think the quintessential diva vocal that you hear all through the life cycle of music is that of Chicago artist Lolita Holloway who gives us the amazing love sensation that we know from you know black box in the 1990s you know so she's a featured performer on so many different tracks that that I hear so

upfront in Kaiser's delivery so first that vocal that diva vocal is huge for house and and you know the lyrics the lyrics aren't too meaningful right it's It's like you're getting, you know, like a lot of pop. You're getting an idea more than you're getting a story. Right. Platitudes about love and feeling. Yeah, exactly. Which, you know, when you're dancing in the club, that's about the most that I can take in

lyrically a lot of times. I also feel like we're getting like a pretty direct reference back to Madonna's Vogue, which was sort of the first mega house hit. They've crossed over to the pop mainstream. Oh, yeah. certainly like there's a kind of like Madonna-like element in terms of her

like needing to be the triple threat dancer singer you know all that stuff and compositionally is there too like it's both start with a sort of like slow build synthy stuff yeah yeah and that that that that deliberately synthesized string sound

that you know it's not it's not trying to sound like an actual orchestral arrangement It's actually wearing that aesthetic of the string sound from Chicago in the mid-80s very boldly. So it's a reference of a reference, basically. Yeah, I mean, that's like a great way to think about it is that it's like this kind of dense palimpsest of musical references. If, like, House in the 80s is referencing Disco from the 70s, now we're referencing House from the 80s. And so it's just synths referencing strings.

Yeah. Oh, it's just totally, we never leave. we're just always coming back to disco. Tell me about drums, because I feel like this is where the most obvious idiom is coming across. Right, well, you have these 808 kick drums or some sort of synthesized kick drum

that's emulating the thickness of the 808 sound. Which is the Roland synthesizer, which came out in the 80s. Yeah, which is Roland synthesizer that they came out within the early 80s. That drum sound was a revelation for producers in Chicago because previously, you just didn't have that kind of depth and richness that you could program with with previous

drum machines. The 808 was really what broke digital drum machines into mainstream pop music production. And people still use it everywhere. That sound is constantly emulated even though the device came out 36 years ago. I think that it's really the connective tissue between all pop music today. So you have the 808, 4 to the floor kick drum. Yeah, exactly. And you have that hand clap sound too which is something that was i believe on the 808 as well that sort of like um it's hard to describe it in another way but you can hear it when you hear it and it's very up front in the guys of song do you have any like famous tracks with great clap sounds that you uh oh gosh how many are that great um it's like it's like so many um we could be the whole other show about that

charlie just clapping just like when you hear that clap sound in a song um But so there's, you know, in addition to that, there's this baseline melody, this like, rubbery baseline that is actually the lead melody for much of the song. So it's sort of like there's kind of two dominant melodies. There's that baseline. Dun-dun-da-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. And then there's the diva vocals over the top of that. I think that those and the drums are sort of what make this classic house sound.

The bass actually reminds me of this really famous early house track. The Juice by Mr. Fingers, which is the track that Kanye sampled on his song. What was it that you were playing over and over? Oh, fade? Yeah, so it's this thing. Oh, yeah. Right, like, that baseline feels, like, the repetition,

that its syncopation, its tonality feels referenced in the Kaiser track. Right, you know, and the Mr. Fingers is, like, really the Chicago. Chicago House Supergroup. It's actually a pseudonym of the artist Larry Hurd, but their music is really the blueprint for so much of what came out in the 90s and after in terms of house music globally. So yeah, no doubt that that's in the musical DNA

of the Kaiser track. All right, so we got the vocals, the diva vocals, the string arrangement, the drums, the bass. You had something else you were going towards. Well, one of the things that I think about, and I'm not sure that there's something I specifically I can point to in this particular track, but maybe in the way that I would play it as a DJ, is the idea of surprising your audience, sort of adding what, what Frank Broughton

calls bombshells and surprises into the mix. So that could be anything from a Martin Luther King speech, to a train whistle, to some sort of sound effect. And I think that you want to keep people guessing as much as you want to give them what they want. And I think that a lot of times that, that that comes through in house music production today of like, there's some little edge in there that, because otherwise it's just too saccharine. You have to have something to disrupt that. Got to have the novelty to disrupt the familiarity.

Exactly. Yeah, I think something that's going to, like, give your audience pause or make it not quite so easy. And, you know, certainly there's, you could argue with someone about what gives them pause. But, yeah, I think the idea of having a bombshell or a surprise in a track or when you play a track is a really important element to this. So what are you hearing here as a bombshell?

Well, let's listen to a little bit more. Maybe we can point one out. Here's another thing, Charlie. It's not a direct sample, but that string part we just heard in that part you played is to me really, really calls up. Rhythm is Rhythm Strings of Life from 1987. Wait, so that in comparison to like, oh, you're hearing that background string section in this thing. Yeah, it's not the same melody, but it's such a close. There's something so, and to me, if I was on the dance floor,

hearing that as like someone who's got a rich history in house music, I would notice that connection, and that would give me a kind of pleasure. You know, it's what at the musicologist, Stephen Feld would call participatory discrepancy, maybe. Like, it's almost like a jarring, a moment that jars you out of your pleasure, but like there's pleasure in that wonderment or, Like that like not knowing quite what where what you're hearing that is giving you pause. Right. Because there's a really strong rhythmic connection between the two.

Right. Yeah. And a textural connection between the synthesizer. Right, right. Like the synthesizer programming is very as much as like any artist is a product of all their influences. I think that with digital music and with house music, which is born digital, really, you have this extra added potential to like where your influence is. broadly.

And so that sort of those citational practices can be really interesting and thought-provoking whether you're listening to House on headphones or whether you're dancing to it in a club. So wait, let's see if we can find our bombshell.

Yeah, keep going. Oh, wait, here we go. We have this drop. Well, you get a whole extra drop. Right. No, and that does feel like a surprise after a pretty straightforward like pop structure

to have this kind of like what sounds like an EDM drop now to me. That was like a Paul Oakenfield drop. Yeah. Paul Oakenfold was his name. Yeah, Paul Oakenfold, it's like a big room house moment of like, wah, wah, wah, wah, wow. No, and then you get that like call out, like,

what does it say even like drop it or like mush it or something like that. I don't know, you know. And that's funny to try to like shove things into these categories. But I think that gives you a sense of the ways that house producers, are always kind of like, aware of how the repetition is both an opportunity and a challenge. I feel like we've just partaken in a practice,

which is almost antithetical to your research practice, which is let's take the thing and distill it to its essence, whereas your research is, let's take the thing and do an oral history and discover where it comes from and historicize it. Yeah, I mean, there's like both the deep, close reading and the broad kind of like interpretive work are super important when it comes to thinking about this stuff in context. And, you know, like, I think what you're able to do by really listening closely is important.

Okay, so now that we've got the sound in our ear, when we come back, let's take a closer look at the cultural origins and history of house music. Convierte your passion in a business with Shopify and bathe records of ventas with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world.

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They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Okay, so now that we all know the four-to-the-floor kick, that bouncy bass, the synth strings, the diva vocals, I want to go into what might not be so obvious when we're just hearing these sounds.

So, Micah, could you share the story of where this music originates? Definitely. House music comes out of both the death of the independent soul music industry in Chicago and the kind of death of the national disco industry in the late 70s. And everybody in Chicago knows about disco demolition if they've lived there since the 70s.

You're writing about Chicago's Disco Demolition Night in your book. What spurred this event? Yeah, so Disco Demolition Night was a promotion that was created by Bill Vec, who owned the White Sox, and his son, Mike Vec, and

a radio disc jockey named Steve Dahl. So basically what would happen during this Tigers game with the White Sox at Comiskey Park on the south side of Chicago was if you brought a disco record to the park and let the um let Steve Dahl blow it up at half time in a big mountain of records you could get in for 98 cents because uh Steve Dahl's uh the call letters at the station he worked out were like 98 something it was W LUP it was an album oriented rock station and and he had sort of made a name for himself um yeah making fun of disco and really deriding it

for being this kind of like fake cultural tradition that had no value. So I don't think anybody really knew when they set up that promotion that the response would be so insane. But the park was overcrowded. People stormed the field. They blew up the records at halftime, but the game never, the White Sox had to forfeit that game. But it was this, what I write about in my work is that that was not just a ritual death for disco. that had kind of reverberations on a national level in terms of a rebuke to public queer culture,

but also a rebuke to black and Latino culture in Chicago. Because, you know, nobody who was black and Latino who listened to disco music, and a lot of black and Latino folks didn't, I'm sure, but it was definitely a mainstay in black and Latino culture saw disco demolition night as something that wasn't racially charged. So my first chapter is really about how that, that promotion was this locally important event and how it set up and kind of elongated a spatial

dynamic wherein queer people and people of color in Chicago and queer people of color, we're all mush together in the same kinds of neighborhoods and social spaces. Okay, so then how does house music come out of these neighborhoods and social spaces? Yeah, so house music really comes out of what I call a maroon queer of color culture that takes shape in the late 70s in post-industrial loft spaces in Chicago. So black, queer, and Latino dancers who had been experiencing kind of racist discrimination

in the white gay discothex of the city started more and more trying to have their own events. And really what set the match under the powder keg was a promoter named Robert Williams and a crew of promoters called Us Studios bringing a very talented young DJ from New York named Frankie Knuckles to the city. And Frankie Knuckles was the resident weekend DJ

at a members-only social club with a 501C3 juice bar license. So this is not an alcoholic establishment. This was a cultural organization. And Frankie Knuckles played the best danceable R&B and disco and funk and funk and soul. And he also played the most, cutting edge European new wave punk music and rare groove African stuff.

And it just he was an omnivorous music lover and he brought that, that love of music to his audience. Flash forward a couple of years in there. And there are dozens of teenagers in Chicago who are now creating their own music that's influenced by the sound that Frankie was spinning. You described to me once that house music is disco on a budget. What do you mean by that? You know, and that might be a quote from Frank Broughton's book,

last night a DJ Save My Life, which is a really excellent account of the history of dance music. But house producers were really attempting to create versions of the disco sound, which was incredibly expensive to produce in its heyday when it had a lot of major label backing. You know, you had a string section, you had French horns, you had French horns, you had maybe saxophones. You really had a ton of instrumentation in the arrangements for disco. And so what happens when house music producers take that disco aesthetic and use new tools like the Roland Corporation's 808 drum machine and the 303 bass synthesizer to recreate those sounds is you get this very stripped down raw. you know, kind of amateur version of that danceable sound.

So it's the same tempo. It's, you know, and it's attempting to kind of keep the same feel and energy, but it's an incredibly different musical palette. So often, I guess now with modern computer music software, it can seem so easy to make that style of music. But I went back and tried to learn about some of these early technologies that people were using. I mean, whether it was just the turntable,

which to manipulate a turntable really effectively and scratching and beat matching is incredibly skilled. And I was really amazed, especially by the early, what was the Roland Basin? Oh, the 303, yeah. Yeah, the 303 was the most complicated.

It was like using a Ti-85, or what are those things called? Those graphing calculators? It's like a graphing calculator that you're making music with. Right, it has like a little LCD screen maybe. It's so complicated. That hardware, it was not easy to figure out.

And it wasn't cheap. You know, a lot of people were, those products were originally marketed to studio musicians as a way of saving money and not paying live musicians for studio sessions. But, you know, they're really being taken and used in ways that they were never intended to be used for by these young producers.

But then, you know, and then you have turntables that weren't courts driven. They weren't consistent in terms of how fast they moved. They didn't have records to play on that were made with digital software that quantized all the beats so that everything was regular. You had to mix between things that were shifting in time. So it was a much different thing to become a DJ. The skill set was, I mean, I bow down to these old school DJs because their sense of rhythm and their timing and the ways that they are able to kind of memorize their archives so that they can. pull specific musical phrases out and accentuate them,

that that is its mastery on a level that I think few people really understand. But so it's sort of this technological change where these cheap samplers and synthesizers all of a sudden allow the distribution of this same style of music, which had been very expensive, to be completely underground and in people's bedrooms. It's kind of the first, like, in-house full bedroom production studio that we now can all do on a laptop.

It's true. Yeah, I mean, hip-hop is happening at the same. same very moment in New York, right? So you have this sound in New York City that's influenced by the ways that Caribbean communities used DJ equipment and creatively misappropriated turntables and mixers and things. And then you have a kind of analog in queer of color communities in Chicago that were then being busted open by these these intrepid teenagers who wanted to make their own music. I often talk about house music as the twin sister. You know, child of disco, twin sister of hip hop. This is a super interesting topic because I was looking at the top 40 today.

And I could draw connections to house music, at least aesthetics, to like at least half the songs. Right? You have the rise of Skrillix and Diplo, the dominance of Justin Bieber's album. You have Calvin Harris. all these things in the charts right now, which are just like evidently drawing from a house aesthetic. I'm so curious, how do you hear that music in relationship to all the work that you've done? Part of me is always super excited when I hear something on American radio that is obviously redolent of house music.

Because for so long, it was so difficult to hear that stuff on the radio here. And it's a mixed emotion that I feel because on the one hand, I'm excited that it's, making waves in the U.S. and I'm hopeful that some audiences will find their way back to the culture and its origins and sort of where it comes from. But I'm pretty skeptical about the possibility for that when the representational regime that we have on American radio is so white and straight. And kind of, you know, like look at Diplos-Skrillex Justin Bieber alone. Like, what, you know, what stories are they able to tell what life experiences have they had? Yeah. Do you feel like is the, is the,

is the ubiquity of this music on the radio charts detract from its cultural specificity? I don't know that it detracts from it, but it certainly dilutes it. And it certainly covers over the critically important queer black and Latino histories of this music in ways that I haven't even begun to fully understand because, you know, it's hard. And you know this as someone who thinks about popular music in the contemporary moment. it's really hard to have that historical perspective until you have some distance and time between you and the music. There's a generation of music journalists now who get this and who know that what they're hearing isn't new. And there are educated consumers who have different kinds of access points through, whether it be through social media or whatever, that are talking back to this music and holding, kind of holding people accountable to their,

musical ancestors in ways that maybe that weren't possible previously. But, you know, it's part of the impetus for the book. I'm hoping that on some level this book crosses over for those kids who are showing up to Electric Daisy Carnival or whatever the festivals are that are happening today and seeing mostly white, straight dudes playing off their laptops, which, you know, that can be great. Like, I don't want to take away from that experience, but know that that music. that they're playing or the way that they're playing it has a history and that it um that comes from a place that is is a is a is not a place of cultural neutrality it's a place of you know it's it's

think about if you're talking about gospel music and house music is queer people's gospel music if you can't um if you can't worship in sunday service because your gender expression or your swish is too kind of too much, then house music spaces become your temple. They become your church. And I think that to have that culture erased, especially after the AIDS epidemic, you know, really, literally, like, devastated these communities in the 80s is really, really difficult to stomach. But it's also, you know, what are you going to do? Capitalism rolls on and the music industry is not, is not going to stop for a moment of silence. So let's run a quick test and see how responsible people should be.

So let's search Scrilex. And what do we get? All right, Wikipedia, Scrilix. And if we check that out, and it looks genres. Electro House. Yeah, there we go. Electro House, stylistic origins, house. Okay, it's down like three clicks away,

and now I'm immediately learning about the origins of Chicago House music. Great. Like, no excuse as a listener. Yeah, really. All you have to do is Google the artist's name and you will be given a hyperlink to a place where you can learn something more. So when listeners are approaching Calvin Harris

or David Getta or any of these modern major producers, what are you wanting them to hear along with this house aesthetic? I mean, I think if you love those artists, if you're into this music, find out more about it. Look, look deeper. You know, don't just take for granted that that's the best there is out there. So, I mean, I think that for casual listeners of dance music who find themselves, you know, peaked on that house sound,

do some research and really, like, dig because it'll pay off for you. And you'll have a, you'll enjoy the newer stuff more, and you'll find some really amazing. needles in musical haystacks that you may never have come across otherwise. Given that this music has become such mainstream music, I'm curious what is happening in House in the underground scene? I think House has, you know, at least in the past couple of years, has really been thriving in the underground in some places because they lend themselves to underground social cultures. That really speaks to the longevity of the

thing that house was trying to do in its infancy, which was bring people together, regardless of who they were and where they came from. Do you have a favorite artist that you're listening to right now? So I'm super into Sean Jay Wright and Alinka right now. I'm just super excited about what they're doing. I think it's drawing from house history while pushing the genre forward. I think it's uncompromising. I think it's incredibly vulnerable and honest music lyrically.

and it's music that's like complex in a lot of ways, even while being like danceable and really groovy. So I'd love if more people knew about artists like Sean and Olinka, I think that our pop music soundscape would benefit from that. So you've come a long way from the dance parties in Kansas City and are now writing a book on the history of Chicago house music. With all that you know now, what would you say to your younger self? Oh, man, I would have said,

Queen, you better keep being weird because nobody ever got anywhere interesting by conforming. That's really wonderful. Thank you, Micah, so much for joining me on the show. Yeah, Charlie, thank you for including me in the dialogue. And I hope that some of your listeners will become more interested in house. This episode of Switched on Pop was produced by me, Charlie Harding, with additional production work by Susan Kaminar, Perkle, Pergo Lizzie, and Michael Mathetone. Our design is done by Luke Harris.

I want to say a big thank you to Micah Salkind for coming on the show and sharing his story with us as well as the origins of house music. On top of being one of the absolute smartest minds about house music, he's also an amazing DJ. You should really check out some of his sets with his DJ duo, Micah Jackson at MixCloud.com slash Micah Jackson. Switched on Pop is part of the Panoply Network, and you can check out more of our episodes on Switchedonpop.com, Google Play, or iTunes, where we would really love it if you would leave us for a review. You can also talk to us on Twitter at Switched On Pop. And if you're missing Nate, he'll be back with us again in two weeks with his report from the Scottish Highlands. Until then, thanks for listening. Attention Spotify.

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