Throughline - Dance Yourself Free

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

Ever since Beyonce's Renaissance dropped last summer, house music has found its way back to mainstream audiences, prompting some to ask "Is house back?" But the truth is, it never went away. Born out of the ashes of disco in the underground clubs of Chicago by Black queer youth in the late 1970s and 80s, house music has been the continued soundtrack of parties around the world, and laid the groundwork for one of the most popular musical genres in history – electronic dance music. And yet, the deeper you dig into the origins of house music, the more clear it becomes that the history of house, like the history of rock and roll, is a complicated tale of Black cultural resistance.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. This is the song, My Soul by Beyonce. You won't break my soul. You won't break my soul. You won't break my soul.

It was the lead single off her album Renaissance, which won her a bunch of Grammys this year. I'd like to thank the queer community for your love and for inventing this genre. God bless you. Thank you so much to the Grammy. Oh, my Beyonce. Beyonce. That genre Beyoncé was referring to in her acceptance speech is electronic dance music. More specifically, it's the movement that started it all. House music. It's the rebar, bitch.

We made this shit, okay? Today, it might be easy to immediately associate electronic dance music with raves and massive parties in cities like Berlin, Paris, and London. Many of the world's most famous electronic artists and DJs are European white men. But Beyonce's album intentionally paid homage to the people who laid the groundwork for all electronic dance music. The young, Black and queer communities of Chicago in the late 1970s and 1980s. For a long time, house music and dance music was considered white music. It's been so far removed from the origins that a lot of Black people even think house music is white music. That's Honey Dijon, a Chicago-born house DJ who actually served as a musical advisor to Beyonce on Renaissance. One of the things that I was told from her team was that, you know,

she wanted to make this dance record and she wanted to go to the true source of Chicago house music. The true source of that music, the story of how it started and influenced the spread of electronic dance music around the world, is a complex and layered tale about how young people searching for a place to party and be themselves could spark a revolution in music. A story that begins in Chicago in the late 1970s in a place called the warehouse. I felt like I was Alice in Wonderland. Inside a lone industrial building in Chicago, Illinois, people dance intensely in a sea of fog. A figure emerges from the mist. Behind a set of turntables surrounded by crates full of records, his arms move back and forth

to the rhythm of the music. Frantic, frenetic movement. I mean, just dancing like he had no tomorrow to come his way. The DJ controls the party and the dancers like a conductor.

Move your body. Shake your ass. Welcome to The Warehouse. This really magical place. The Warehouse was an after-hours private club. I felt like I was Alice in Wonderland. So you had to know somebody to get an invite in or to even attend. The Warehouse was a home for people who wanted a safe place to party.

People who had nowhere else to go. People who would come together and dance and form a community. It's like a story. You know, like there's a beginning and a middle and an end. You just wanted to be there for the whole thing. Frantic, frenetic movement. I remember the feeling more than I remember the music. We can all be wrong. We can all be wrong.

All right, let's do it. Got your phone? Got it. Got my phone. We're caffeinated. In order to get to know the place that birthed house music and the people who were there at the start, Ramteen and Throughline producer Christina Kim went to Chicago. Hello.

Hi. To trace the history of house with the people who shaped it. Oh my goodness, sorry, I overslept. I was up until 2 o'clock in the morning. Oh no problem, I'm sorry. And of course, dance a little. It's a really happy atmosphere in here, right? You feel it.

And I know I was tired before I came here. I was like, I don't think I can do this. I'm so tired now, yeah. And I was like, we can go. Like, let's go. I'm Ramteen Arab can do this. I'm like, we can go. Like, let's go. I'm Ramteen Arablui. And I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. Today on this show, the story of how house music, a Black American art form, helped spark an international movement and changed music history.

My name is Terry Hunter, and I'm a DJ and two-time Grammy-nominated producer calling from Chicago. You're listening to ThruLine on NPR. To me, house music is culture, it's community, it's artistry, it's life. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally,

and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Part 1. Dance Church. Gil Scott sucks! Gil Scott sucks! Gil Scott sucks! In 1979, just a few miles south of the warehouse, there was a much different scene going on. It was a publicity stunt at a Major League Baseball game. It's Comiskey Park. The White Sox are playing the Detroit Tigers. It's a home game, a doubleheader.

And a guy named Steve Dahl takes to the mic. This is now officially the world's largest anti-disco rally. Dahl was what people called a shock jock. He had a radio show in Chicago. And on this day, he was the emcee for an anti-disco event he organized. Between the doubleheader games, he and his listeners were going to take disco records, throw them in a pile, and blow them up. If you brought a record, you got into the game for just 98 cents. There were some disco records, of course. There were Saturday Night Fever,

and Sylvester, and Gloria Gaynor Gloria Gaynor, you know, records that were disco, but then there was just so many records. It was just black records, funk records, R&B records, even like blues records. This is Vince Lawrence. He was 15 at the time and was in the stands working as an usher. You know, I guess they thought that 15 or 20,000 people were going to show up and the game filled to capacity

almost immediately. It was actually nearly 50,000 people who attended the game, way more than expected. There were lines down the block and you know, then there were still thousands of people outside afterwards. And there were so many records.

During the game, fans hurled disco records onto the field. And when the time came, Steve Dahl collected tons of those records and loaded them into a giant box and just blew it up. Like, literally exploded the records. All right, you ready? We're going to count to three and then go boom! One, two, three, boom! They're not going to show their direct threats! We rock and rollers will resist, and we will thrive!

And then, things got darker. The crowd basically turned into a mob. Everybody stormed the field. They were taking bases and picking up pieces of turf. Authorities showed up. Mounted police were used to dispel the crowd. It was just mayhem on the field. Vince was watching all of this chaos in astonishment. But then he started noticing something.

One look at me and I was disco. And they're yelling, disco sucks at me. In a way, it kind of felt different. Vince is Black, and he wasn't the only person noticing the racist and homophobic undertones of the event. My community embraced disco. So you knew that the audience for it and a lot of the artists that were making the good disco

that we like to listen to were Black. So what other association could you have made? This is Darlene Jackson, who was watching the news coverage of disco demolition from her living room as a kid. It was almost like they wanted to send a message. Like, we will tear this place up. We don't want blackness here. Steve Dahl has since denied that disco demolition was aimed at Black or gay communities. But what is clear is that what happened that night was about more than a cheap stunt.

It was a symbolic representation of the end of a cultural era. The 1970s were a time of rapid change in the United States. Glitter, platform heels, sequined bodysuits were everywhere. Afrocentrism and Black pride were in the mainstream. Disco music, like this track from Sylvester, was dominant. But with the 1980s just over the horizon, a backlash to this cultural movement was brewing. The Reagan years were coming, and with them, a renewed investment in so-called traditional American values. It's more important than ever for our families to affirm an older and more lasting set of values. The cultural climate that had allowed music like disco to flourish

was over, and disco demolition symbolically lit the funeral pyre. But the spirit of disco proved too hard to kill. In the late 1970s and early 80s, a new sound would be born right there in Chicago. It would be the cultural torchbearer of disco. A young, Black, queer movement that provided a new space for expression. A movement that would lay groundwork for a musical genre that would take over the world. House music is music that fills your soul. How does house music make you feel?

House music really is just an experience to forget about your problems. It's church. Yes. It's a lifeline. House is about love. It's about community. And it's an inspirational type of music. All of the things that separate us kind of fade away underneath the boom, boom, boom, boom. Chicago house music, like all music, is hard to describe.

But it usually has a beat kind of like this. It's funky, repetitive, and is generally around 120 beats per minute, kind of like your heart rate when you're dancing. When you're dancing to it, that repetition, that beat, causes an almost ritualistic feeling of being perfectly in sync with other people. It mimics the feeling of love, of letting go. I guess if you had to describe it, you could say it was akin to gospel dance music. Gospel dance music. That's Frederick Dunson. He was at those early house music shows in the 1980s,

dancing all night until the sun came up. It's a feel-good music. That's the only way I can keep saying and describing it. And that's what brings us back to the warehouse, the ground zero of house music. You walked up a long landing of stairs and there was a little window

and it was mostly gay men there, you know, a few women mostly black. And then you walked toward the back of that room and there was a long stairwell downstairs to the dance floor. And it was surrounded by this incredible sound, you know, this incredible music that I hadn't heard in that way before. It was not like listening to the radio. It was like being in an experience. We were open to 6, 7, 8, 9, and then some days, maybe midnight the following night because there were marathon parties.

Frederick didn't just go to dance at the warehouse. He even worked there for a bit, handing out flyers, helping with parties, and even managing for a little while. There was no pause. You just experienced it all night. And DJ Lori Branch, a Chicago-born house music historian and DJ who grew up sneaking into the warehouse. I was like trying to find my life and I found this community that just felt like home. Home. We all accept each other and we all love each other.

All the people we talked to in Chicago said entering the warehouse was like journeying to another world. The sweaty bodies dancing together, the booming beats, the escape. And if you were there on a Saturday night in the early 80s, there was one person taking you on that journey. Its primary DJ was Frankie Knuckles. Frankie Knuckles. Who is known as the godfather of house. It's not always about how technically savvy you are on the equipment or how well you can put two songs together. It's what you play.

Frankie Knuckles, whose voice you just heard, had moved to Chicago from New York City in the late 1970s to DJ at The Warehouse. He was an innovator. He blended genres like disco, funk, and German electronic pop. He played obscure records, used sound effects, and drum machines. I was in the car with a friend of mine going to his house out on the south side, and we had a stoplight, and there was a tavern on the corner that had a sign in the window that said, we play house music. And I asked him what it was, and he said, is that music you play down there at that club? He was experimenting every night when he was behind the turntables, and the crowd loved it. People came to dance to the when he was behind the turntables, and the crowd loved it.

People came to dance to the music he was playing. And those magical nights all contributed to the creation of the musical movement, to its name. I didn't realize it had a name. And so he was like, well, it's the house. It's what everybody calls it. And he was like, it's everybody's nickname for the place. And I just thought, oh. And that's when I really felt like I cities in America. Black and white communities lived in different neighborhoods, different parts of the city. So if you were black, there were clubs and parties you just didn't have access to.

And if you were black and gay, there were even less. The reason that the underground clubs evolved was because most of the gay clubs gave most of the minorities a really hard time in getting in. While a white patron might be asked to show one form of ID, when it got to me, they'd ask me for three or four. A clear sign to Frederick, a Black man, that he was not welcome. And so as a result of that, people just said, oh, well, we could do our own thing and start doing underground parties.

It was a solution to a situation that wasn't getting any better. Frederick says that was why the warehouse was necessary and why it was so beloved. It was a sanctuary, a place for both Black and gay people to feel welcome and safe, where the music and dancing created community. It gave you the strength to carry on, to make it from week to week. Because, you know, people would look forward to, oh God, next Saturday, see you next Saturday, see you next Saturday, because it was their release. The warehouse was like a dance church, a place to refuel and be in community,

to be seen, to be loved, to dance away the pain and embrace the beauty, no matter how fleeting. So-called house music, it's one of the hottest things going, and it may only be a matter of time before house musicians become heroes in their own home. House music wouldn't be confined to the underground scene at the warehouse for long. Some of the teenagers who were sneaking into the warehouse and listening to house music on local radio shows This is WBMX 102.7 FM. We're bringing house music to the places they could party without needing to sneak in. Let's go, let's go.

Teens like DJ Lori Branch. People like me who was like 17-year-old teenager sneaking out trying to find myself with my other friends who were burgeoning DJs. Who then said, we can take this sound and implant it to our teen parties. Teen parties could come in the form of an after-school event. We used to call them sock hops, and they would happen at the end of the school day. Or at local restaurants that would rent their space to kids on a random night. Or Catholic schools.

Yeah, even the local Catholic church got in on the house music craze. This is the Catholic archdiocese, you know, letting kids come two and three thousand, you know, strong to throw these parties. So yeah, this was like the precursor to raves, right? That's Darlene Jackson, who watched disco demolition from her living room as a kid. She's now known as DJ Lady D, one of Chicago's most popular house DJs. But back in the 80s, she was one of those teens dancing at these proto-raves. Basically, you're just like doing this pumping, running, like frantic, frenetic movement, just to the beat of the music, to the rhythm, like hard, hard, like just, it's like frantic, frenetic movement, just to the beat of the music, to the rhythm, like

hard, hard, like just, it's like a train, choo-choo, like the wheels are turning. Teenagers were dancing, they were DJing, they were throwing parties. And people like Vince Lawrence, that 15-year-old usher at Comiskey Park during disco demolition, started becoming promoters. Basically, house music entrepreneurs. Yeah, I want to be the guy who throws a party. That way, for sure, I get in free. And we put together a little group, and we had our DJs, and we had our promotion people, and we had our group members

that went to high schools all over the city. So everybody would take some flyers and pass them out at their school. But Vince, whose father was a musician, wanted to do more than throw parties. He and his friends wanted to start writing their own house music records. One weekend, we had gotten a little drum machine and we said, let's go make some music. And we came up with a bunch of songs. So we started playing the songs on cassette at the party

and people kept dancing just like it was any other record, like a regular old record. We were like, hey, wait a minute, hold on. We can make these records. Vince and his friend Jesse Saunders would make songs and then get them played at parties all over Chicago. In 1984, they made a song that really struck a chord. A song that many call the first real house record. So Jesse and I got this four track and

you know, we made this record called On and On. On and On. We made the record. We were playing it at the party, and it was going over like gangbusters. So we said, forget it. Jesse, I know where the pressing plant is.

And we pressed up on and on, and we started playing it and giving it to our friends. And one of our friends is Farley Jack Master Funk, and he played a record on the radio. Man, this is a real busy night for me. I think they're ready to hear your mix. Aren't they always? Okay.

Let's go, let's go. You know, it became really, really popular. Everybody would recognize it. In a single day, Vince remembers making around $4,000. Jesse and I left, and we got in the car, rolled up the windows and we screamed. And I looked at Jesse and said, fuck parties, man. We in the record business now.

That is amazing. We probably gave him the $4,000 check, something like that. We'd never made that much money on a party. With the success of On and On, Vince Lawrence and Jesse Saunders had cracked open the door to the record industry for house music. A door that would soon burst open to the world with the release of another song Vince and Jesse produced for that local radio DJ named Farley Jackmaster Funk he says okay I'm gonna make it perfectly clear

you guys are gonna make a good record with me or I'm gonna stop playing all of yours so I wrote this song and said okay well look when you like somebody and they don't like you back the same way you still keep liking them like even though you try to say okay that's over love can't turn around look, when you like somebody and they don't like you back the same way, you still keep liking them.

Like, even though you try to say, OK, that's over. Love Can't Turn Around. Love Can't Turn Around was a hit on the radio and not just in Chicago. It was released by a record label in England and completely took that country by storm. It was the first, it was the song that broke the house music movement in the UK. It was at the top of the UK charts in 1986. And it was in the U.S., like Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C. And with the success of songs from Vince Lawrence, Jesse Saunders, and Frankie Knuckles, house music left the U.S. and reached new heights in Europe.

Coming up, how house music laid the foundation for the birth of electronic dance music, a genre that would cause a music revolution and create a billion-dollar industry. This is Benjamin Bedley from Chicago, Illinois, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. This message comes from NPR sponsor, the NPR Wine Club, a place to explore the exciting world of wine, including wines inspired by popular NPR shows like Weekend Edition Cabernet. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, all purchases help support NPR programming and fund quality reporting developed to connect people

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Now, back to the show. Part 2. Rave Cave. to kick off three days of heart-pounding music, over-the-top production, and more than 300 of the world's biggest DJs and live actors. Join us as we all get set to experience the largest and most unparalleled lineup ever assembled in dance music history. This is a promo for the Ultra Music Festival. Joining nearly 200,000 crazy dance music fans who've all packed themselves in the streets of Miami.

One of the world's largest dance music festivals. Today, Ultra Music Festival has come to define the electronic dance music scene for people in mainstream culture. But we have to rewind to Ibiza, an island off the coast of Spain in the late 1980s, to understand how it started. This is a very famous story. In 87, a number of British DJs went to Ibiza. Ibiza is known as one of the party capitals of the world. And these British DJs hear this guy Alfredo play at this open-air all-nighter called Amnesia. And they heard a whole bunch of American house records. And he rewires their brains.

They dance, they get high. They're completely in awe of the power of the music. They're hearing all these great Chicago house records. They go out, get those records, and... They bring it back to England. Then by 88, it becomes a national craze. Mind the Gap. This is...

Michelangelo Matos. He's a music journalist who also wrote a book called... The Underground is Massive How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America. He says that when the DJs who heard Chicago house music in Ibiza brought the music back to London, the entire party scene changed. All of a sudden, dressing to the nines and looking like you're trying to be in GQ goes out the window. And suddenly, everybody is wearing baggy clothes and dressing all like colorful and psychedelic and sweating their gonads off to this crazy music coming from Chicago.

In the late 1980s, house music, a Black American art form, had inspired a new movement in the British underground party scene. They were even bringing DJs like Frankie Knuckles to London. And just like in Chicago, it was bringing people together to party in a place that felt safe. But London had one major twist on their version of the house music scene that was very different from Chicago. Chicago is a party town. So it stands to reason there were drugs, but it also, it was not a drug scene in the way that it would become in Britain, where it was associated with a specific drug. That drug is called methylene-dioxymethamphetamine. MDMA.

MDMA, also known as ecstasy or molly, is a party drug that causes feelings of intense euphoria. It arrived in the UK club scene right around the time house music did. Because that's part of the implication that those DJs had gotten in Ibiza. That's part of what they were bringing back. They wanted to spread the experience of dancing to all of this crazy music while high as a loon. While high as a loon. It was the American import house music which started the craze. Linked with the so-called designer drug ecstasy, it became known as acid house.

Acid house. That's what the British twist became known as by the late 1980s. The music, fashion and drug culture. It spread all over the country. Acid house in Britain means that whole epoch. The trend is said to be probably the most distinctive development in popular youth culture since punk rock in the 1970s and just as controversial. These parties are said to be linked with drug taking or worse they're in breach of local authority licensing regulations and besides they keep the home counties awake at night.

The acid house scene kept growing even though the authorities were trying to shut parties down. And that tension and energy built and built and culminated in a week-long free electronic music festival on a massive field in Worcestershire, England in 1992. At the height of the festival, an estimated 20,000 people had converged on Castle Morton Common at the foot of the Morven Hills. It came to be known as the Castle Morton Common Festival. Variously described as New Age travelers, hippies and rave goers, they were, in reality, a motley bunch of predominantly young people from all walks of life, drawn together by the promise of free music. There's a lot of post-punk flavor in early British house music

because that's a lot of the people who were doing it, were these people who had been involved with punk. The festival was part of England's second Summer of Love, where there was an open rejection by youth of the austere political conservatism that dominated the country in the 1980s. But in much of the British press, the festival became a symbol

for a party culture that had gone too far. I have nothing against meetings that are legal and young people having fun. But this is an illegal meeting. It's against, it's a threat to public health, public order, and a real nuisance to people who have lived around it. And that must never, ever happen again. In response, in the years after the festival, British authorities passed laws that gave the police, quote, powers to remove persons attending or preparing a rave. At parties where the music was defined as, quote, characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.

House music is mutated by all of its practitioners in different ways. You take house music out of Chicago and you put it in another city and it mutates. The Londoners were doing it differently. Everybody had different equipment. Everybody had different points of view. And people were coming from different backgrounds and bringing that to it. By the mid-1990s, the house music from Chicago and other American cities

had morphed into electronic dance music styles like acid house, trance, and drum and bass. Parties were happening all over Europe. London, Berlin, Rome, and the giant record labels in the U.S. started to see a potential business opportunity in this movement. The U.S. record business decides it's going to sort of latch onto this stuff and try to sell it back to the states. They're trying to sell it to a bigger audience. The mid-1990s was the era of grunge, gangster rap, and boy bands. I remember it well. It was weird. Artists as different as Nirvana, Dr. Dre, and NSYNC were all achieving popular success.

And somewhere in all this chaos, record labels thought electronic dance music could find a new, mainstream American audience. The default audience is considered to be a white post-adolescent male. When you sold a lot of records, that's who you were selling them to. They're trying to reach the alternative kid because that's the ascendant audience at the time. And of course, the alternative kid is seen as a white post-adolescent man.

This is the song Setting Sun by the Chemical Brothers. It was a number one hit in 1996. And this is Da Funk by Daft Punk. Another number one single in 1999. These songs were part of the breakout of electronic music into the mainstream, a triumph for major record labels. They're pretty successful later on in the 90s when Fatboy Slim, the Chemical Brothers, all of those acts, and Daft Punk. And that's kind of a golden era for that form because here are these artists who are really making serious albums, trying to make something equivalent to a great rock album only with those tools.

And some of those records are great, but there's a sense in which a lot of these artists, the newer artists, pay homage to the old school, and they pretty consistently do. They cite their predecessors. Daft Punk has that song Teachers on their first album, where they name names. There's a lot of that going on, but do you think most of the, you know, frat boys who are dancing to this stuff in 1998 care?

Of course not. And it's frustrating because here are some of the artists who are actually attempting to put some shine on the originators and the rest of the world being like, eh. And it becomes a problem because, for example, Detroit Techno is black. Chicago House is black. These musics are black and they've always been open to whomever

is going to work their variations on them as long as the variations are good. But then there's a lot of variations that aren't very good. And a lot of that gets mixed up. The success of electronic music in the mainstream in the late 1990s continued into the new millennium. At the turn of the 21st century, there were dozens of hit songs based on electronic music. Artists as diverse as Madonna, Ricky Martin, and Jennifer Lopez were singing over tracks you could dance to at a club. And on it went. Electronic music festivals popped up and grew into huge events. Raves and dance parties were happening in cities all over the world.

And by the early 2010s, the electronic dance music genre had become a massive industry, generating billions of dollars. David Guetta, Tiesto, Avicii. These are the names of some of the most famous artists in the history of electronic dance music, EDM. They provided the soundtrack for massive music festivals like Ultra. It was defined by crowds in the tens of thousands dancing to anthemic songs. A lot of the build and drop dynamics that came out of Trance, a lot of the sweeping sort of sounds, a lot of it,

and then it stops, and then the bass hits you like a hammer. Almost unrecognizable compared to Chicago house. House is more of a church. House music, especially when a good DJ plays it, house music can be profoundly spiritual. It's a very up and down kind of thing. You know, it's moving through passages and then into new peaks and then back down. And it has that movement to it. EDM, big room EDM was more like a, you know, a roller coaster. A roller coaster that got bigger and bigger, that everyone was riding the exact same way. There was a one-minute long mix called Epic Mash Leg by Delary. It came out in 2013. And it was essentially just like,

here's five seconds of 20 of the top 20 on Beatport's chart right now. And they all sound exactly the same. That's what EDM had become. It's that moment, that early, that 2010s moment of it, of its cultural ascendancy and peak, that is, that to me is EDM. Very macho, extremely macho. That's, that is a lot of what marked it. Today, EDM is one of the most popular and profitable genres of music. There are DJs and festivals that make millions and millions of dollars every year.

And Frederick Dunson says that success has obscured our view of the people and places that inspired it all. House music was the foundation on which EDM's legs stand. And so for new musicians to say, oh, well, we created this, we created that,

that's not, that wouldn't be right. That's not giving credit to the people who actually put the work in. David Gedip, one of the world's most famous electronic artists, has cited the song Vince Lawrence helped write, Love Can't Turn Around, as an inspiration that launched his whole career. Yet it's Gedip and other current artists who most people associate with the genre. What do you say when a guy who makes tens of millions of dollars a year says, this was the launch pad for me?

Every interview I have, when someone asks me this question about David Geta and so on and so forth, I say, David, I'm right here. What do you say when that whole industry doesn't really have one guy like you in it, in all of EDM? There's not much, you know, representation in that sense. Coming up, we go back to Chicago to meet the people working to keep the origins of Chicago House alive. My name is Kevin Mega McFall. I co-host the Vintage House Show, and I myself am a DJ. I'm calling in from Chicago, the birthplace of house music. And you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Part three. Part 3 You got to find the light.

Check, check, check, check, check, check, check. Okay, here we go. Okay, so we're outside of the Honey Dijon show. It's December in Chicago, and it is offensively cold. ThruLine producer Christina Kim and I are at Metro, a venue where some of the earliest house DJs like Frankie Knuckles played. On this night, Honey Dijon is headlining.

She's from Chicago and incredibly beloved here. The line to get into Metro stretches all the way down the street, and getting people to talk was pretty easy. NPR, can I ask you a question? Hell yeah, NPR! Yeah, but through line. Oh, through line, yeah! Fuck yeah!

The vibe was clearly amazing. It was a party. The line was buzzing. It felt electric. But when we asked people why they were there, the answers were about way more than a party. There's still an inherent joy to going somewhere where the only thing people care about is the DJ. They don't care about your race. They don't care about your sexuality.

They don't care about your gender. And everyone is just releasing themselves to the music. How does house music make me feel? It's very connecting and yet chill and no pressure, you know, just be there. House music makes me feel euphoric. An experience to forget about your problems. Stop, twirl, move around. Empowered.

Empowered, especially being loved. I like that it allows you to just ride the wave and go along with it. Moving, like energized. Stop, twirl, move around. Joyful. Stop, twirl, move around. You get lost in the music. And it just makes you feel at one with everyone and yourself.

It's church. Yes. Church. Yeah, no, it's church. It's church. On Sundays it's like going to church. It's going to church every Sunday. It's a spiritual experience.

Every Sunday at Queen is church. Yeah. We worship on the dance floor. We worship on the dance floor. This was so true. This really magical place. I felt like I was Alice in Wonderland. Frantic, frenetic movement.

House music may have gone around the world, but it never left Chicago. More than 45 years after Frankie Knuckles first started spinning at the warehouse, house music is still providing sanctuary. We all feel safe. This is our safe place to be. This is the place for queers. Here you're accepted for who you are. It's just home. It's home. It was built in Chicago and it makes us all feel great and a community. So after we talked to all these people, Christina and I put our mics down and we also got to go to church. You hear the sound from a distance. And as you get closer, the sound gets less muffled and less muffled.

And then they build you up. It's like ascending. Up, up, up. Into a completely new space that's bathed in light and sound. And you literally feel like your soul is lifting. Up, up, up. And above you, a kind of angelic pastor coming down from the heavens is the DJ. Everything that's been weighing you down just gets a moment to go. Up, up, up.

Hello, hello. Hello, hello, hello. Meet Lauren Lowry. We love the music. We enjoy the music. Now we realize this is very special, and we need to protect it and celebrate it. Why is it important? And I'd love to hear a little bit more about, like, the ephemera you're collecting. What do these flyers look like? Where are you storing them?

Why is it important to do that in Chicago? Oh, man, we could have brought some archives. We have ephemera we could have brought here today. Don't tell me that. She's the chief archivist of Chicago's Modern Dance Music Research and Archiving Foundation. So we have lots of different things. Gold records, reel-to-reels, a tremendous number of flyers, the mixer from the power plant, you know, those types of things.

She captures and keeps track of all of this history to keep the stories of Chicago House alive. So people can't argue that, you know, you can't prove that this happened. Like, here's the sound and here's what it came out of. She's doing this work together with Kevin McFall and Lori Branch, the house DJ who used to sneak into the warehouse. I think that history gets erased often, and we are just now starting to claim that. They're interviewing all the original innovators of house to make sure that the Chicago black and gay origins

of house music and electronic dance music won't be forgotten. It is a Chicago product made by Chicagoans, made by black and brown, queer, straight folk. And if you want to understand a genre, if you want to understand a people, there's no better place. The intersection of races and, you know, the different cultures that have come together to create it is what made it special. And I think what made it international. You have to find the light.

That's why there's house music. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Del Fattah. I'm Ramtin Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg.

Yolanda Sanguin. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Yordanos Tesfazion. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voelkel. Thanks to Otis Hart, Micah Salkland, Amaya Henry, Adrian Loving, Emmanuel Martinez, DJ Heather, Metro Chicago, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Jeff Mao for letting us use part of his interview with Frankie Knuckles, Thames TV, ITV Central News, and our play cousins at It's Been a Minute. You can hear their full interview with Honey Dijon on their podcast. Big thanks also to the Beyonce fans and creators who you heard at the top.

That's O'Shawn and Jordan Jones. And to everyone in the Chicago House community who opened their doors for us, talked and danced with us. Also, thanks to Micah Ratner, Rachel Seller, Taylor Ashe, Tamar Charney and Anya Grungman. This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin. If you want to hear more house music from around the world, check out NPR Music's Spotify profile for a special playlist they put together

by Grammy-nominated house producer and DJ Terry Hunter. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org or hit us up on Twitter at ThruLine NPR. Thanks for listening. This message comes from Grammarly. Back-and-forth communication at work is costly. That's why over 70,000 teams and 30 million people use Grammarly's AI to make their points clear the first time. Better writing, better results. Learn more at grammarly.com slash enterprise.