"Frederick Dunson was 17 when he first rode a rickety freight elevator to the sprawling industrial space where music history was being made. When the doors opened, the desolate Chicago neighborhood below fell away. The lights were dim and pulsing. The crowd was art-student chic. The music was the style that would come to be known as house. The men playing it were, like Dunson and many other attendees that night, young, black and gay.
It was 1975, and the club at 555 W. Adams St. and local venues like it were sonic and social revelations. By year’s end, the venue had moved to a members-only space nearby that was officially named US Studio, but was called “The Warehouse” by attendees. Revelers shortened that name to “house” to describe the music DJs like Frankie Knuckles -- who would come to be known as the godfather of the genre -- played there, grafting gospel and soul vocals over kick drums made with the era’s emerging drum machine technology and played at 120-130 beats per minute. With a thrilling soundtrack, the gay men populating the dancefloor could freely express themselves.
“Being ostracized as black, gay kids,” says Dunson, founder/president of the Frankie Knuckles Foundation, which works to preserve Knuckles’ legacy and support his causes, “this felt like a place where we could be who we were while being protected from the judgments of society.”
“Chicago was kind of a racist town,” adds Warehouse founder Robert Williams, who relocated to the Midwest from New York in the early ’70s. He recruited Knuckles to be the resident DJ at his new club. The Warehouse “was a haven for the gay community, which also turned into the heterosexual community, because the gay kids were inviting their heterosexual friends who were dying to come in.”
From Knuckles and company in Chicago to fellow house innovators David Mancuso and Larry Levan in New York, dance music’s roots in the gay club scenes of the late ’70s and early ’80s are well documented. Gay men, and particularly gay men of color, are widely credited with creating house music and planting the seeds of the many genres that have evolved from it.
Walk into a Las Vegas club today, and you’ll hear music -- mainly, what’s known as EDM -- that draws on this earlier sound. Like the blues and other genres before it, it is music forged by a marginalized community that is now dominated by the heteronormative mainstream, with straight, white, cisgender men populating label boardrooms and festival lineups. While underground LGBTQ-oriented clubs continue trendsetting in major cities, in the most visible and lucrative incarnations of the scene they created, gay and black artists are in the minority.
Mainstream house music is nothing new. In 1991, CeCe Peniston’s “Finally” hit No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Dance Club Songs chart. The 1993 club jam “Show Me Love” by Robin S. became a worldwide radio smash. Meanwhile, artists like Madonna, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson were recruiting underground house producers like David Morales, Peter Rauhofer and Victor Calderone to remix their tracks.
At the same time, the AIDS crisis was dealing a blow to the worldwide gay dance scene, curbing its unbridled celebration and sexual adventurousness. “You could tell that the behavior of the consumer in those parties was not about just getting laid anymore,” says Insomniac’s Carlos Correal, a longtime talent booker and organizer of some of Montreal’s earliest house and techno events. “It was like, ‘If you keep doing that, you’re going to die.’”
It was around 2006 that EDM began rumbling stateside. While the genre built upon house and its electro and progressive subgenres it spawned after crossing over to Europe, the scene’s biggest stars were, and are, mostly straight white men like Calvin Harris, Diplo, deadmau5, David Guetta and the members of Swedish House Mafia. According to IMS’ 2017 business report, the global EDM industry is now valued at $7.4 billion. Published in March, Billboard’s Dance 100 list (determined using chart statistics, touring data and fan votes) included only two openly gay producers: techno powerhouse Nicole Moudaber (No. 87) and bass-funk producer GRiZ (No. 76). - Billboard.com
"Stories of the Saint - Chapter 4: The Era".
The Saint was a product of 1970s New York: post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS. An era renown for sexual liberation, hedonistic lifestyles and the gay community's profound role in shaping contemporary urban nightlife and culture.
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