Do You Remember House?

Chicago's Queer of Color Undergrounds

Micah Salkind

Based on sixty new oral history interviews
Integrates histories of music, production, DJing, dance, fashion, and slang
Addresses movements that led to the development of Chicago's house music

Do You Remember House?

Chicago's Queer of Color Undergrounds

Micah Salkind

Description

Today, no matter where you are in the world, you can turn on a radio and hear the echoes and influences of Chicago house music. Do You Remember House? tells a comprehensive story of the emergence, and contemporary memorialization of house in Chicago, tracing the development of Chicago house music culture from its beginnings in the late '70s to the present. Based on expansive research in archives and his extensive conversations with the makers of house in Chicago's parks, clubs, museums, and dance studios, author Micah Salkind argues that the remediation and adaptation of house music by crossover communities in its first decade shaped the ways that Chicago producers, DJs, dancers, and promoters today re-remember and mobilize the genre as an archive of collectivity and congregation.

The book's engagement with musical, kinesthetic, and visual aspects of house music culture builds from a tradition of queer of color critique. As such, Do You Remember House? considers house music's liberatory potential in terms of its genre-defiant repertoire in motion. Ultimately, the book argues that even as house music culture has been appropriated and exploited, the music's porosity and flexibility have allowed it to remain what pioneering Chicago DJ Craig Cannon calls a "musical Stonewall" for queers and people of color in the Windy City and around the world.

Do You Remember House?

Chicago's Queer of Color Undergrounds

Micah Salkind

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Epigraph
Introduction

Part 1 - This is How It Started

Chapter One - Like a Phoenix From The Ashes: Socio-Sonic Memory and Proto-House Geographies
Introduction
Anti-Integration Activism in Residential and Cultural Spaces
Urban Renewal, Deindustrialization, and Top-Down Development
The Rise and Fall of Chicago's Indie R&B and Soul Industry
Queer of Color Cultural Antecedents
Conclusion

Chapter Two - The Warehouse and The Music Box: Nurturing Chicago House Music Culture
Introduction
The Birth of The Warehouse
Ron Hardy and The Music Box
Conclusion

Chapter Three - Remediating The Underground: Teen Parties, Disco Punk, and Hot Mix Radio
Introduction
The Deep Times and Spaces of Chicago's Black Social Dance Cultures
Hotmixing DJs on The Airwaves
"Saturday Night Live Ain't No Jive"
Conclusion

Chapter Four - The End of The First Decade: House Music Crosses Over and Moves Out
Introduction
Pressing and Selling Chicago House
Chicago House Music Moves Out
Conclusion

Part 2 - It's Not Over

Chapter Five - "Is It All Over My Face?" Sounding a Communal Love Ethic at The Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic
Introduction
Setting The Stage: Reunion Picnics, Chosen Family, and Camp Culture
Sounding The Classics of a Repertoire in Motion
Dancing The Loving Community
Conclusion

Chapter Six - Are You Ready to Get Your Life? Performing Neostalgia and Wildness in Chicago's Contemporary Queer Club Scenes
Introduction
The Hermitage of House
Safer Spaces on The West Side
Queen!'s Neostalgic Musical Mix
Sounding Wildness at Chances Dances
Queen!'s Neostalgic Visuality
Cuteness and Wild Visuality at Chances Dances
Conclusion

Chapter Seven - Dancing in Brave Spaces
Introduction
Being Big
Riding The Rhythm, Pulling Energy
Jack Your Body, Strike a Pose
Out of My Head
Conclusion

Coda
Bibliography
Books
Articles
Websites, Online Articles, and Multimedia
Conferences, Lectures, Symposia, Unpublished Work, Personal Correspondences etc.
Oral History Interviews
Selected Discography

Do You Remember House?

Chicago's Queer of Color Undergrounds

Micah Salkind

Author Information

Micah E. Salkind is the Special Projects Manager for The City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism. A DJ, sound designer, and curator of live performance, Salkind's writing on Afro-Diasporic cultural production and post-industrial cultural development complements his work towards establishing innovative models for sustaining community art institutions and art-makers.

Do You Remember House?

Chicago's Queer of Color Undergrounds

Micah Salkind

Reviews and Awards

"...expansive and deep..." -- Courtney Lau, Dance Research Journal

"[The] definitive study" -- Chicago Tribune

"This richly nuanced study shows how house music - one of Chicago's most important, enduring, and magical cultural creations - arose in underground spaces through the vision, determination, and energy of queer people of color. Just as importantly, through a wealth of first-person accounts, Salkind also reveals how house continues to resonate through this American city today. An essential contribution to critical race and sexuality studies and the history of club music." --Mark J. Butler, author of Playing with Something That Runs and Professor of Music Theory and Cognition, Northwestern University

"With Do You Remember House?, Salkind has given us a definitive study of a music that has until now received very little scholarly attention. Through years of ethnographic field work, dozens of oral history interviews, and meticulous archival research Salkind delivers a riveting story about how house music emerged, first as an underground creation and then as a commercially successful Chicago phenomenon that literally saved the lives of a generation of queer people of color. This book pays homage to house heads around the world." --E. Patrick Johnson, author of Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South