This is the song Break My Soul by Beyonce.

It was the lead single off her album Renaissance, which won her a bunch of Grammys last year,

though not best album. This year, she's dropping Act 2, an homage to the Black Roots of Country.

But in 2023, it was all about House.

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 bea bea That genre, Beyonce was referring to in her acceptance speech is electronic dance music.

More specifically, it's the movement that's started at all.

House music.

It's a re-bark, bitch. We had weed. 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

DJ's 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 Dejan, a Chicago-born house DJ who actually served as a musical advisor

to Beyoncé 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

...