Dance Yourself Free

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2023

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a song, Break My Soul, by Beyoncé.
0:13.3	It was the lead single of her album, Renaissance, which won her a bunch of Grammys this year.
0:18.3	Everybody, everybody.
0:27.2	I'd like to thank the queer community for your love, and for inventing this genre.
0:33.1	God bless you.
0:34.5	Thank you so much to the Grammys.
0:36.9	Oh, my Beyoncé.
0:49.3	That genre, Beyoncé, was referring to in her acceptance speech, is electronic dance music.
0:55.3	More specifically, it's the movement that started it all.
0:59.3	House music.
1:00.3	As we've read about it, the rebar fits we had.
1:02.3	We made this shit, okay?
1:06.3	Today, it might be easy to immediately associate electronic dance music with raves and massive parties in cities like Berlin, Paris and London.
1:15.3	Many of the world's most famous electronic artists and DJs are European, white, men.
1:21.3	But Beyoncé's album intentionally paid homage to the people who laid the groundwork for all electronic dance music.
1:28.3	The young, black, and queer communities of Chicago in the late 1970s and 1980s.
1:35.3	For a long time, house music and dance music was considered white music.
1:39.3	There's been so far removed from the origins that a lot of black people even think house music is white music.
1:46.3	That's honeydijon, a Chicago-born house DJ who actually served as a musical advisor to Beyoncé on Renaissance.
1:53.3	One of the things that I was told from her team was that she wanted to make this dance record,
1:58.3	and she wanted to go to the true source of Chicago house music, the true source of that music.
2:03.3	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.
	...

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