Chicago house

Chicago house refers to house music produced during the mid to late 1980s within Chicago. The term is generally used to refer to the original house music of DJs and producers from the area, such as Ron Hardy and Phuture.

History and origins

Disco edits

Following Chicago's Disco Demolition Night in mid-1979, disco music's mainstream popularity fell into decline. In the early 1980s, fewer and fewer disco records were being released, but the genre remained popular in some Chicago nightclubs and on at least one radio station, WBMX-FM.

In this era, Chicago radio jocks The Hot Mix 5, and club DJs Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles played various styles of dance music, including older disco records, newer Italo disco, electro, EBM tracks, B-boy hip hop music by Man Parrish, Jellybean Benitez, Arthur Baker and John Robie as well as electronic pop music by Kraftwerk, Telex and Yellow Magic Orchestra.

Some of these DJs also made and played their own edits of their favorite songs on reel-to-reel tape, focusing on the portions of songs which worked well on the dancefloor. Some even mixed in effects, drum machines, and other rhythmic electronic instrumentation in an effort to give songs more appeal. These edits and remixes were rarely released to the public, and even then were available only on privately pressed vinyl records or on mixtapes.

European connection

The early house music sound was a "dialogue" between Hispanic, and Black American post-disco and European post-punk electronic music and their traditions with Italo-disco picked or, emulated the most, as the template for house music. Precursors include electro songs "Planet Rock", "Let the Music Play", Italo-disco (e.g. Klein + M.B.O.), on one hand; EBM (Liaisons Dangereuses; Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft on acid house) on another.