Story by Emma Cooke
Photo by Cameron Thomas
We hear the influence of house music every day. On the radio, at music festivals, on our social media feeds, and at clubs.
But as those on the dance floor get lost in the DJ’s beats, they’re also usually unaware of where House actually comes from.
Analogue: You usually got that kick drum like that on every house beat that became indicative of house music. Before that, there was no intentional music that was making that kick go on every drum. That was never before heard of.
That’s Suzi Analogue, founder of Never Normal Records, Recording Academy member, and Teaching Assistant Professor at UNC Chapel Hill’s Beat Lab. She describes House music as a genre that energizes the crowd.
She says the style emerged in Chicago and New York following the discotheque era. Vinyls were being intentionally cut, sampled and mixed for the first time, pulling from disco, soul, and gospel. It was a different way of making music.
Analogue: So people deciding, I just want this little part. This is the little part that everyone’s waiting for.
And the genre was a voice for queer people of color during a period of liberation movements, like Gay Pride and feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Analogue: That’s when you’re going to sometimes get some of the most cutting edge music because people are feeling a lot of things. So the beats are gonna go hard and it’s going to try to liberate and uplift the people around the community.
But the ones cultivating the sound aren’t always the ones getting the recognition. Ocean Coaxum is a Triangle-based producer and music artist. They say a lot of the time, white DJs are booked for sets at major music events like Coachella and Lollapalooza before Black, queer musicians are even considered.
Coaxum: The majority of the DJs that are doing those shows and getting booked are white cishet men. But the creators of the sounds are very much not that.
They say listeners usually associate white artists like David Guetta, Avicii, and European producers with electronic music.
Coaxum: The face of, like, one white man should not be the face of electronic music, period.
But digitized music has made it easier for newer DJs to fight against the genre’s history.
Tesnim Arebawel is a college DJ from Raleigh. He started DJing three years ago after seeing electronic sets at Lollapalooza… And a lot of the time, from white artists.
He says he wasn’t even aware of House’s history before he immersed himself into the genre. Electronic music is so mainstream now that he says that a lot of today’s DJs aren’t aware of where their samples are coming from.
Arebawel: Like, you can just pick it up, watch a couple of YouTube videos, and not really have to care about the history, like, at all.
But House could be reclaiming its space at 2024’s Grammys with a new category. The decision followed Beyonce’s 2023 Electronic Dance Album win for “Renaissance.” A voting member of the Recording Academy, Analogue says that a lot of the cuts on the album weren’t even electronic.
Analogue: Is it fair to have all this R&B and all of these other sounds pushed into your category and then someone take that whole category away from you.
And the new Dance Pop category is part of an effort to make the award show more equitable.
I’m Emma Cooke reporting.
