Sound Check: Inheritance
& Legacy
This
is a piece about legacy, but it is a purposely limited one. In it, I want to focus on one aspect of what Frankie
Knuckles left us. I am interested, then, in how house serves as a practice. To be sure, house
is many things: a genre, a community; a global phenomenon; a definite and
particular form of music. My decision to not address these aspects is neither
to deny nor diminish their importance. Rather, it is a recognition of house's impossible reach and scope. And so I have decided to limit my consideration to house as a practice both because it has been one of the more valuable aspects in my life and because it seems to
have been lost in so many of the articles I have read over the last few
days. Consequently, this is a
piece that spends too much time theorizing and too little grounding. And it is
also one in which I spend too much time thinking about what Knuckles gave
me and too little on what he gave the world. For this self-centered approach, I apologize. I know no other way.
Record One: As Architect of a Practice
Tracking
a musical form is difficult. Determining a song's place within those forms is
impossible. Not the least of all because sound is promiscuous. Notes and
arrangements seem to have an uncanny ability to make genres their own. What is
R&B in one instance seems to effortlessly transmogrify into rock or pop or
house in the next. And those concerned with tracking the historical import of a
single form are left having to draw artificial--even arbitrary--lines. Thus, while it may be convenient to
proclaim that R&B is this, and House
is that, allowing for a shorthand through which to identify a song's particular traits, the act leaves us with little more than vague pronouns, which bound more
than define. And the question to ask is what or who is being bounded when we endeavor to such a task.
The
short answer is that it depends. In my more fanciful moments of allegory and
analogy, I imagine this binding serving as a sort of Borgesian nightmare in
which those of us who seek rigid categories take on the role of a record
collector. This collector compulsively and perpetually buys a single record
over and over again, so to be able to file it within every category that it
might fit. In time, a million copies
have been amassed, and the collector can name just as many categories but,
tragically, only knows one song. And so the collector files the physical
object, triumphant in his or her imagined scope and depth, all the while
fooling the world into thinking that he or she has harnessed the notes therein.
Sadly, the comfort doesn't hold. Even the most cursory interrogation shows how
the act of filing merely situates each of us within a sort of bureaucratic maze
or sonic territory, whose boundaries truncate--indeed, stunt--the ability to
consider music from various perspectives. The comfort of order disguises the
limitations wrought. And, thus, we
who attempt to bind become bounded, no longer able to hear the innumerable possibilities
all sounds offer.
For
house, however, the effort to determine a song's generic placement is not a
matter of classification but contextualization. It is an effort interested in
discovery and consideration. To contextualize is to open up the field, to, as
it were, demand that genres can teach us how to listen to songs. To hear house
is a way of knowing, a particular method of listening, which takes in
innumerable notes and arrangements so to see if they have the potential to, as
it were, beat the box. Approached in
this way, house is not a matter of categorization but positioning. It is a function
of entering into a specific conversation, both literally and figuratively. Who,
what and how one chooses to engage becomes more important than
whether or not the sonic response falls within the arbitrary bounds of a single generic
space. That is, boundaries are dictated by the conversations at hand and by the
interactions between DJ and crowd, not by a set of static rules. And each of us
enters into these conversations knowing that our tone, words and politics are
responsible to both ourselves and the community that we have chosen to engage.
Thus,
house does not describe a set of traits that a song must
possess in order for it to fit into the category. Rather, it describes a way of
hearing; it is a practice in search of intersections. It is a practice that
finds moments of sonic commonality not because it seeks to flatten the variety
of differences it is capable of accommodating but, rather, because it
recognizes the strength of difference itself. In this sense, all songs--no
matter their generic traits--are potentially house, and a DJ is only limited by
his or her ability to hear those intersections which allow for the sort of
contextualization needed to place a song within its sonic space. When Teddy Douglass of the Basement Boys proclaims that "Where we come from the mix is more important than the selection. You'll have a real problem if your blend isn't smooth," he is not celebrating technique over sound.* Rather, his observation demonstrates the ways in which the mix serves as the method used by DJs to position a song--any song--into house. The mix, thus, becomes the moment through which two disparate songs are not only layered and sync'ed so to become one but, also, through which the DJ locates moments of sonic commonality so to be able to shift his or her crowd into new sounds. If the mix identifies those moments of intersection, the songs
themselves, which stretch out and demand the crowd find ways to make sense of
them, offers a sonic palette of innumerable differences. This ability to find
the common so to accommodate and celebrate difference is what
Knuckles--alongside other DJs and pioneers in both Chicago and New York--gave
us. Theirs is a practice that
challenges us to find our place within a sonic space in which tradition, to
paraphrase Jazz master Lester Bowie, is always a matter of innovation.
Indeed, Knuckles and house might be said to have offered us a new way to participate within the Black musical tradition. To say that tradition is innovation is to suggest that black art is always both a retaining of and departure from what has come before. The artist's goal is to create new techniques and practices accountable to both the values and history offered by the tradition but which are somehow also and simultaneously relevant and answerable to the moment at hand. In offering listeners house as a practice, Knuckles and his peers provided their respective communities with one such technique. House, thus, takes part of--indeed, is member of--what Amiri Baraka has called the changing same, a phrase used to describe those ever-transmogrifying forms that seek to accommodate the interests, values and aesthetics held by and created through the Black community. In this approach, sonic promiscuity is not an inconvenient fact that the collector must quarantine within a new category but, rather, evidence of the ongoing and innovative conversations occurring within the tradition's most durable technique, that of call and response.
As with the variety of musicians involved with black musical forms that precede house, the DJ offers the crowd a song, and the crowd, an equal partner in this ever democratic process of art, responds and responds in endlessly different ways. To riff off Ralph Ellison, House is. . . an' house ain't . . . at any particular moment, but then comes the next moment, the next response, the next song, the next crowd response and what ain't suddenly is and what is suddenly ain't. And that's its power. This, then, is not house as a collection of sonic traits or markers. This is house as epistemological practice. This is house as a method through which the sonic logic of genre is disallowed the convenient tendency to essentialize, to calcify and to deny any sound its due hearing. Under this direction, the DJ isn't god, as later dance forms have proclaimed; rather, he or she is one participant in the long tradition of innovation and expansion. A caller waiting for the crowd to respond so to know how to, then, call back again and again, endlessly and always with a difference. This is what Knuckles gave us. This is his legacy.
. . . Or part of
it. . .
Record Two: The Personal
The night comes in bursts. Memories are quartered
by gaps. Flashes of story and then
long spaces of experiential miasma, where facts smear into others, and myths
shift to truth, while truths get lost to myth, and where time is not so much
postponed but in a constant state of quantum leap: from minute to hour in the
course of a second. There are, then, as many ellipses as there is narrative.
This is a history that defies its realization but, nevertheless, demands it
telling. Gaps and all. Forgive what follows.
This
much I know. It is December 31,1992. I am barely fifteen and on my way to
Tracks, the legendary Washington, DC nightclub. Two women are taking me.
They are sisters, well versed in the procedures of DC nightlife and, to one
degree or another, my teachers in navigating underage entry. Indeed, it was Allison,
the younger of the two sisters, who had taught me how to lick the
top of my hand and then roll it over her own, so to transfer the club stamp
needed for re-entry to Fifth Column, another of DC's dance clubs. Earlier in the evening, Cameron, Allison's older sister, had given me a tab of acid, and as we
turned onto South Capitol Street, my belly began to churn. Part anticipation;
part drug. I both welcomed and dreaded the feeling. To reorient myself, I looked for One-9's graffiti mural. Two blocks from Tracks and on the outside wall of a South Capitol playground, its letters had always offered a welcome comfort. They were a code that was legible only to a small group, and my ability to read them signaled a unique and uncommon literacy. On this night, however, the mural seemed to portend my entry into a world I no longer knew, that was far from legible. The painted hand,
which held in its palm the Eye of Horus and served as the focal point of the
piece, appeared to reach out beyond the wall in an attempt to pull me into its
angular, neo-cubist world. When I finally found it, I closed my eyes, and a song from my first house mix
moved to the fore. Then ellipsis.
The
line to get into the club was long, and not knowing any better, I stopped at
its end and listened to the bass coming from inside the club. More felt than heard, it seemed to move through the concrete walls and rendered the club as more membrane than concrete. As concentrator, not container. Here was a music capable of an inside and outside. A world unbounded. I reached out to touch the wall, and both Cameron and Allison grabbed my arm and dragged me toward the entrance. When we arrived
at the front of the line, they flashed Gold Tracks Club cards to the bouncers, evidence--to
my young mind--of their expertise in this world, and we slid in ahead of the people
waiting to be id'ed and patted down.
Inside.
A new kind of disorientation. The Tracks I knew--Friday nights--was
not present. In its place was an entirely new terrain, population and camp. New
superstars. Willie Africa. Kevin Aviance. Mama Vann. Sissy. New aesthetics. Costumes. Jump Suits. Checkers.
Shirtless men. Only Jay, the thin, older bartender, who poured heavy drinks just to the left of the dance floor every Friday, and the mix of spilled and stale liquor, cigarettes and various perfumes remained. I looked around and tried to focus on faces and spaces. Both spiraled and twisted. A face would start to turn in one direction, only to halt and then twist in the opposite. Over and over. Roiling. Grimacing. I tried to un-dialate my eyes and thoughts, but it was no use. Both had begun to absorb more than I was ready to take-in. Ellipsis.
As I settled into the trip, the roil and grimace dissolved. Faces stopped turning. Space cohered. The endless--indeed, exponential--dividing of moving bodies into faint traces of where they had been became joyous rather than disorienting, as echo rather than bombardment. And everyone was beautiful. I wondered if this status was a
function of the red lights, which seemed to carve contours and cheekbones into
even the limpest of faces, which seemed to paint pale faces like my own with a vibrancy
otherwise unavailable, and which seemed to cast all of us into a
more beautiful light. This was the first time that I admitted to myself that
other men could be and, indeed, were beautiful. This was the first time that I admitted
to myself that place shapes how we see the world. I gazed up at the disco
ball--rumored to be the largest on the East Coast--and listened to the music.
Both served as the points through which I began orient myself.
Time
shifts into an urgent and eternal present. Perhaps this is the acid. Perhaps it
is memory assigning importance to what follows. Perhaps it's something more. Nevertheless, before I have finished staring at the ball, Cameron
grabs my wrist and drags me toward the center of the room. On our way there, I
trip over the lip of the dance floor and begin to laugh at myself for how I've
allowed my discomfort at this new, gay community to erase my ability to
navigate a terrain I had long known. Then ellipsis.
Midnight
arrives. And rather than continuing with the hard, driving house he has been
playing since we arrived, Earic Patten, the club's resident DJ, plays Whitney
Houston's cover of "I Will Always Love You." The crowd stalls. I stare at the undulating walls. On the stage, a man dressed as Little Bo Peep raises her white and pink shepherd's crook as if directing the crowd below. The crowd continues to stall. Patten holds steady. The song continues. I watch the crowd begin to give in to
Houston's lyrics. I hold back. I can't make sense of what is going on. House,
after all, is supposed to be underground. To my understanding, pop music has no
place within spaces like these. Dancers begin to sway. I am further confused. A
few people begin to sing along. Then Houston's signature long note plays, and
by its end it seems as if every single person on the dance floor is singing
with her, with each other. I stand there, in the middle of the dance floor, in
the midst of a club cast in red, in the midst of a singer coming into her own
power and am left without speech.
A man grabs my hands and lifts them above my head. His own are slippery from sweat, and I have to tighten my grip just to keep hold. He doesn't speak. He
doesn't need to. I smile and begin to sing. We sing to each other until the
song finishes. Patten follows Houston with a house song, and it dawns on me
that he has turned Houston's ballad into house, not because of its sonic
particulars but because he located a moment, a place, an opening in which no
other song would have been able to do what Houston's recording had done to the crowd. To me.
Then ellipsis.
On
our car ride home the next morning, Allison, Cameron and I decide to eject my
mix. In its place, we turn on the radio. I can't be sure why they want to do
so. Perhaps, it's because my technical execution was atrocious. (It was.) But
for me, the decision has to do with the nagging fact that I was no longer
satisfied with merely playing those songs that were categorized as house. Instead,
I wanted to begin the practice of house.
And for both better and worse, every mix that has followed has been an
attempt to do just that.
The Blend: When Practice Shapes the Personal and becomes
Political
Tracking
the importance of Knuckles' contribution to music and community is difficult. Determining
his importance to my development as a better person is impossible. The former asks
for a scope an article of this length can't possibly achieve. The latter
demands I face some ugly truths about myself. This scope and these ugly truths
are, however, related, so allow me to begin with the latter, so to arrive at
one part of the former.
If I were forced to identify the greatest gift given to me
by house and, thus, Frankie Knuckles, it would--unquestionably--be perspective,
a hard won, and always uncomfortable, always challenging perspective. As I
imply above, it is house that thrust me out of the homophobic ideas I had
inherited and then harbored--even if only casually--prior to 1992. By casually I
mean that I don't think that I ever disdained gay men and women, but I certainly
took on the behaviors of a homophobe. I certainly affected a posture of
masculinity which needed homosexuality to exist as its opposite. And while I would
like to think that I would have eventually, no matter the circumstance, come to
realize just how hateful, how violent and how disgusting such affectations
were, I cannot be sure that I would have without house. And I know that any
potential change would not have occurred at fifteen. I am, then, richer for
these perspectives; I am richer for the ways that house obliged me to consider
the violence of affectation and casual prejudice.
This demand that house
makes upon its users is not, then, merely sonic. It is social, too. And this social element exceeds the anecdotal. Its reach is longer than my own history. The community and
practice that Knuckles helped to shape emerges in an era that also sees the
rise of a new, racially and socially directed conservatism. House comes to be
in midst of rampant homophobia, in the midst of a newly emboldened campaign to
vilify persons of color, and in the middle of a recession that further
disenfranchised already struggling communities. It is born at the very moment
Reagan's domestic policies not only ended social programs but also found ways
to enact a new jim crow, to borrow
from Michelle Alexander. And it, too, is born in a moment when HIV and AIDS were not seen as evidence of our need to embrace a common humanity, but, rather, as the justification for a collective, American bigotry, which had long attempted to thrust the LBGTQ communities into categories of deviance, abjection and threat. This is the social milieu into which house emerges. This is the violent, shameful American space upon which house constructs its own counter-community. And in its capacity to find intersections so to keep
present and, indeed, celebrate difference, house emerged as a powerful, if
limited, tonic through which subjugated populations were able to reclaim both
body and joy.
Looked at through this wider social and historical lens, to beat the box describes more than a DJ's ability to drive the club toward ecstatic release. Though it is that, it is also a call to arms and a collective
refusal to be categorized. It describes a song, a mix, a dance step, an arm lifted into the air that beats--or outmaneuvers--those boxes which frame individuals
and communities as something less than they are. To beat the box, then, is to
cast off the generic and essentializing descriptions too often used to reduce
these same communities. In a moment when rock, and R&B, and, I would
venture, even the emerging rap form sought to reinforce notions of hetero-normativity and those race and gender boundaries that dictated one's ability to occupy space itself, house offered its
practitioners--both in the booth and on the floor--a means through which they
were able to celebrate the innumerable and ineffable differences of sound, body
and community. To be sure, such celebrations were not inevitable, and various
prejudices did and continued to occur in the midst of the house space.
Nevertheless, it was and is a practice that offered and continues to offer its users a way through
which intersection could be accountable to difference, should we--those of us who
call ourselves house heads--choose to keep present the value of difference and, indeed, the value of friction, of both the body and the mind.
This, too, is
Knuckles' legacy, and it is, perhaps, his most important.
* K, Wendy. "The Basement Boys: Rising To The Top." Soul Underground. Issue 25, October 1989.
