When she was a teenager, Marguerite L. Harrold found her calling in house music clubs and juice bars across Chicago. Raptured by disco and baptized by house beats, she and her friends would drive from the suburbs to the Muzic Box. Before long, she was hitting parties at Playground, The Power Plant, Club LeRay, Medusa’s, and Smartbar. It kept her out dancing long past her curfew and grounded once she got home.
“That was like walking into a whole other universe, and I was hooked. Like, I was literally addicted. Nobody was trying to hit on me. Nobody was bothering me. It felt like people were all looking out for me,” she said. “It was a spiritual experience. It takes you to another place.”
Although she now lives in Nebraska, with her first book, Chicago House Music Culture and Community, Harrold wants the world to know Chicago’s DJs and house heads made it first, and how the house music scene made safe havens for Black queer young people blocked from white dance clubs. For many, house music parties were places where you could come as you were living outside the day-to-day systems of oppression, and let people like her feel free, she said.
Harrold will host a discussion with Guild Literary Complex at Co-Prosperity with Khari B. Discopoet, founder of The Debauchery Ball, veteran House music DJ Michael Ikechukwu Ezebuku, and Barbara Allen, director of “House Music: A Cultural Revolution,” on Aug. 15 at 6:30 p.m.
The city is celebrating the 40th anniversary of house music this August with a series of events.
House music emerged from Chicago’s Black gay underground club scene as DJs began mixing disco songs into new kinds of dance music. As she writes, the name first came from a Chicago club called the Warehouse, which drew thousands of people until it closed in 1982. Pioneers like Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy would pull from disco, R&N, gospel, and techno, remixing tracks and splicing together records until they had gotten something unique.
Chicago House Music Culture and Community comes out Aug. 13 through Belt Publishing. The book follows house music from its birthplace in underground clubs to becoming a worldwide phenomenon and the stuff of Chicago landmarks today. When house music survived the death of disco, the sound and spaces it inhabited kept on evolving. Pulling together archives and oral histories, she maps the movement’s makers and shakers, from the people behind the turntables to the promoters and dancers who helped it spread.
The closer we get to the present, the more the book is made up of interviews with contemporaries—like DJ Lady D, Chicago Poet Laureate avery r. young, and Silver Room Block Party Founder Eric Williams—sharing different stories and experiences of the culture within a culture and what made the scene special.
The TRiiBE spoke with Harrold to learn about the DJs and dancers that first made house music, how it became this spiritual experience for the queer people of color who flocked to it, and what it means for folks today.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What made house music venues this safe space for Black queer people?
Marguerite L. Harrold: What makes it a safe space is the people who were throwing the parties. While they were Black parties, they didn’t exclude people because they had been excluded. I think the founders’ hearts translated because before somebody took you to a House party, this was the thing—you got a lecture. I got a lecture and gave lectures about, “Don’t be coming up here, acting a fool. There’ll be some different kinds of people in here. It’s all love. We don’t do that other bullshit.” That continues to every house music party I’ve ever been to anywhere.
People were very intentional about it and were very protective of those spaces because many of them were underground. At some point, some of them were illegal. Like the loft party scene in Wicker Park or other places, like parties that happen at clubs, but it was the off night. It might be a restaurant during the normal week, but on Tuesday nights, there was the gay party. Or people like Pat McCombs and Vera Washington, who threw parties under Executive Sweets—these were all Black, lesbian professional women parties. Each one had rules and regulations about how to behave and how to be so that we could all be safe. Because Chicago can be a very hostile place, sometimes for Black people, for gay people, for women, so if we were creating these spaces for ourselves, we wanted them to stay safe spaces.
People were very intentional about it and were very protective of those spaces because many of them were underground. At some point, some of them were illegal. Like the loft party scene in Wicker Park or other places, like parties that happen at clubs, but it was the off night. It might be a restaurant during the normal week, but on Tuesday nights, there was the gay party. Or people like Pat McCombs and Vera Washington, who threw parties under Executive Sweets—these were all Black, lesbian professional women parties. Each one had rules and regulations about how to behave and how to be so that we could all be safe. Because Chicago can be a very hostile place, sometimes for Black people, for gay people, for women, so if we were creating these spaces for ourselves, we wanted them to stay safe spaces.
What do you think having those safe havens did for people?
MLH: It helped people find a community. It helped people find a space to be whatever kind of person they wanted to be, particularly whatever kind of Black person they wanted to be. Sometimes, we’re ostracized by our own people. If you went to a house music party, you knew you were in a space where you found your people. That made me a more confident and welcoming person because when you get that kind of love, you tend to give that kind of love and hold it as a sacred thing.
It was important also for young people, too. Places like Medusa’s had an earlier party where you could be under sixteen and get there. It sparked a lot of different juice bars and places where they didn’t serve alcohol but played house music. It gave young people places to go on a Friday or Saturday night to be amongst their peers. When that went away, they didn’t have any place to go. They didn’t have outlets to be in.
What makes house music now different from the 1980s when it first came about?
MLH: It’s a global phenomenon now, whereas, in the ‘80s, you had to know somebody to know where the parties were. Now, I can look at my phone, and if you’re part of different Facebook groups, there’s a House music party everywhere on a regular basis. The newest thing that’s happened is that the city of Chicago has officially accepted House music as a Chicago art form, right? There’s a Frankie Knuckles Way. The Warehouse has now become a historic landmark. There’s going to be a house music parade on the South Side on August 31. That’s huge, right? That’s the mayor sponsoring it. Even in Nebraska or anywhere else that I am in the world, I can find out about many of the events around house music from my phone. That was not the case in the ‘80s. You had to know where the party was.
In the ‘90s, it started to branch out more. You had the loft party scene in Wicker Park, and it began to grow more people. More people were DJing. More women were getting into the game. You had house music and hip-hop coming up around the same time. You have people who were into both scenes because some of it was the same music, so you’d have B-boys who would come into house music parties and house kids who were going to B-boy parties. Some people would change clothes, literally. They would have their B-boy clothes on at this party and then have their house music clothes on at the other party. It was like a brother-sister thing in Chicago.
As hip-hop took hold in Chicago, it [factioned] off. You had your house people and your hip-hop people, and some people felt they needed to choose sides. And part of that has to do with gayness—sorry to say, but it’s true, right? Hip-hop was a very misogynistic, male-oriented, straight-acting scene in Chicago, whereas house music was still primarily gay but also open to everyone. If gay people were throwing the party, you’re still going to have a handful of straight people there, but you didn’t go to a house music party and feel like you were in any danger. That was not necessarily the same experience at hip-hop parties or shows.
What did your research look like for this book?
MLH: I literally have a milk crate full of notes. The first part of the research was just looking at each different genre of music that it came from—West African traditional music, work songs, or field hollers, and looking at spirituals and the blues, and looking at how those sounds and those things came from, and then how they, in essence, are responsible for all American music, if you look at it. Looking at rock ‘n’ roll, which was just another name for rhythm and blues. A reporter from Rolling Stone coined the phrase to distinguish between the Black music that was happening and the white music that was happening.
Micah Salkind wrote a book a few years ago about Chicago house music called Do You Remember House? Chicago’s Queer of Color Undergrounds, and one of the most amazing things that came out of that project, though, is that he did a bunch of interviews and oral histories with folks that are now at the Columbia College archive. It’s helpful to have those voices because there are so many people I couldn’t interview or whose interviews didn’t make the book because I only had a certain amount of space. It was fun to dig deeper into that and learn some new things myself.
But I was also very nervous about writing this book because it’s Chicago, and this is our stuff, so I wanted to get it right — as right as possible. I wrote this book for Chicago, and I want Chicagoans to like it. I hope it generates discussion because there were things that we got into that there wasn’t enough space in the book to talk about, like the Black body and how that is represented, and how we move within the house community, and how that’s different in other places that we might move within Chicago.
Do you think house music could be plucked out of those roots and be a product otherwise?
MLH: I don’t think it can ever be plucked out because it’s in us, right? It’s in all of us. We will always have spaces for us somewhere. There are people who are part of the community that will always, continually create spaces for us because those spaces are still necessary because the Black body is still being policed, right? We’re going to always have our spaces. However, when you have Drake and Beyoncé, and people commercializing that music or a culture, it’s always going to have these other branches that attempt to co-opt it, but house music is free, so she’s never going to be able to be caged or captured. There’ll be those commercialized factions, those city-sanctioned factions, and they’ll still be wild-ass parties in somebody’s backyard or some other underground club. So, I’m not worried about her. I think she’ll do just fine.
What do you hope readers take away from reading this book?
MLH: I hope that it gets some people who don’t know about house music or who have never experienced a house music party to come to Chicago because it’s different. It’s like when you listen to jazz or bounce in New Orleans. House music in Chicago is very different from house music anywhere else, hands down. I hope it will inspire people with the spirit of it, the community, the love, the self-acceptance, and the freedom part of it. I hope it makes people smile and sparks some discussion or arguments. That’s good, too.
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