Oppression, Resistance and the Role of Minority Communities in Developing House Music

18 January 2024

By Benjamin Rawsthorne 

Before the emergence of house, disco was the primary form of dance music. Emerging in the 1970s, disco came to be the primary sound found in clubs by the mid and latter stages of the decade, particularly in clubs associated with LGBTQ+, black and Latino communities in America.

However, on July 12 1979, in a night that would become known as ‘Disco demolition night’, the genre effectively died. That night saw a baseball game at Comiskey Park, Chicago between the Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers. However, many of the 70,000+ people in attendance were not there to watch the game but rather the planned destruction of thousands of disco records. Anti-disco banners surrounded the stadium whilst chants such as “disco sucks!” echoed around. Organised by Chicago radio disk jockey Steve Dahl, the popularity of the evening would be seen by many historians as the final cause for the disco genre falling out of mainstream popularity and going underground.

However, as historian Gillian Frank points out in her essay on the subject, the events at Comiskey Park were not isolated but rather the final explosion in a period of growing anti-disco sentiment and backlash. See, the music itself was not what caused such a violent and aggressive backlash. Rather, it was instead the culture and people associated with disco at the time: the LGBTQ+ community. The events of Disco demolition night and the countless anti-disco events prior were emblematic of wider attempts to sexualise disco and frame it in a conflicting dichotomy of homosexuality vs heterosexuality, to vilify this minority community.

This is where the story of house truly begins. Pushed underground, house music was the reaction of the (predominately) LGBTQ+, black and Latino club scene to the vilification and destruction of their form of dance music. House was, as many historians, DJs and music producers have claimed previously, ‘Disco’s revenge’.

The Warehouse, colloquially known as ‘The House’ (there is disputes as to whether this is where the genre’s name originates) was a member’s only gay, black and Latino club based at 206 South Jefferson Street, Chicago. It was here that the ‘Godfather of House’ Frankie Knuckles, experimenting with old disco records, helped create the iconic and distinctive sound of house. Knuckles began DJing in the club from 1977 amidst the decline of disco, layering the increasingly out of favour disco vocals on top of newer electronic samples. This unique and fresh sound was an instant hit. As noted in a documentary on the genre aired on Channel 4, Knuckles’ mixtapes became iconic in Chicago with many people copying and sharing cassette tapes of his sets. The culmination of this was that the originally minority-attended Warehouse began attracting larger white and straight audiences, drawn in by this iconic new sound. Factor in other figures such as Jesse Saunders, who in 1984 produced one of Chicago House’s first documented singles, and it was only a matter of time before the genre exploded. The expansion of house started initially through its wider introduction to new US audiences in other major metropolises such as Detroit and New York, before eventually it began reaching international audiences.