Unfortunately, though, it’s so easy for outsiders to erase Black Chicago from house music’s beginnings because the city – as a whole – didn’t get behind the genre early on. Take hip hop, for example. When DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and other early pioneers coined their music “rap/hip hop,” the city embraced it. Their songs were played on the radio. Publicists latched on, taking the genre to magazines and newspapers inside and outside of New York City. It truly became a phenomenon that everyone wanted to be a part of.
That didn’t happen in Chicago. Here, house music was seen as a urban thing. So no one wrote about us in the major newspapers. It wasn’t heavily played on the radio. It mostly lived in the bars, clubs, and houses where urban folks gathered to party – that is, until European artists got wind of our tracks and took it overseas. Today, house music brings in millions of dollars worldwide.
So who is the grandfather of electronic dance music? There isn’t one. EDM is a made-up term to give a poppier, more commercial-sounding style of house music a new origin story. In Chicago, however, house music is a feeling. It’s inspirational. It’s love. It’s soul. So until our story is properly documented, and understood around the world, our Chicago story will forever be left out of the larger narrative of house music.