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house & disco reviews


Jamie Principle/Frankie Knuckles—“Your Love”

“Your Love,” is a 1986 single based on a poem written by Jamie Principle in 1982. Having just “gotten out of a bad relationship,” Principle sought to remove himself from the dating scene in an attempt “focus on [his] music for a while” (3). He meets a girl named Lisa, and the poem, upon Principle’s reentrance into love worlds (inescapable as they pulled him back in…), is transformed into a song about her (3). The track was eventually carried to Frankie Knuckles (by a close friend of Principle’s, José Gomez), instigating a collaboration (between Knuckles and Principle) that led to the song’s official release in 1986 (3).

“Your Love” is marked by an arpeggiated three-note progression and effervescent strings that hover above a gritty bass interval. Though the percussive element (kick and snare) is prominent and propulsive, the song’s affect is one of an ethereal sublimity. Principle’s highly reverberated vocals soar over the instrumental, interlaced with his deep inhaling and exhaling, expressions of a lust or desire that permeates the air of the nightclub. “I need your love,” Principle vocalizes, ensuring a forceful extension of the word “love” (seasoned by the prevailing three-note progression), as if to engage a certain sublimation, a formation of an atmosphere (an air-of-Love) that pervades the breathing and heaving of bodies, the aura of the dance floor. It is transporting.

note: i am aware of a more prurient/political read of “Your Love,” yet i am interested in another angle, one that speaks to the spiritual (as a product of/container for the sexual) and the political potentials of that. it’s probably bullshit, yet i feel it partakes in some sort of diptych with the “Move Your Body” review?…  i also acknowledge that “Your Love” does not completely dismiss the corporeal as the track’s center presents the lyric (among others that reference the body) “I need your touch,” vocalized very forcibly by Principle, as if to puncture the very hazy ether characterized by his earlier vocal and the more ambient instrumentals…

Marshall Jefferson—“Move Your Body”

Marshall Jefferson’s “Move Your Body” is a 1986 single conceived at the Post Office job, written in a bedroom, and mastered in Lito Manlucu’s studio. Having initially been met with his coworker’s disapproval, Jefferson took “Move Your Body” to the Sheba Baby club, where DJs Mike Dunn, Tyree Cooper, and Hugo Hutchinson endorsed the song, but claimed it was not House music “because of the piano” (1). Jefferson proceeded to carry the cut to the eclectic Ron Hardy, and then to DJ Frankie Knuckles, who popularized “Move Your Body” in Chicago while piquing the curiosities of various international DJs and media outlets (mostly UK). With its lyrical interpellation of the House genre (“got that House music…”) and outstanding media coverage, the song had “given House a name,” an entry into the mainstream (2).

In “Move Your Body,” Jefferson opens with a series of Blues piano riffs, later exchanging the arrangement for a simple, three-chord progression at the one-minute mark. Although the track is ubiquitously punctuated by a potent kick and elevated hi-hat, the notorious piano—consolidated by a baseline of the same melody—remains the rhythmic nucleus. Like Jamie Principle’s debut club-banger, “Your Love,” “Move Your Body” engages melody as a percussive force; yet while Principle’s cut stresses a subject of a more ethereal, sublime nature (Love), “Move Your Body,” with its consistent piano riff, bouncy and palpable, addresses House physicality, a corporeal force that manifests on the dance floor, the bodies of which are complicit in a jubilant escapism: “It’s gonna set you free,” the head vocalist belts as if his own body aches at the cusp of total frenzy.


Lil Louis—“French Kiss”
“French Kiss” is a 1989 instrumental track by Lil Louis comprised of frisky drums and rhythmic, buoyant synth patterns. At its center, the song engages a dramatic, but gradual slowing of tempo interspersed with a piercing female moan, perhaps to mimic an early stage of a deep and prolonged orgasm. Though the affect is one of titillated physicality (the lust that potentially blooms in club goers) the voice itself seems not to emerge from a body; with its overt prurience comparable to the 1982 disco hit, “Do You Wanna Funk?,” featuring diva Sylvester, who’s singing is undeniably tethered to an identity (specifically a queer male), the female voice in “French Kiss” operates as an anonymous diva: a sort of bodiless deity or spirit that, perhaps, in its casting onto dance floors and queer spaces, maintains the potential to be embodied with even greater effect. It is here that a very primal noise (one of sex, pleasure) fuses with the technological (synths and beats), as if to reiterate a force that binds the bodies of club goers and House heads to the music. It is in the hedonistic, secular space of the nightclub that the queer individual, in embodying new deities, technologies, sounds and languages, transcends the violence and oppression of the day only to be liberated, reborn in the long night.


Faith, Hope & Charity — “To Each His Own (That’s My Philosophy)” [+ David Mancuso, THE LOFT]

“To Each His Own (That’s My Philosophy),” a 1975 disco classic by vocal group Faith, Hope & Charity, encapsulates a prevailing attitude of the 1970s disco scene that would proceed to take shape in House (Ernest Hardy, BQB Disco Playlist Notes). The track lyrics urge the listener to “leave other peoples business alone,” to “mind [their own] business,” and, as if speaking to each individually, encourages one to “do [their] thing.” “To Each His Own” delineates the boundaries of “difference” and being of “difference,” yet also encourages the coalescing of disparate bodies: “Come on, Everybody,” the singer invites, includes: the track promotes and protects philosophies of individualism, but has ultimately universal undertones. It is, therefore, necessary to mention, here, the more immanent nuances of dance culture and House culture’s radical embrace of difference, which entailed, indeed, the “[minding of one’s] business,” yet enmeshed with an unequivocal sense of solidarity and sociopolitical responsibility. Take, for example, David Mancuso and his founding of underground dance club THE LOFT in 1970, by which his embracing of marginalized communities—Black, Latino, gay, homeless—enabled the cultivation of one of few queer-friendly, class-friendly spaces in New York City. Mancuso himself was a proponent of not only difference, but the convening of differences and the political potentials consequent: “If you mix the economic groups together, that’s where you have social change,” he explicates in Josell Ramos’s Maestro (2003). Here, Mancuso’s “minding" of others is neither invasive nor dealigned with the Faith, Hope & Charity philosophy, but instead, in its manifestation as invitation (rather than intervention), provides moments of safety and agency to those in the city who have it least.


Eddie Kendricks — “Date With The Rain”

“Date With The Rain” by Eddie Kendricks is a 1972 soul-infused disco track comprised of pitter-patter beats, ripples of guitar and piano, lightning strikes of brass, and soaring falsetto vocals. With its delicate yet thunderous instrumentation interspersed with field recordings of a rainstorm, the track harnesses the soft, but spectacular propensities of Romanticism to access and express the residues of heartbreak. The song’s lyrics serve a premise in which the singer (Kendricks), in witnessing rain, is reminded of the absence of his (past) lover. Taking “a bag full of blues,” he goes out “walking in the rain,” “hiding [his] tears in the rain.” Though the term “hiding” in this sense suggests a dissimulation of emotion, perhaps its poetic realization—of what delineates a blending of/between one’s mood and the weather (“the clouds that gather in the skies gather in my eyes”)—is marked by a catharsis. Much like the Romanticist expansion of the protagonists’ plight into vivid surroundings, the rain becomes an outward projection of Kendrick’s mourning, rather than the source: his teardrops, rather than sink into skin or dissipate, multiply and pervade, become universal, fall infinitely onto dance-floors.



Farley Jackmaster Funk — “Love Can’t Turn Around”
“Love Can’t Turn Around,” a 1986 single produced by Farley “Jackmaster" Funk (Farley Keith) featuring vocals by Darryl Pandy, has a brief but meaningful genealogy. The track’s instrumental structures borrow heavily from “I Can’t Turn Around,” a J.M. Silk house remix of Isaac Haye’s 1975 disco-funk single by the same name. Though Keith’s rendition matches (almost mimetically) the sonic trajectory of these early iterations, its lyrical departure, propelled by cowriter Jesse Saunders, subverts, transforms, and renews. The track’s altered hook, “love can’t turn around,” with “Love” displaced onto “I,” inverts the themes of a prevailing relationship conveyed in the original, and instead, channels/describes break-up. The track does not forfeit upbeat rhythms, however. Much like house staple “Date With The Rain” by Eddie Kendricks, the diva-house banger spurs one to dance to heartbreak.

The “Love Can’t Turn Around” music video features the track vocalist, Darryl Pandy, in a glittered blouse (similar to Sylvester’s drag gown in the video for “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”), posing, skipping, shaking upon the innards of a dimly lit, abandoned warehouse. While the setting underpins more bitter themes of the track’s lyrical content—an architecture of a hermetic refuse, an irreconcilable ruins of past Love and “broken-hearted...dreams”—Pandy is a beacon, from which the elated Soul of the sound (comprised of viscous lead vocals, a thumping beat and bass-line, vibrant gospel backup) might shine through, onto grey, concrete walls. The unabashed flamboyancy of Pandy’s diva offsets destitution and vitalizes new meanings: the warehouse as a place to cruise, to play techno, to cultivate or attend queer, underground life.


Masters At Work — “I Can’t Get No Sleep” (ft. India)
The lyrics of “I Can’t Get No Sleep,” a playful, robust 1995 dance number by Masters At Work featuring India, express a simultaneous subjection under and reclamation of the power of erotics. While the production vibrates with neurotic and prurient vigor (via rapid/robust percussion, that cheeky brass rift, bone-chilling vocal and chord progressions), India’s strong, virtuosic singing conveys a grip on and possession of sexuality. “I can’t get no sleep, your touch is making me weak,” she admits, but then asserts: “I’ve got to have you’re love, I’m thinking of you.” This convulsing between sexual fever and agency is indeed a precarious position, yet, in “I Can’t Get No Sleep” and its respective music video, resurfaces as a modality of empowerment: to confess to one’s absorption into desire, to claim it, and to dance. The video itself is faithful to the black and white, blank backdrop aesthetics of ’90s house: with India cross-dressed in suit- and-tie (of various silhouettes), women and men* getting close, teasing and touching, lone women, feeling themselves, diverse, expansive representation (Black, Asian, AfroLatina), and a brief cameo from vogue-extraordinaire and ballroom legend, Willie Ninja.

* It is necessary to mention that the women in “I Can’t Get Not Sleep” consistently face the camera whereas the men face away, performing the archetypical ‘male hoe’ of House.

✿ 2020 steven chen & liam mandel
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