New Book Sifts Through Chicago House Music’s Complex History

Poet, essayist, and activist Marguerite L. Harrold, who grew up in and around Chicago (Hyde Park on the South Side, as well as the Northwest Side and suburban Markham and Bolingbrook), painstakingly details Chicago house music’s complex history in her book, Chicago House Music: Culture and Community.

As most house heads know, everyone has their own story when it comes to the locally crafted genre. 

As someone who was a part of the 1990s Chicago hip-hop scene, which was adjacent to house music, Harrold penned a vivid description of what happens when the social spaces relied upon by teens are yanked away, causing an adverse effect within the city’s marginalized communities. She immediately noticed the connection to today.

In the book, Harrold, who turned twenty-one in 1991, describes Chicago’s social scene for teens when the juice bars, venues that did not serve alcohol and were patronized by teenagers, went away. One could say the same could be apt for 2024 Chicago regarding spaces for teens to safely gather being taken away over time. Venues appear to not cater to teens as they did during my teenage years. Some schools hosted events called “mixers,” when teens social groups would rent venues and community centers to host parties. 

Some of those juice bars include Medusa’s and The Orbit Room, well-known venues in house music lore.

“Things really did change in Chicago after that,” Harrold writes. “More teens struggled with alcohol and drug use. Teen violence increased. Without the music and safe spaces that the juice bars provided, teens had no place to go and nothing to do on weekend nights. Of course they were going to get into trouble.”

Harrold sat down with the Weekly to discuss her book, house music’s history, the genre’s “family” aspect, and more. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why a book about house music? What did you say to the publisher to get them to take on your book?

It started with a conversation with a friend of mine named Andrew Peart, who at the time was the editor of Chicago Review, and he was working on his dissertation at the University of Chicago. So I was drinking bourbon, talking shit, and he just started talking about his dissertation. I asked him how it was going, and I didn’t realize that he was doing it about a lot of the different Chicago music. I thought he was just working on it related to the blues, but he started talking about jazz and gospel and soul. And so I just asked him. I said, “Well, you’re doing your dissertation about all of these different types of Chicago music. Are you going to do anything about house music?”  He looked at me with a straight face and said: “House music? What is that?” I’m like, how the hell? And then we just start laughing. How the hell have you been in Chicago for nine years and not know house music. I just started describing to him what house music was, how I first came into house music, and what those experiences were like for me. 

Peart suggested that I write an essay because he was putting together a Black Arts Movement issue of Chicago Review.  And it took a while to kind of get into writing it because one, there’s the idea of: Well, who am I to write about house music? I’m not an authority. I’m not an ethnomusicologist. And so I figured the best way to explain to people what house music is to take them to the party. And so I wrote the essay just describing my first experience going to the Music Box. Andrew sent me a message saying that there was a small Midwestern press called Belt Publishing, a small, woman-owned Midwestern press that was putting out proposals because they were going to be doing a series of books about Midwestern music, and suggested that I send them something. I just sent them the proposal that just had excerpts, I think, from the essay, and highlights just talking about the fact that house music stems from all of the different types of music that goes into traditional African rhythm. And then the influence of jazz and blues and particularly gospel. So it wasn’t really a very long proposal, but it basically was clips from the essay, and they accepted it. 

So my hope with the book was that, yes, people who didn’t know anything about house music could always learn something, and that people in the community would see themselves in and see their experiences in it, be inspired to do their own thing and to get their own voices out there if that’s what they wanted to do. And I definitely had, with myself, probably spent more time replaying those arguments [about house history] that people have, some of which you captured, I think, very well in your earlier article. And I tried to address those things, particularly about house music’s place, and LGBTQ Black people’s place in the creation of house music and in the creation of house culture, and in the creation and being able to sustain, I think, the communities that surround it.

What was it like to write a book about a music genre so many Chicagoans love where a lot of the lore is steeped in spoken word?

I think because I’m a poet, I value the oral tradition that we come from, and so I think that was helpful for me to listen to those oral histories. And to listen to Frankie [Knuckles], who is not with us, but he’s always with us in spirit. So to be able to hear him in different interviews say the same thing over and over and over and over again, I think that was helpful for me, honestly, and then I knew that I could do my own fact checking on those things. I also had an editorial team with [Belt Publishing] to be able to do some fact checking on that. And I just enjoyed hearing the stories of people. So this is part of why I included interviews with folks so that oral tradition could continue. That their stories could be told in their own voices as opposed to me interpreting their voices and what they had to say. I feel like as Black people, people are always trying to interpret our voices.

The Weekly’s Michael Liptrot and I recently attended separate house music events where spirited debates regarding the creation of the genre took place. Seems like many house heads have different experiences within the community. Why is that?

It’s like a family, right? We’re not all going to agree about a situation or what happened, and a lot of that has to do with just our own different perspectives and where we’re coming from and our point of view, right? So again, depending on who you are, where you from, you’re going to see a situation differently. And I think with house music, especially because it’s something so personal for each one of us, that we’re going to go into it and come out of it with different experiences. And I feel like that’s okay. I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong with that, as long as you’re respectful in your discussion and your argument. 

What was the reasoning behind starting the book with a timeline explaining house with the forces and moments that created it?

It helped me to frame the book; I was going to talk about the history. Timelines, to me, are very helpful because you can also see the other things that were happening in the world at the time. And so, for example, I found out through my research that the very first discotheque was started in 1947 by a woman named Régine Zylberberg. In Paris, it was a club called the Le Whisky à Gogo where she literally had the lights on the floor, and the Christmas lights around the room. And she had two turntables because she was really the only person working so she could put on a record, go make a drink, go clean the bathroom, come back, and then put on another record. 

I think it’s important for us when we’re looking at the development of house music to see all of the things that went into making it. And so when you look at all of the other music that was being made in Chicago, and all of the other art that was being made in Chicago, and the political things that were happening in Chicago, right? So not only what other historical things were located, but where are you? What were you doing in 1987 and what were you doing in 1991 and what else was happening around that time? And people like to know that kind of thing. When did the Chosen Few start hosting their picnic? When did Lil Louis’s “French Kiss” come out? So it’s a great way to locate yourself. It’s a great way to locate yourself within the book, and it’s a great way to locate house music within the cultural and historical context through which it was born.

You discussed house operating in the same orbit as hip-hop. Can you talk more about how house heads view hip-hop?

House was already happening. It was in its second or third wave by the time hip-hop started to take form in those golden years of the ’90s. There were some of the same people. Some of them were in a hip-hop crew but they would also go to house parties and make circles, and people would be breakdancing at house music parties. Some people would have their hip-hop clothes and go to the hip-hop party and then change into their house clothes and go to the house party. And what I found was that, again, in house parties, it was a safe space. There was nobody coming out of pocket. There was nobody being rude. 

During your interview with local poet (now Chicago Poet Laureate) Avery Young, you described Disco Demolition Night in the best way I’ve heard it: They were burning Black bodies in effigy, basically, right? Why do you see it that way?

Me and my dad were watching it as it was happening, and it felt like a Klan rally. And it felt like they were—I didn’t have the language for that then—it felt like they were burning us; that they were burning representations of [Black people]. They were burning our music. So we talk about music as being something that is from the soul, and that is of the soul, then they’re trying to burn our soul, literally. It was terrifying.

How does house make you feel? How would you describe it to someone who isn’t aware?

Music is something that touches the soul, and with house music the communities that it created were friend groups, right? Most people didn’t just find a house party. Somebody brought you to the party, and it was usually somebody close to you and the music and the freedom that you feel in the house community of not being judged. There were none of those kinds of expectations. And so when you go into a house party, function, an event, you’re allowed to be free and be yourself and really feel and experience the music. Also, a lot of house music is based on literal gospel songs. Music that, in particular, is designed to touch your soul.

Chicago House Music: Culture and Community by Marguerite L. Harrold. 208 pages. Belt Publishing, 2024. $24. Paperback.

Correction Oct. 11: This piece was updated to reflect where the author has lived and the venues for minors.

Evan F. Moore is an award-winning writer, author, and DePaul University journalism adjunct instructor. Evan is a third-generation South Shore homeowner.