Salkind — Do You Remember House?

Author: Micah E. Salkind
Title: Do You Remember House?: Chicago’s Queer of Color Undergrounds
Year: 2019
Type: Academic book (Oxford University Press)

Do You Remember House?: Chicago’s Queer of Color Undergrounds is a book by Micah E. Salkind, published by Oxford University Press in 2019. It is a history of Chicago house music from the late 1970s to the present: how it began, how it was remade in queer ways and how the city remembers it. In Salkind’s account, that remaking, the work of crossover communities in house’s first decade, still shapes how Chicago’s house scene uses the music, to remember and to gather. House’s culture has been appropriated, he argues, but for queers and people of color it is still a “musical Stonewall,” in the phrase of the Chicago DJ Craig Cannon. The book’s evidence is archives, Salkind’s readings of DJ mixes and his interviews with the people who made house, which are now held at Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Black Music Research. Its seven chapters run from proto-house geographies, the Warehouse and the Music Box through teen parties and Hot Mix radio to the Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic and Chicago’s contemporary queer club scenes. The reviews in Dancecult and Filthy Dreams praised it: Jacob Mallinson Bird for the way its theory joins musical and social analysis, and Noa/h Fields as a corrective to whitewashed histories of the genre.

Salkind is the Director of Civic and Cultural Life at the Rhode Island Foundation.¹ He also throws quarterly Dollar Disco parties as one half of the duo Micah Jackson.¹ Oxford University Press published the book online in January 2019 and in print the next month, in 334 pages.^{2, 3} The interviews he collected for it are held as the Chicago House Music Oral History Project in Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Black Music Research.⁴

The publisher’s description says the book rests on “expansive research in archives” and on Salkind’s talks with house’s makers across the city, and it states his argument: “queer remediation and adaptation of house music by crossover communities in its first decade shaped the ways that Chicago producers, DJs, dancers, and promoters today invoke and mobilize the genre as an archive of collectivity and congregation.” The book, it says, “builds from a tradition of queer of color critique” and “considers house music’s liberatory potential in terms of its genre-defiant repertoire in motion.” Despite appropriation, the description concludes, the music’s “porosity and flexibility” have kept it Cannon’s “musical Stonewall” for queers and people of color.³

The book has an introduction, seven chapters and a coda. The first four chapters are “Like a Phoenix from the Ashes,” on proto-house geographies, “The Warehouse and The Music Box,” “Remediating the Underground,” on teen parties, disco punk and Hot Mix radio, and “The End of the First Decade,” on house’s crossover. The last three are “‘Is It All over My Face?’,” on the Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic, “Are You Ready to Get Your Life?,” on the city’s contemporary queer club scenes, and “Dancing in Brave Spaces.”^{2, 3}

Jacob Mallinson Bird, reviewing the book in Dancecult in 2022 alongside Madison Moore’s Fabulous, wrote that it moves “from a linear history of house music in its first part to contemporary autoethnographic work in the second.” What impressed him most were “the ways in which they allow the music to begin their theorisations,” so that the loose fit of the house groove becomes a theory of delayed pleasure and remixes and samples become “a repertoire in motion.”⁵ Bird reports that the book dwells on “neostalgia,” which he glosses as “the desire for a connection to the past that one may never have had personally to begin with,” and that Salkind, writing of clubs that seek to be inclusive, prefers “safer” spaces to safe ones because “the work of creating a safety is never done.” Bird quotes Salkind’s view that “queer people of colour are always already theorising, even before a scholar enters the club.” The book also describes clubs that presented themselves as open to all becoming “profoundly discouraging for Black gay men in particular.”⁵

The reviews in Dancecult and Filthy Dreams praised the book. Bird wrote that “Salkind’s musico-social theory is enlightening throughout,” suggested that the book might be “more acutely critical than Moore’s,” and added that Salkind “has a measured idea of utopia.”⁵ Noa/h Fields, reviewing it in Filthy Dreams in April 2019, wrote that Salkind’s “shared memory work” draws on archives, interviews and the DJ mixes themselves. Fields wrote that it centers “the biomythographies of pivotal Black gay DJs like Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy,” and quoted Salkind’s argument that house “retains the indelible traces of the communities that birthed it.”⁶ Fields read the book as challenging the opposition of house and hip hop, and as a corrective to histories that had whitewashed the genre.⁶ It was also reviewed by Emily Kaniuka in the Journal of the Society for American Music in 2019, and in 2020 by Kareem Khubchandani in Dance Research and by Courtney Lau in Dance Research Journal.⁷

Key contributions

• The first decade of Chicago house read through its crossover communities and their queer remediation of the music.
• House as an archive of collectivity and congregation, and a “musical Stonewall” for queers and people of color.
• Neostalgia and “safer” spaces as terms for the memory and the politics of Chicago’s queer club scenes.

See also

• Love Saves the Day — Tim Lawrence’s 2003 history of American dance culture in the 1970s
• Hot Stuff — Alice Echols’s 2010 history of disco
• The Underground Is Massive — Michaelangelo Matos’s 2015 history of American rave