Salkind — Do You Remember House?

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

The interviews behind this book are anyone’s to hear. Between 2013 and 2014, Salkind recorded fifty-eight interviews with sixty-one people from Chicago house’s first generations — Robert Williams, the man who opened the Warehouse, among them — and the tapes now sit at Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Black Music Research as the Chicago House Music Oral History Project, publicly browsable, an evidence base that outlives its book.¹ Salkind is a working DJ (quarterly Dollar Disco parties, arts-policy work for the city of Providence), and the book runs on what he calls “shared memory work”: a stitching, in the critic Noa/h Fields’s description, of “archival research, oral histories, and close readings of recorded DJ mixes,” testimony layered like tracks in a mix with each voice left audible.^{2, 3}

The history is told against the culture’s own creation myth. House enters the book as the music of Chicago’s queer Black and Latino dancers, and its proto-history runs through a whole geography of parties before any one club appears.⁴ The two rooms then arrive as a pair — the Warehouse, where Frankie Knuckles played, and Ron Hardy’s Music Box, twin nurseries with neither crowned — and the book centers its DJs as what it calls biomythographies: legend and life story braided.⁵

Reworking Nelson George’s term, Salkind argues that the publics who carried house past its first floors in its first decade — the teen parties reaching straight South and West Side high schoolers, the Hot Mix 5 shows reaching the whole city by radio, the records reaching New York and London — were crossover communities that maintained racial difference rather than dissolving it, and that this widening is precisely what lets Chicago now mobilize the genre as “an archive of collectivity and congregation.”⁶ House, in this reading, keeps the traces of the communities that birthed it and keeps crossing lines of race, gender, class, and ability.⁷ Even the received house-against-hip-hop rivalry falls apart, since the tidy binary “minimize[s] the fact that house music culture had classed and gendered dimensions in and of itself, and that hip hop sounds, and poor and working class people, were always a part of its wild mix.”⁸

The back half brings the argument into the present tense, where remembering house is something Chicago does out loud. The Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic is the crossover community still at work, an annual reunion whose welcome Fields glosses as midwestern inclusivity — “My house is your house” — and the present-day chapters follow the memory into queer club nights like Queen! and Chances Dances.⁹ But the remembering has losers, and the Dancecult review singled out the book’s account of them: the erasure of the queer people of color who built the culture, and clubs grown discouraging for the Black gay men they were made by.¹⁰ The academic journals received it as the field’s Chicago corrective; from inside the culture, the DJ Craig Cannon compressed the claim to two words — house as a “musical Stonewall.”¹¹ Love Saves the Day and The Underground Is Massive establish what happened; Salkind studies how it is remembered, by whom, and at whose expense — the Chicago book, and the shelf’s memory-politics counterweight.

Key contributions

• The deposited archive: fifty-eight interviews with sixty-one Chicago house figures, publicly held at the Center for Black Music Research — a monograph whose oral-history base is itself a public resource.
• The crossover thesis: the three first-decade publics as constitutive of house culture, and the ground of its later remembering.
• The paired-room telling: the Warehouse and the Music Box together at the culture’s start, their DJs’ legends handled as biomythography.
• The memory-politics frame: origin talk studied as present-tense practice — the Picnic, the reunions, the pricing-out — with house’s queer Black and Latino makers centered in the remembering.

See also

• Love Saves the Day — the New York seventies party lineage this book’s proto-house geography inherits
• Hot Stuff — disco’s history, whose crash sets this book’s opening conditions
• The Underground Is Massive — the American rave decades this book’s crossover chapter hands off to
• House — the genre note this book anchors, the Chicago telling behind its eras

Footnotes

1. The Chicago House Music Oral History Project at Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Black Music Research (sighted August 27, 2026) — 58 interviews with 61 people, conducted 2013–2014, Robert Williams among the interviewees. ↩

2. Salkind’s own About page (accessed August 27, 2026) — Director of Civic and Cultural Life at the Rhode Island Foundation, previously with Providence’s Department of Art, Culture + Tourism; the quarterly Dollar Disco parties. ↩

3. Noa/h Fields, “Layer Stories Like Sounds,” Filthy Dreams, April 25, 2019 (accessed August 27, 2026) — both phrases quoted verbatim from the review; “shared memory work” is Salkind’s own term as Fields reports it (“Through what he calls ‘shared memory work,’ Salkind stitches together…”). ↩

4. House as the music of Chicago’s queer Black and Latino dancers per the publisher’s description as carried on the book’s Google Books record (accessed August 27, 2026); the proto-history-first structure per the same record’s chapter listing, whose opening chapters run “SocioSonic Memory and ProtoHouse Geographies” before “Nurturing Chicago House Music Culture.” ↩

5. The Warehouse/Music Box pairing and the biomythography frame per Fields’s review (accessed August 27, 2026) — “By centering the biomythographies of pivotal Black gay DJs like Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy,” quoted verbatim; the “Nurturing Chicago House Music Culture” chapter per the Google Books listing. ↩

6. The Google Books record (accessed August 27, 2026), quoting the publisher’s description verbatim — 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 Nelson George reworking per the review summary at Project MUSE (sighted August 27, 2026). ↩

7. Compressed from two of the book’s sentences as carried verbatim by Fields’s review (accessed August 27, 2026) — house “retains the indelible traces of the communities that birthed it” and “has evidenced a nearly boundless capacity to foster new cultural imaginaries in which axes of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability come to be crossed.” ↩

8. The book quoted verbatim on the house/hip-hop binary, per Fields (accessed August 27, 2026). ↩

9. The Picnic, the “My house is your house” gloss (the reviewer’s phrase, on Chicago house’s midwestern inclusivity), and the Queen! and Chances Dances chapters per Fields (accessed August 27, 2026). ↩

10. The erasure account per Jacob Mallinson Bird’s dual review in Dancecult 14/1 (November 2022) (sighted August 27, 2026), characterized rather than quoted. ↩

11. The reviews: Emily Kaniuka in the Journal of the Society for American Music 13/4 (2019); Kareem Khubchandani in Dance Research 38.1 (May 2020); Mallinson Bird in Dancecult 14/1 (2022); Fields at Filthy Dreams. Craig Cannon’s “musical Stonewall” per the Google Books record (accessed August 27, 2026), which attributes the phrase to the “pioneering Chicago DJ.” ↩