How do people “remember house?” Micah Salkind asks (19). Do You Remember House? Chicago's Queer of Color Undergrounds continuously poses this question within house culture, a queer black and Latinx musical and dance subculture that emerged in Chicago in the late 1970s. Throughout the book, Salkind resists directly answering this question and insists on engaging the multitude of ways people sonically and kinesthetically remember house, arguing “Chicago's house music audiences fashion an expansive, shared Chicago house history by telling, and re-telling, personal and collective stories of the music's emergence and repeated resurgence in the city of its birth” (5).
Salkind foregrounds house's queer of color origins in response to people who are “blissfully unaware of where house had come from, and who it was first made for” (3). Since the culture's beginnings, it has circulated widely. As house spread globally, its black and gay roots were often obscured. This book honors house's history by demonstrating how people in Chicago remember house, again and again. Following Richard Schechner, it suggests that if “performance is behavior twice-behaved, then communal memories derive from stories twice-believed” (7). Indeed, house is about people, across communities and generations, collectively recalling, over and over, the culture's origins. As people gather together to remember, Salkind reveals how house lovers move across lines of racial, gender, sexual, and class difference. In this deviant movement, house culture becomes “reservoirs of affective information that can help artists, scholars, and fans alike better understand how to make and sustain loving cultures across innumerable axes of difference” (8).
People moving across difference inspires what Salkind calls “crossover communities.” Engaging Nelson George's notion of “crossover,” which draws attention to how black music is diluted and reduced when circulated to white consumers, Salkind reconfigures crossover, theorizing house culture as a crossover community that does not eliminate but maintains racial difference. Influenced by José Muñoz's concept of ephemera, Do You Remember House? “argues that sexual and racial alterity are the ghosts in house music's machine soul; the beautiful stains that won't be washed out no matter how many times the music crosses over to the mainstream” (10).
In addition to crossover communities, another key phrase this book presents is “repertoire in motion.” Expanding Diana Taylor's notion of the repertoire, which refers to performances, gestures, and dances rather than documental archives, Salkind claims that house culture is a repertoire in motion. That is, house music has a repertoire of classic tracks that bind people across many generations. These people remember house by remediating and remixing this repertoire in their DJ sets, radio mixes, and dancing bodies. When tracks like MSFB's “Love is the Message” (1973) return throughout the book in different forms, we witness “house music's classic repertoire as being elastic, capacious, and unstable” (150).
The book is divided into two sections—the first half offers a history of house, while the second half describes dancing in contemporary house cultures through vibrant ethnography. Salkind's methodology is expansive and deep. He makes his arguments through performance ethnography, conducting oral histories, archival research, and close listening to house mixes.
Chapter 1 tells two interrelated stories about how house music emerged in Chicago. The first is about Disco Demolition Night on July 12, 1977, a troubling event where people rushed into Comiskey Park in the city's South Side to burn disco records and destroy black music. The second presents a spatial map, revealing how corporate leaders and developers restructured the city to benefit wealthy white people and neglect poor people of color in the 1950s. Whereas these two events reveal how deindustrialization and development attempted to demolish disco and black queer creativity at large, Salkind argues that this creativity does not die, but lingers and blossoms into house music. Chapter 2 focuses on two vital venues in Chicago that formed in the late 1970s, The Warehouse and The Music Box. Although the venues have cultural differences, Salkind demonstrates that both sites and their integral DJs, Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy, are foundational to house culture's sound. Throughout the chapter, Salkind claims that new musical techniques, like the manipulation of magnetic reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes, the use of powerful sound systems, and the arrangement of the layout of nightlife venues, deeply influenced house. A combination of these produced an intense dance floor, where people felt “vibrotacile” sensations and grooved “within a cocoon of external sonic pressure” (61).
The third and fourth chapters focus on what happens after The Warehouse and The Music Box. In these final historical chapters, we trace how house music travels to other places through radio hot mixes and the sale of records, circulating the music to new generations of listeners and dancers. Although teenagers danced to black music long before The Warehouse and The Music Box, WBMX's Hot Mix 5, and Importes, Etc. at family celebrations, sock hops, and roller rinks, the codification of house music into its own genre via social institutions transformed the culture into a global commodity. As the music changed and many of house's originators passed away due to HIV complications, “the cultural descendants of the city's queer of color undergrounds continued to listen to and celebrate the sounds favored by their foremothers and forefathers” (143).
The second half of the book, which grows from Salkind's detailed performance ethnography in contemporary house scenes, directly engages dance. Chapter 5 concentrates on the Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic, a massive house event in Chicago's Jackson Park. Through years of working for and dancing at the reunion picnic, Salkind shows how dancing bodies keep house's repertoire in motion alive through what bell hooks calls “a politically charged love ethic” (149). As Salkind describes black social dances, like the Electric Slide, and recalls how “beaming faces, outstretched hands, and two-stepping feet physicalize the love ethic articulated in house music,” he reveals how house music and dance gathers many generations together, from elders to youths (160). This discussion of how dance is passed down through a “non-transactional economy of pleasure” (161) lives within the field of black dance alongside scholarship by Naomi Bragin (Reference Bragin2014), Thomas DeFrantz (Reference DeFrantz, Nielsen and Ybarra2012), and Katrina Hazzard-Donald (Reference Hazzard-Donald1983).
Steeped in Salkind's lively accounts, the sixth and seventh chapters welcome readers into two current day parties in Chicago, Queen! and Chances Dances. Chapter 7, the final chapter, in particular, lingers with dance and shares how people move with each other in the risky and magical hours of the night. By describing how dancers and DJs relate to one another, and how he learned how to jack in dance studios from scholar and dancer Boogie McClarin, Salkind claims that house enables him to get “out of my head” and “slip back into my body; to wear my movements like a loose garment” (237). In these chapters, Salkind joins a conversation about queer dance and nightlife from scholars, such as Jonathan Bollen (Reference Bollen and Desmond2001), Fiona Buckland (Reference Buckland2002), and Ramón Rivera-Servera (Reference Rivera-Servera2012). Although Salkind's ethnography of Queen! and Chances Dances reveals diverse crowds moving together, I wish he further detailed the relationship between these parties and gentrification, perhaps relating this to his earlier discussions about deindustrialization and development.
Like people who cross spatial and social thresholds to dance together, Do You Remember House? crosses disciplinary lines. The book does not sit a single field, but moves between dance studies, performance studies, popular music studies, urban studies, and theories of race, gender, and sexuality. Dancers and musicians will learn about house culture's history, political economy, and performance practices from this text, as will people studying how queers of color survive under neoliberal conditions. People crossing social lines to gather in the night “has meant not only celebrating connection and freedom at these intersecting axes, but also bravely meeting and flowing with the conflicts that arise as well” (237). Likewise, as fields touch in this book, they create new bridges and tensions—both of which are generative.
In his conclusion, Salkind writes, “So too is this book, in many ways, a love letter to Chicago, albeit one written by an amateur” (244). What this book contributes to dance studies is a politics of amateurism. This means that Salkind does not approach house as an authority or master figure, but an amateur, who learns about and embraces house with love and vulnerability. As someone who did not grow up with black dance, his amateur politics are most salient when he learns how to dance in house scenes. In the dance studio and at the club, he must let go of his “habitual embodied retreat,” and dance fully and bravely to the music. In these zones of crossover and conflict, Do You Remember House? encourages us to dance ecstatically and “live more deeply in difference” (237).
