After the UK’s Second Summer of Love in 1988 and ’89 gave house music a firm foothold across the Atlantic, Derrick Carter was part of the first wave of Chicago DJs and producers to invade Europe, in the process permanently altering its pop-music landscape. A couple of decades later, songs built on a house-music framework have started to dominate the pop charts in America too—it wouldn’t be hard to draw a straight line connecting Carter to radio juggernauts like Will.i.am and David Guetta.
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Carter prefers this relative anonymity—he’d rather be an influence behind the scenes than have his face on magazine covers. “You know what,” he says, “I have such a comfortable existence that is built on not having a crossover. I like to live a normal life. I mean, OK, there’s like this crazy—I’ve done Australia and New Zealand. I’m about to go to Istanbul on Friday, I was in Belfast on Saturday, I got back from London yesterday. So there is this fantastic element. But it’s really much more commonplace than it sounds. It’s work. And I come back, and I got to pick up dog shit, and I got to go to the grocery store because we’re running out of food, and there’s company coming tomorrow so I have to do some dusting.”
That mellowness doesn’t carry over to the music he spins, though. Carter recently released Fabric 56, a mix in the highly regarded series curated by forward-looking London club Fabric since 2001, and it’s full of massive songs built on the kind of polyrhythmic beats he’s known for—funkier and less bare-bones than the beats in old-school first-generation house, they fill up large swaths of the audio spectrum, and they’re frequently accompanied by exhortations to get lewd on the dance floor. He’s been DJing since the late 70s, when as a grade-school kid he took over the decks at a family reunion, and the black music of that decade left its mark on his aesthetic. “I liked funk. I liked disco, but I liked funk,” he says. “I like big slap basses. Like bow! Bar-Kays, and like James Brown, and who else was big? Parliament. I liked groovy stuff. Anything that just settles right into the pocket and just rides the pocket.” From there, he explains, it was a “natural evolution” for him to get into house.
At this point in his career, it’d be fair to call Carter a die-hard traditionalist, but if you talk to him about the mainstreaming of DJ culture over the past few years, he comes off less like an old crank and more like a bemused veteran. “They sell DJ equipment at fucking Best Buy!” he says, and laughs. “I had gone to get a flash drive, because the new Pioneers [CD DJ decks], you can put something on a flash drive and pop it in the B slot and play off those. So I found myself looking at DJ mix controllers and the pitch-controlled CDJs that they had there. And I was like, Hmm, that’s not bad. But then I was like: What the hell am I doing?”
