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Given all that dramatic irony, as well as the broad targets presented by the wardrobes on display, it’s surprising that “Chicago Hip House Documentary 1989” didn’t attract more snark when it propagated across the Internet. Chicago hip-hop blog Fake Shore Drive, which covers nu-gangsta rap alongside relatively dance-friendly “hipster-hop,” posted it with the one-word commentary “Dope,” and the site’s pool of hard-line commenters—who can usually be counted on to savage anything that doesn’t meet their impossible standards—barely raised an eyebrow.
I credit this to the present-day crossover between hip-hop and dance music, which has blurred the distinction between the two—and against all odds redeemed the reputation of hip-house. What seemed corny just a couple years ago now looks prescient—maybe hip-house’s problem was that it arrived 20 years ahead of its time.
At the same time, dance DJs discovered juke and its relatives, and as they introduced that hip-hop-inflected material to mainstream dance-club audiences—to considerable notice, in the case of artists like Diplo—quite a few hip-hop musicians crossed over too.
