“You’re as relevant as your last mix.”
House music has belonged to the world as a whole for most of its history. But like everything else in club life, Chicago-purist house has its vogues of popularity and wider cultural relevance. The mid-to-late 90s was such a time—just as right now is. The original sound of Chicago house music labels Trax and DJ International has been reintegrated into clubland’s matrix with increasing frequency. A number of producers have made back-to-’87-style tracks. Vintage-Chicago-house 12-inches pop up on mixes by under-25 DJs such as Benjamin Damage & Doc Daneeka (their XLR8R Mix, from March, pivots halfway through on Armando’s “Downfall,” first released on Trax in 1988).
It was around the time that “Special” first appeared that Sneak got his start in the business. He began working for the now-shuttered Hip House, a seminal rave-era 12-inch dance shop on West Grand that he helped run from 1991 to 1994. He then took a demotion of sorts to work an entry-level job at the legendary DJ shop Gramaphone Records. “I went from general manager and main buyer for a big store to being a counterperson,” he says of his move to Gramaphone. The trade-off was worth it. Sneak expanded his contacts and was able to shop his demo to house labels. “Gramaphone was like my college,” he says.
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One day in 1997, Sneak promised his friend and fellow Chicago DJ Derrick Carter a new 12-inch for Carter’s label Classic, then spent hours fruitlessly laboring over a basic, bustling four-four beat. Finally, Sneak gave in and smoked the J he’d had stashed for later in the day. When he came back inside, he carelessly dropped the needle onto a Teddy Pendergrass LP, heard the word “Well . . . ,” and realized, “That’s the sample, right there.” He threaded Pendergrass’s 20-year-old disco hit “You Can’t Hide From Yourself” through a low-pass filter to give it the effect of going in and out of aural focus, creating one of the definitive Chicago house singles. “An hour later,” he says, “I called Derrick and played it over the phone: ‘I’ve got your track.’”
“You Can’t Hide From Your Bud” is a master class in sustained tension and release. The song’s title phrase is hinted at, teased around, and turned to fuzz. But the track never totally resolves itself in all of its nine minutes, giving it the feel of a nonstop plateau, which makes the record even more disco. “Bud” is the definitive example of late-90s “filter disco,” give or take French fake-robot duo Daft Punk. Their own 1997 release, Homework, features “Teachers,” a tribute to 44 of their musical heroes. The third named is DJ Sneak.
“They played all this different house music on the radio,” Chicago house vet Derrick Carter told the Reader‘s Miles Raymer in 2011. “WBMX or WGCI or Disco Dai [WDAI] or WVON or WJPC would do a morning drive-time mix, a ‘hot lunch’ mix, and an ‘after work at six’ mix. Then on Fridays and Saturdays they would do 9 [PM] to 4 or 5 [AM]—right along club time, but on the radio. I would stay up and listen, or rig up the VCR to the radio. I could record six hours, so I didn’t even have to be up. Later I would listen and transfer it all back to cassette. I would edit it and take out the stupid songs—reduce to the good stuff, in my eyes.”
Long grew up on Chicago’s north side and fell for house music in fifth grade, after hearing Thompson & Lenoir’s “Can’t Stop the House” (1987) on the car radio. He hooked into the music’s alien quality—stark electronic beats, swaying keyboard bass, and engagingly off-key singing from Kenya Lenoir and Brenda Parker, who delivered emphatic lyrics such as “I pledge allegiance to the house sound.” In 1992, at age 14, Long bought his first pair of turntables. Soon, he was playing at parties downtown and along Milwaukee Avenue, at venues referred to only by door number: 1355, 1471, 156. “Drugs weren’t a factor,” says Long of the early loft parties. “People really just came to dance and hang out. It would be two DJs doing their thing for hours, telling a story.”