Right now pop music is as genre blind as it’s ever been. Though the Internet has encouraged the development of ever more specialized niche communities, it’s also erased many of the aesthetic and social distinctions between styles—rock bands are making EDM tracks, R&B singers are stealing moves from indie bands, and country music has recently found an unlikely source of inspiration in hip-hop.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This community coalesced in the mid-80s around a small group of DJs who were coming up in the city’s burgeoning house scene, among them Matt Warren, Miguel Garcia, and Ralphi Rosario. “We all started out as your basic basement DJ crew, doing house parties and stuff,” Warren says. “Then as we got kinda older, we moved into the nightclub scene. We started buying equipment, doing the wedding thing, doing the private-party thing. It just kinda grew and grew from there, because of our sound system and lighting, because we had the coolest stuff in town.”
Warren and Rosario were among the first DJs from the house scene to go into the studio—Warren says they recorded their first single before Jesse Saunders recorded “On and On,” cut in 1983 and generally considered the first house record (though many other artists have made that claim). And when they did, they brought along the disparate collection of sounds they’d accumulated via their DJ gigs, including new wave, rap, and salsa. “Just because we were DJs, we were influenced by all of these things,” Warren says, “and we wanted to incorporate them into our sound.”
He managed to attract their attention at least briefly during promo trips to New York, but nothing came of it. That’s not terribly surprising—the majors didn’t begin to wrap their heads around dance music’s potential until years after Sunset folded. Still, it’s not hard to imagine an adventurous A&R rep being intrigued by what Warren had on offer. Many of the tracks on Kill Yourself Dancing could have been marketed to several of the distinct subspecies of clubgoer that existed in the 80s. The throbbing synthesizers and rigid drum programming of Master Plan’s “Electric Baile,” for instance, would’ve pleased black-vinyl-clad new wavers, while its vocal line and salsa flourishes would’ve appealed just as much to fans of Latin freestyle music, which was bubbling up at the time. And White Knight’s “Yo Baby Yo” is raucous, tear-the-club-up electro-rap, recorded just before 2 Live Crew turned that particular hybrid sound into a mainstream pop-culture phenomenon with As Nasty as They Wanna Be.
