Ray Barney has a basement full of old dance records, on shelves that stretch from the floor to the ceiling, but it’s not his personal collection—it’s leftover inventory from Dance Mania, a Chicago label he ran from 1986 till 2001. Barney and Victor Parris Mitchell (a producer who put out several records on Dance Mania) are relaunching the label, in part because they’ve learned that while this back stock has been gathering dust, original Dance Mania releases have become highly sought after, especially in Europe. “What I’ve noticed on Discogs and a lot of other sites, people are selling these records for ridiculous amounts of money,” says Mitchell. “These records are in demand, and people are selling them for $100, $200, $300.”
The label’s music is also great to drop into a mix—at least according to Steve Mizek, editor of dance-music website Little White Earbuds and founder of the labels Argot and Tasteful Nudes. “If you played a Dance Mania track, it would get people dancing,” Mizek says. “People love getting down to music that has just no intention of being nice but is all about having fun, partying, and being real with our desires and what people actually want to do—which is smoke, drink, and have sex.”
“In the early days I was just interested in putting out music and being fair with people; it wasn’t making money or anything,” he says. With that attitude, Barney had no trouble taking chances on producers such as Mitchell, whom he’d met in 1987 through Vince Lawrence, a key figure at Larry Sherman’s foundational house label, Trax Records; Mitchell had been in a disco group but was unknown in the house scene at the time. Now 49, he’d gotten hooked on dance music in his early teens, when disco was at its peak (“That was my era,” he says). He’d had no luck breaking into house, though: when he met Barney, a deal with Trax to release “You Can’t Fight My Love,” a single he’d recorded as Victor Romeo, had just fallen through. He was about to pull the plug on his dance career, but in ’87 Barney issued the record via a resuscitated imprint his father had founded, Bright Star. Soon Mitchell was working for Barney’s distro operation too.
Beginning in the mid-90s and continuing through its final days, Dance Mania worked with Gant-Man and Traxman to release early forms of juke and footwork, fast-paced styles that branched off from ghetto house and have since become international phenomena. Critic David Quam, who wrote a detailed overview of juke and footwork music for Spin last year, says the styles were going through a critical development period around the time Barney pulled the plug; most of it happened underground once the scene lost Dance Mania as an incubator.
