At some point during another amazing Time Kode party last Friday, I was struck by the dance floor. No, I didn’t fall over, but I had a thought - as DJ’s, our job is to create the atmosphere that activates the space such that people participate in it. When we consider the way in which the pub or club has become the gathering ground for young urban creative class 20-somethings/30-somethings, how significant is the music that they want to hear to the spaces they want to be in? Participating in public space has something of a performative value - this discourse of performance in space has been in motion since Rousseau’s philosophical anthropology defined human existence as fundamentally social in the Discourse on the Inequality of Man. and was brought to bear on the phenomenon of the 20th century city by Richard Sennett’s seminal 1974 work The Fall of Public Man. The dance floor is an interesting and practical kind of metaphor for the public space in which we perform and individuate.
Sennett was among the urbanists who contributed to 2007’s The Endless City, one of the most powerful and comprehensive books of comparative urban study that I’ve ever seen. They do not, however, profile Sennett’s home city of Chicago. Nor was youth culture and music on the researchers’ radar. If it was, they might have thought to include The Chi. Other than New York, there are few other cities in North America, or anywhere for that matter, that have made as strong an impact on youth and music culture worldwide as Chicago has. It was from there that House music would make its way into the world.
Edward Soja comments in his opening essay “The Urbanization of The World” that:
An important starting point in looking at the changes that have taken place within urban regions over the past 30 years is what Mike Davis recently described as the mass production of slums. The expansion of urban poverty has made ‘extended’ slums and burgeoning informal economies a distinctive feature of both the urbanization of the world and the globalization of the urban.
Nowhere is the concept of mass slums more poignant than in Chicago’s north and south sides. The Robert Taylor and Cabrini-Green houses are infamous even as they come down. The Chicago Housing Authority’s position on integration in the 50s led them to create one of the most severe black/white housing divisions that the U.S. would ever see. Those projects would also be the breeding ground for one of the most robust and influential informal economies of musical ideas outside of New York’s 5 boroughs.
While in Comiskey Park they were literally blowing up dance records, in a south side club called The Warehouse, dance music was reinventing itself and creating a new context for the dance floor. Revealing the world beat that would turn the UK upside down between ‘88 and ‘91, and changing the way we dance forever are no small innovations. As the homes and communities that birthed House come down, we should ask ourselves: How have the peripheral effects of space contributed to mainstream culture? In the discourse that Hope VI has initiated about dispersing or concentrating poverty, without defending the terrible conditions that places like Cabrini-Green subjected its residents to, it’s important to consider what else we’re concentrating and dispersing as well. How can we appreciate the innovations coming from a space and its productive forces while simultaneously condemning that space?
Also, how important is the nightclub/pub to the young professionals? How much does a city’s musical profile affect your impression of it? How important is it to you that you can go out and dance?
And now, as always, some music.