Two new lavish CDs from Trax Records will partially remedy this shameful knowledge gap. The triple-disc Trax Records: The 20th Anniversary Collection and the double-disc Trax Records: The Next Generation offer an exhaustive look at the spark that ignited house's Big Bang in Chicago.
To the cynical rocker, house may sound like disco merely given a different name. That view holds some truth, but disco has been unfairly maligned. At its best, disco provided some of the most erotically charged music ever (it's impossible to overestimate the importance of this), and its streamlined rhythmic, DJ-centric formulas laid the foundation for house, hardcore rave, jungle, techno, and various mutations thereof. Viewed from a certain angle (under the glass table where coke lines are cut, perhaps), disco producer Giorgio Moroder is as important as the Beatles.
But I digress. On The 20th Anniversary Collection, innovative talents like Mr. Fingers (Larry Heard), Farley "Jackmaster" Funk, Frankie Knuckles, Marshall Jefferson, and Phuture map out the blueprint of house's libido-liberating 4/4 rhythms, suggestive and sometimes wacky vocals, and alien sounds from the new generation of synths surfacing in the mid-'80s. These producers drew on influences ranging from gospel-soul belting to '70s jazz funk to (f)rigid Euro-new-wave synth pop to disco's don't-stop-the-music propulsiveness. From Chicago, the house sound spread to New York, Detroit, the UK, and then pretty much every region where electricity and hedonists exist.
Sure, much of the music on these collections now sounds quaint compared to today's sonic scientists with their Pentium-powered laptops and nearly unlimited digital signal processing capabilities. Still (take note IDM heads), cuts like Phuture's "Acid Tracks," Virgo Four's "In a Vision," and Sleezy D's "I've Lost Control" foreshadow Warp Records' infatuation with wickedly weird sounds. In the Reagan era, house was a powerfully convincing argument against rock's hegemony, subsuming its cult of personality into an endless flow of body-jacking tracks designed to sustain pleasure like Tantric sex. House packed a subversive punch, wearing its African-American, gay-friendly colors with pride, while advocating a polymorphously perverse sexual agenda.
The Next Generation, sadly, merely retreads Trax's old glories rather than adding any new ones. These artists sound too enthralled and reverent toward the label's history. Most of the songs here are solid, but it's hard to imagine any of house's forward-looking DJs getting excited about this lot. Nevertheless, we can look forward to Trax excavating more of its classic back catalog throughout 2004 and into 2005. DAVE SEGAL
See www.traxhouse.com for more info. For more perspectives on house's roots and branches, see www.jahsonic.com/House.html.
