This Is A Podcast About House Music

C-Dub
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  • MUSIC HISTORY

r/thatpodcastgirl All episodes and more at https://www.thatpodcastgirl.com Season 1: House Music by city and decade. Immerse yourself in stories of the birth of House Music and its regional influences.  Season 2: Untold Stories in House Music. Listen to the stories that never made the headlines—the quiet ones, the erased ones, the ones still living in the basslines and breakdowns. House music rose out of the wreckage—after disco was declared dead, while AIDS was being ignored, and as Black and queer communities were pushed to the margins. It was protest. It was joy. It was survival. And the people who shaped it weren’t always let in, given credit, or remembered. We’re remembering them now. This podcast is perfect for: people who like the style of an ASMR, spoken slowly, in a moderated tone, perfect for putting the entire season on autoplay while you do work in the background Disclaimer: Some names and personal details in this episode have been changed or composited to honor privacy while preserving the emotional and cultural truth of these histories.

  1. 11/14/2025

    NYC 90's House: Junior Vasquez, Megaclubs, David Morales and the Remix (S2 E6)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. Under the vision of Peter Gatien, New York began to experiment with scale. Limelight, housed inside a deconsecrated church, offered stained glass windows and marble floors that glowed under strobes. The Tunnel stretched long and narrow, a place where each room carried a different fantasy. Club USA sat on Times Square like a wild attraction, complete with a slide that carried dancers from the balcony down into the crowd. Palladium mixed ballroom glamor with club futurism. These clubs treated nightlife as theater. They were built for spectacle and for the feeling that anything could happen inside their walls. The soundtrack of the megaclub era needed a conductor: someone who could take a massive room, a restless crowd, and a long night, and shape it into a story. That conductor was about to arrive. Junior Vasquez had been in the city for years before he became a name people whispered with reverence. He started as a studio assistant, then remixer, and eventually found his way into the booth at Bassline. His early sets were raw, emotional, and tightly shaped. You could hear the influence of disco, but he pushed the music harder, darker, and more cinematic. Everything changed when the Sound Factory opened on West 27th Street. The Factory became Junior’s canvas. His marathon Saturday night sets often lasted until noon the next day. Dancers would talk about arriving in the dark and walking out into bright sunlight with mascara running and sweat drying on their skin. Junior had an uncanny ability to build tension for long stretches. He kept dancers suspended in anticipation and then broke the room open with a kick or a vocal line that felt like release. He treated the booth like a laboratory. Rumor had it he would isolate frequencies and push EQ curves in ways that made the body feel the shift before the ear fully understood it. Regulars began calling themselves “Junior’s Children.” They followed him with devotion because he created a space where pain and joy could move through the body without explanation or judgment. During the AIDS crisis, the dance floor became a place where people carried grief quietly inside them. Junior built sets that allowed that grief to surface without language. This wasn’t therapy in the clinical sense. It was community surviving the only way it knew how. New York was a magnet for models, musicians, and artists. The supermodel era was thriving. Designers were pushing boundaries. And celebrities wandered into Junior’s booth because they wanted to feel the way the Factory felt. Madonna appeared frequently, and their artistic relationship became its own legend. Junior remixed tracks for her, and she fueled his visibility. Their bond was complicated but electric. When he created the track “If Madonna Calls,” it sparked tension, humor, and myth. It became one of those New York stories people still repeat because it captures the wild intimacy of that era when fame and nightlife were always bumping into each other. Designers also drew from the energy of his nights. Runways picked up the rhythm of house. Magazine spreads reflected the neon glow of the clubs. The line between fashion and nightlife blurred to the point where it felt like they were breathing the same air. While Junior held the energy of the night, another revolution was happening during the day inside recording studios. Record labels were beginning to understand something dancers had known for years. A remix could change everything. Producers and DJs like David Morales, Masters At Work, Frankie Knuckles, Satoshi Tomiie, François K, Hex Hector, and Armand Van Helden turned remixes into cultural events. Major artists began requesting club versions of the Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music” hosted by C-Dub

    10 min

  2. 10/21/2025

    Detroit House: Then and Now (Kevin Saunderson, KMS Records, Paragon, Brooklyn: S2 E5)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. Hey everyone, I’m C. Dub. And this is a podcast about house music. When we last left Detroit, house and techno were twins raised in the same neighborhood—one born of gospel and groove, the other of machines and math. But the story didn’t end in those warehouses. It kept growing, shaped by the people who carried both sounds in their bones. Kevin Saunderson was one of them. He was born in Brooklyn in 1964, but his family moved to Belleville, Michigan when he was still a kid. The move dropped him right between farmland and factory smoke. Detroit was close enough to feel, but far enough to dream about. At home, his older brother’s records spun Parliament, Stevie Wonder, and Ohio Players. Late at night, the radio turned futuristic—Kraftwerk, Prince, The Electrifying Mojo. Those frequencies collided in his mind. Funk met  circuitry. Soul met sequence. That’s where the blueprint started. At Belleville High, he met two kids who heard music the same way: Juan Atkins and Derrick May. They weren’t the popular ones. They were the ones talking about drum machines no one had seen and records no one else understood. They built a friendship out of sound. Juan was the philosopher. Derrick was the provocateur. Kevin was the engineer—the one who could take an idea and make it move. By 1987, he founded KMS Records—his initials on the door, his fingerprints on the city’s next chapter. It was one of the first Black-owned electronic labels to release straight from Detroit to the world. The label became a launchpad for his own projects and for producers who were inventing Detroit techno in real time. Then came Inner City, his collaboration with vocalist Paris Grey. Their sound wasn’t borrowed from Chicago or Europe. It was Detroit optimism with a house heartbeat. In 1988, “Big Fun” hit the UK Top 10. “Good Life” followed and crossed continents. These weren’t crossover tracks; they were cross-pollinations—soulful, synthetic, and deeply human. Inner City didn’t just make radio hits; they made history. Kevin didn’t stop there. Under other names—E-Dancer, Reese, Tronik House—he kept pushing deeper underground. In 1988 he released “Just Want Another Chance,” a track whose bassline became immortal. That detuned low-end, now known as the Reese bass, shaped drum & bass, jungle, dubstep, and half the darker corners of modern electronic music. His fingerprints are in genres that didn’t even exist when he pressed that record. As house and techno grew into global industries, Kevin stayed rooted. He kept the independent grind alive, touring, mentoring, and producing from his KMS studio. He welcomed young Detroit artists like MK and Carl Craig, offering gear, advice, and patience. He wasn’t a gatekeeper. He was a gardener. His legacy runs in the family now. His sons, Dantiez and DaMarii, are producers and DJs, carrying the Saunderson name into new decades. Every year at Movement Festival on Detroit’s riverfront, Kevin still headlines. He’s treated like royalty there, but he plays like a worker—head down, hands on, eyes on the crowd. He’s received official recognition for it too. In 2016, the City of Detroit awarded him a Spirit of Detroit Resolution Award for his contributions to electronic music. He’s also been honored internationally for advancing Detroit’s global presence in arts and culture. For a kid who started making beats in his bedroom, that’s a full-circle moment. Kevin’s story is full of side roads too. He’s collaborated with artists you might not expect—from British rappers to European producers like KiNK on the 2017 track “Idyllic,” a playful, retro-futurist piece that felt like a wink to his eighties self. His remixes of pop and hip-hop acts in the lat Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music” hosted by C-Dub

    8 min

  3. 08/25/2025

    New York City House Music: Part 2 (Untold Stories in House Music: S2 E5)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. Welcome back, beautiful souls… it’s that podcast girl, C-Dub. I wanted to give a quick shout out to our listeners tuning in from the UK tonight, thanks for your support from across the world. Tonight—especially since the episodes on New York, New Jersey, and Detroit House Music are leading our search charts—we’re leaning deep into the roots, starting with New York City. We’re not just touching the pulse of ’90s NYC house. We’re breathing the air from those rooms. Red Zone wasn’t just a club—it was a confession. David Morales famously called it the place where he “made a statement for the new age,” and he wasn’t exaggerating. He described that era as mixing the “dark side”—minimal vocals or no vocals—not just music, but revolution in 4/4. He said, “Red Zone was the turning point on the map for music changing.” People remember it as the spot that flipped disco into club soul through sheer grit, vinyl dig, and rebellious rhythm.  Red Zone was theater in flesh; the naked, the naughty, and the unapologetic moved inside it. The club embraced extreme self-expression—think raw nudity, sex, spontaneous hookups, and sometimes eruptions of violence. It was a place where curtains, fog, and a pulsing beat blurred lines between pleasure and performance. The edge was always one step away from confrontation, because survival in that crowd meant daring to be seen. This was the home turf of the Club Kids—Michael Alig, James St. James, Screamin Rachael, Lady Buddy, Dan Dan the Naked Man, Goldie Loxxx—and the rest of that flamboyant crew who tore the norm apart with feathers, glitter. Their wild identities flashed, flirted, and fought in the space. They were Red Zone. Imagine this: curtains hiding backrooms where sex happened behind velvet folds. Fog machines creating halos you couldn’t see—but felt in your bones. Fights that erupted out of passion or possession, fueled by too much adrenaline, and too little filter. Sex, chaos, and liberation weren’t just tolerated—they were invitation-only. Red Zone allowed things to come unhinged, and unhinged they became. Then came NASA nights at The Shelter—NASA stands for Nocturnal Audio Sensory Awakening. Moby called it “utopian,” and Chloë Sevigny said it “transcended raves.” Imagine a Tribeca loft drenched in light and smoke, with acid, trance, and jungle tracks all whirled through that booth by Scotto and DB. And then there was Sound Factory. It was hallowed ground—Junior Vasquez said people told him they were “going to church on Sunday morning… but they meant Factory.” He co-founded that room with Richard Grant and Christine Visca in 1989. Right in the heat of New York house’s golden era, Junior Vasquez dropped a track that became infamous—not just for its sound, but for how it ended a whole era. The track “If Madonna Calls” (1996) loops a snippet from what sounded like Madonna’s voice on his answering machine: “Hello Junior… This is Madonna… are you there? Call me in Miami.”   It continued with a cheeky retort — “If Madonna calls, tell her I’m not here.” The vocal loop was so bold that it became known as a “bitch track”—campy, savage, and hilarious in its defiance.  The story goes: Madonna allegedly bailed on appearing at his club night at The Tunnel, leaving him in the lurch. He turned that moment into house-music history—with total disregard for permission or precedent. Not surprisingly, Madonna never forgave the joke. Their friendship—and any chance of future collaboration—was done.  Yet the track exploded on dance floors. It did hit #2 on Billboard’s Dance Club chart and became a cult anthem for underground queer scenes and ballrooms. DJ queens would perform it, the sound of gossip and bet Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music, Sometimes” hosted by C-Dub

    8 min

  4. 05/30/2025

    The Record Store (Untold Stories in House Music: S2 E3)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. This is a podcast about house music. I'm thatpodcastgirl, C-Dub—and I want to thank all of you for helping us hit over 200 downloads in just three and a half months, across 11 episodes. JohnJohn guess what? We did it! This episode is called: The Record Store. Picture this: It’s the early '90s. Somewhere between grit and gold chains. Between big dreams and dirty sneakers. And on both coasts—if you wanted to find a sound, you walked into a record store. Let’s start with Chicago. Gramaphone Records: it wasn’t big. Tucked into a narrow space on Clark Street, its walls were crowded with bins and bins of vinyl. The floor had the signature black and white checkered tile. It smelled like plastic and cardboard and gum stuck to a sneaker. Flyers were shoved under the glass of the counter. The lighting was harsh and honest. But it was church. DJs walked in like they had a mission. They’d flip through crates with the reverence of a surgeon in the middle of a procedure. Customers would clear out of the way if someone serious walked in. Because the booth in the back? That was sacred ground. Behind the glass, a selector would listen to your picks. The staff could tell if you knew what you were doing by the second record you previewed. “If you played the wrong thing too loud, they’d cut the sound. You’d feel it before you even noticed.” Gramaphone didn’t sell records. It passed on secrets. There were codes in the track listings. White labels with no names. You’d find the record someone played at 3AM that melted your brain—and it wouldn’t be there next week. You either knew when to come, or you didn’t and missed out. Frankie Knuckles was a regular. So was Derrick Carter. But even if you weren’t a name, you could be a witness. One customer remembered watching Derrick build an entire set in the store over two hours—testing tracks, building tension, then walking out without a word. “Gramaphone was like a dojo,” one woman said. “You didn’t go there to buy. You went to train.” Over in New York—it was different. Downtown, you had places like Vinylmania, Dance Tracks, and Satellite. Tucked behind basements. No two stores were the same. Some were dark and sleek, others crowded and chaotic. But all of them had a pulse. Dance Tracks, on East 3rd Street, had tall racks and endless stacks, plus a community board with handwritten ads—DJ needed. Roommate wanted. One wall had stickers from clubs that no longer existed. Another had a memorial photo of someone from the scene, framed with scribbled tributes. This is where Joe Claussell got his start. Where François K would come through in his sunglasses. Where a new DJ might overhear a conversation that would change everything. One regular recalled being handed a record and told, “Don’t play this unless you mean it.” Another described the joy of walking in hungover, digging through wax, and finding a beat so perfect it made you cry. At Vinylmania, there were whispers. About a rare Japanese pressing. About a reel from a closing party. About a limited promo that came in through someone’s cousin in Detroit. It wasn’t about the money. It was about the mythology. These stores weren’t commercial. They were coded. You had to dress the part, or dress in defiance of it. Some people came in gender-blurred—baggy pants, nail polish, stubble and gloss—because in those four walls, there was no wrong way to be. In fact, dressing ambiguously sometimes gave you more space. People didn’t know how to categorize you, so they left you alone. One woman recalls she never got called out for being a woman in the DJ booth because she wore oversized hoodies and kept her voice low. “If I didn’t speak Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music, Sometimes” hosted by C-Dub

    6 min

  5. 05/16/2025

    Die-In On The Dance Floor (Untold Stories in House Music: S2 E2)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. This is a podcast about house music. I’m thatpodcastgirl, C Dub, and I’m here to guide us through the untold stories behind the house music. This season, we’re remembering what was almost lost—what pulsed in the basslines and lived in the corners. Stories that stayed alive only because someone danced them into memory. Picture this: It’s 2024, and you’re in Berlin. A DJ pulls out a vinyl with no label and no sleeve. Just black wax and instinct. She drops it. It’s from Shelter. A remix from decades ago. The crowd roars. But most people in the room don’t know that track was once played in protest. They don’t know about the night the beat was an act of defiance. In the early 1980s, a virus began to spread. And for far too long, the world stayed quiet. The clubs that gave people freedom—places like the Warehouse, the Paradise Garage, the Power Plant—became spaces of mourning. Dancers disappeared every week. DJs lost their friends. Party flyers became obituaries. The government wasn’t naming it. So the music did. Michael Roberson is a scholar, a father of the House of Garcón, and a Black queer activist. He’s often spoken about the ballroom floor as a sacred place during the AIDS epidemic. “We were losing people every week. So we danced with them, for them, through them.” For Michael and so many others, house wasn’t just escape. It was church and it was ritual. It was where you could scream into the bass and still be held. At the Paradise Garage, DJ Larry Levan began playing extended versions of tracks with long breakdowns and pauses. Sometimes he left full seconds of silence. Club historian Tim Lawrence says: “People would stand still, or scream, or weep. The music gave them space to grieve.” In 1989, ACT UP held a die-in at the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia. That same night, on the floor at a gay club in New York, dancers lay down in silence. They called it dancing to remember. There’s also a story about a track that included a voicemail. The voice said: “I can’t go on.” Nobody agrees on who made it, and some say it was a real message. Others say it was constructed from memory. It was played only once. In a small club. Quiet room. Full of people who understood. Then the beat dropped. At the door, the ten-dollar cover might be for the DJ—or for someone’s casket. Sometimes it paid for AZT. Sometimes for rent, or a hospital bed. At the Shelter in New York, one woman came every weekend, in the same shirt. She danced in the same corner. “I’m here for my brother,” she told the DJ once. “He used to dance here. I still do it for him.” At certain parties, there was a board behind the DJ booth—names were pinned, and candles lit. It wasn’t advertised because it didn’t need to be - those were friends. Flyers used coded language: “This one’s for family,” or “bring your breath.” That meant someone had passed. That meant come ready to move through it. These weren’t just parties. They were vigils on the dance floor. Frankie Knuckles once said: “You can play joy. But you can also play mourning. The floor knows the difference.” The dancefloor didn’t ignore the crisis. It became the memorial. And for some, it stayed that way. From the early 1980s through the late 1990s—and even into the 2000s in clubs like The Shelter and Body & Soul—these spaces continued to hold grief and memory. Candles continued Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music, Sometimes” hosted by C-Dub

    5 min

  6. 05/15/2025

    The Other Door at The Warehouse (Untold Stories in House Music: S2 E1)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. This is a podcast about house music. I'm thatpodcastgirl, C-Dub, and I'm here to guide us through the untold stories behind the house music. This season, we’re telling the stories that never made the headlines—the quiet ones, the erased ones, the ones still living in the basslines and breakdowns. House music rose out of the wreckage—after disco was declared dead, while AIDS was being ignored, and as Black and queer communities were pushed to the margins. It was protest. It was joy. It was survival. And the people who shaped it weren’t always let in, given credit, or remembered. We’re remembering them now. In 1977, on the West Loop of Chicago, a man named Robert Williams opened the doors to something rare. A space that would come to mean everything. It was called The Warehouse. Williams had moved from New York. He’d spent time at David Mancuso’s Loft and Nicky Siano’s Gallery—spaces where music wasn’t just a soundtrack. It was an offering. A way to hold each other in sound. When he came to Chicago, he carried that vision with him. He once said:  "I didn’t want to open a bar. I wanted a house party that never ended."  *(Chicago Tribune, 2014)* He found a building on South Jefferson—three floors, concrete bones, no signage. Just potential. He called his friend Frankie Knuckles. Frankie didn’t just mix records. He shaped mood. His sets built slowly, tenderly. A gospel chord stretched across a disco break. Synths weaving through soul. He played what the room needed—before the room knew it needed it. There was no shouting into the mic. No interruptions. Just music, steady and intentional. The sound didn’t have a name yet. But it was unmistakable. People started calling it house. A nod to where they heard it first. For many, The Warehouse was more than a club. It was where the weight came off. Where you could exhale.  A dancer once recalled: "Frankie played like he was watching us—not the other way around. If someone cried in the corner, the next song held them." *(Chicago House Music Oral History Project)* But that wasn’t everyone’s experience. Some people never made it past the door. There were quiet rules. About how you looked. Who you knew. Whether you matched the room. One man wrote: "I stood outside The Warehouse in ’81 and watched the guy in front of me go in. The door shut behind him. I didn’t get in. That rejection stayed with me—but it also made me start something else." *(Out & Proud Archive, Chicago)* For those turned away, something else had to be built. New spaces began to open. Not spin-offs. Not alternatives. Their own worlds. Places like the Power Plant. The Bismarck. The Music Box. Sometimes you heard about the party through a friend. Sometimes it was a flyer taped to a pole, already half torn. A back room. A storage space. A dancefloor that wasn’t trying to impress anyone. The Music Box, in particular, held something raw. The ceilings dripped with condensation. The walls throbbed. The air was soaked with sweat and smoke. One dancer said: "The ceiling would drip. The walls would shake. You couldn’t fake it. You had to move, or leave." *(Black LGBTQ Archives, Spelman College)* Another remembered: "It was the first time I saw a man scream during a breakdown. Not because he was scared—but because he needed to get something out of his body." *(ACT UP Club Culture Collection, NYC)* Ron Hardy was at the center. His sets didn’t follow the beat. They followed the feeling. He looped tracks until people broke open. He reversed them. Sometimes it was chaos. But it was the kind of chaos that made sense in your bones. This wasn’t a Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music, Sometimes” hosted by C-Dub

    7 min

  7. 04/28/2025

    Baltimore House Music: K-Swift, The Paradox, Skateland North Point (S1 E9)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. Welcome back groove lovers! This is House Foundations, a podcast about house music. I’m your host, C Dub. Tonight, we’re heading to a city where house music caught fire and burned a new path through the streets. In Baltimore, the beats didn’t aim to please. They hit hard, ran fast, and refused to be ignored. Baltimore Club was carved from basement parties, roller rinks, street corners — born from a city’s need to dance through every hardship. Let’s dive in. When house and soulful rhythms drifted from Chicago and New York, Baltimore heard them — but chose a different journey. The city's pulse demanded a sharper edge, a louder voice. In the heart of it all stood The Paradox — a downtown stronghold where the sound system hurled music into the bodies of everyone packed onto the floor. This was a place where every night tested your spirit, left bass echoing in your chest long after the sun came up. The line outside wrapped around the block, buzzing with anticipation. Sneakers tapped, bodies bounced to the faint rumble of the bass leaking through the heavy doors. Everyone was there for the same reason: to be claimed by the night. Before The Paradox came the sparks. Odell’s Nightclub, with its disco, R&B, and early house sets, planted the first seeds in Baltimore's dance scene. Hammerjacks, the legendary warehouse space, turned those seeds wild with raw, untamed energy. Young DJs crafted their skills at The Twilight Zone on Belair Road, where experimentation wasn’t just allowed — it was essential. Skateland North Point offered a sanctuary for the next generation, where skating and dancing blurred into one pure form of expression. Here, you didn’t chase velvet ropes or exclusive lists. You found freedom, a flash of sweat and joy in the rhythm. Inside these spaces, DJs pushed boundaries. They tore records apart and rebuilt them in jagged, urgent shapes. Armed with battered equipment like Cool Edit Pro, beat-up MPCs, and dusty SP-1200s, they sampled tiny fragments of sound and spun them into explosive loops. Voices became drums. Beats jumped forward like electricity snapping through wire. Basslines cracked foundations. Scottie B, DJ Technics, Rod Lee, DJ Boobie, Jimmy Jones — they shaped a language spoken with kicks, snares, and fearless imagination. In the middle of it all stood K-Swift — Baltimore’s crowned Club Queen. Her ascent wasn’t an accident. Night after night at The Paradox, she summoned entire rooms into one throbbing heartbeat. Sundays under her decks became sacred. As K-Swift said herself, "I just want people to feel good when they hear my music, that’s all I ever wanted." Her sets didn’t follow a script; they followed the crowd’s need to break loose, to rise, to breathe through the music. K-Swift’s magic spilled beyond downtown. At Skateland North Point, she handed the next generation the keys to a world where rhythm was resistance and community. Her mixtapes became relics of that energy — sold in gas stations, salons, flea markets, shared hand to hand until they wore thin. A K-Swift tape wasn’t a possession; it was a lifeline. Young people would scrape together their last few dollars just to grab the latest volume, knowing it held the soundtrack to their summer, their first loves, their first battles on the floor. Swift wasn’t just at the center of the scene. She was the scene — the living pulse of a sound too wild to tame. A night inside The Paradox etched itself into your bones. The stickiness of the air, the relentless bass, the shared sweat of strangers turned into family by the dance floor. In those moments, Baltimore wasn't weighed down by anything but lifted, brightened, electrified. Baltimore Club was never made to sit still. The ener Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music, Sometimes” hosted by C-Dub

    6 min

  8. 04/24/2025

    Detroit House Music: Where the Belleville Three Minted Techno music, where The Shelter, Cheeks and Motor Lounge were Prime Spots (S1 E8)

    Send us a text if you like it and want more of it. Hey everyone, welcome back to House Foundations. I’m your host, C. Dub. Today we’re in Detroit. A city that helped build the world and then turned around and built its own sound. The factories shaped the rhythm. The people shaped the feeling. What came out of that was house music that didn’t need permission, and a techno scene that grew from basement parties into global influence. Let’s start with the Belleville Three, who were three high school boys named Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May. They met in high school just outside Detroit in the late 70s. They were into synths, space, and sounds that didn’t belong anywhere yet. They listened to Kraftwerk and Parliament. They stayed up late with the Electrifying Mojo. And then they made something new. In 1981, Atkins dropped “Alleys of Your Mind” under the name Cybotron. It sounded like a machine trying to feel something. In 1985, May gave us “Nude Photo” and later “Strings of Life.” That one? It made people cry on the dance floor. In 1988, Saunderson’s group Inner City hit with “Big Fun.” That record moved hips all over the world. These weren’t just tracks. They really were landmarks. It was Juan Atkins who first called it 'techno.' He borrowed the term from futurist writer Alvin Toffler, who used it to describe a new kind of rebel in an information-driven age. The sound was mechanical, but full of purpose. Meanwhile, in Chicago, the term 'house' was taking shape at a club called the Warehouse, where Frankie Knuckles played long sets that blended disco, soul, and something new - we covered that in a previous episode. That’s how the names stuck—techno from Detroit, house from Chicago. But Detroit, as always, found a way to make both its own. By the early 90s, house and techno were no longer separate lanes in Detroit. They shared the same turntables, the same speakers, and often the same dance floor. You could hear a driving techno track blend into a soulful house groove, and nobody blinked. Detroit DJs weren’t just mixing tracks, they were connecting scenes. Local producers, many of whom worked day jobs and made beats at night, built a sound that reflected the city.  The working class man. The DJs aligned themselves with those voices. They didn’t wait for approval from outside. They played Detroit’s sound, made by Detroit’s hands. And through that, house and techno grew up together. You saw this play out at Cheeks. That place was thick with bodies and bass. Nothing fancy. Just movement. Motor Lounge opened in 1995. The room was tighter, but the sound stayed raw. The Shelter was underground in more ways than one. Before Eminem made it a movie set in 8 Mile, it was a late-night lab where DJs could test anything. These parties pulled people from all over. You’d get heads from the east side next to art school kids. Some were lovers holding hands in the dark. Some came alone, worn out from double shifts or skipping class. They all showed up chasing the same thing—a release, a rhythm, and a reason to stay a little longer. Ken Collier gave it to them. His sets at Club Heaven were long and smooth. He didn’t play to impress. He played to heal you. His crowd trusted him. And they stayed all night. Then came the next wave. Moodymann was watching and he soaked it in. His sound came out dirty and tender at the same time. His records had dust in the grooves and heat in the bones. Theo Parrish moved from Chicago in ‘94. He brought jazz into the booth. Not the notes, but the risk. His sets didn’t build, they simmered. Sometimes they snapped. Rick Wilhite brought the balance. He knew how to take a room from warm to wild without breaking the spell. Together with Marcellus Pittman, they Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music” hosted by C-Dub

    7 min
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r/thatpodcastgirl All episodes and more at https://www.thatpodcastgirl.com Season 1: House Music by city and decade. Immerse yourself in stories of the birth of House Music and its regional influences.  Season 2: Untold Stories in House Music. Listen to the stories that never made the headlines—the quiet ones, the erased ones, the ones still living in the basslines and breakdowns. House music rose out of the wreckage—after disco was declared dead, while AIDS was being ignored, and as Black and queer communities were pushed to the margins. It was protest. It was joy. It was survival. And the people who shaped it weren’t always let in, given credit, or remembered. We’re remembering them now. This podcast is perfect for: people who like the style of an ASMR, spoken slowly, in a moderated tone, perfect for putting the entire season on autoplay while you do work in the background Disclaimer: Some names and personal details in this episode have been changed or composited to honor privacy while preserving the emotional and cultural truth of these histories.

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