2009 Pop Conference Bios/Abstracts

Michaelangelo Matos

Michaelangelo Matos is the author of Sign 'O' the Times (Continuum, 2004) and writes regularly about music for Good, The Stranger, eMusic, Idolator, Baltimore City Paper, and Salon.Panel(s):
Dance Off the Beaten Track
Friday, April 17, 2009, 2:00 - 3:45Abstract:

"''House Is a Feeling'': Chuck Roberts and Dance Music's National Anthem"
In 1987, Chicago's Catch a Beat Records issued a 12-inch by Rhythm Controll titled "My House." The song began with an a cappella vocal--spoken, or more exactly preached, rather than sung--by Chuck Roberts, that goes, in part:

In the beginning there was Jack. And Jack had a groove. And from this groove came the groove of all grooves. And while one day viciously throwing down on his box, Jack boldly declared, Let there be house! And house music was born. . . . You see, house is a feeling that no one can understand, really, unless you're deep into the vibe of house. House is an uncontrollable desire to jack your body. And as I told you before, this is our house, and our house music . . .You may be black. You may be white. You may be Jew or Gentile. It don't make a difference in our house. And this is fresh.

(You can hear the a cappella online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NSn5RfxoXs.)

Almost no one remembers what the rest of Rhythm Controll's record sounds like, largely because its most famous element was later recycled by a much more popular Chicago house 12-inch, Fingers Inc.'s "Can You Feel It" (1988). But everyone knows Roberts's a cappella, even if they don't. It has, of course, been heavily sampled: the lines "House is a feeling," "And this is fresh," and "In the beginning there was Jack" have all made their way onto numerous other tracks. And the words themselves speak to house music's open-armed embrace of misfits and outcasts--largely the gay, black fans that first embraced the music.

But in purely musical terms, Roberts's a cappella is one of those sound-items that seems to shape-shift to fit whatever you put it next to. I mean that quite literally: as I hope to demonstrate, Roberts's sermon sounds good over just about any house track, at whichever point you choose to cue it up. It's the ultimate DJ tool: you don't need any DJ skills whatsoever for it to work. I can't imagine there's a serious house DJ in the world who hasn't dropped this at a peak moment in a set at some point in his or her career.

I propose to detail the history and continuing legacy of the "My House" a cappella. I plan to interview as many people as I can reach who were involved with the making of both the Rhythm Controll and Fingers Inc. records, including (if I can find him) Chuck Roberts himself, as well as a few of the uncountable number of house DJs who've kept the track alive in the 21 years since its initial release. Yet its very ubiquity also helps render it partly invisible to history--very little has been written or documented about it. With this presentation, I plan to change that.