chris viets's Page

House isn’t so much a sound as a situation.

There must be a hundred records with voice-overs asking, “What is house?” The answer is always some greeting-card bullshit about “life, love, happiness…” The House Nation likes to pretend clubs are an oasis from suffering, but suffering is in here with us. (If you can get in, that is. I think of one time in New York when they wouldn’t let me into The Loft, and I could hear they were actually playing one of my records on the dancefloor at that very moment. I shit you not.)

Let’s keep sight of the things you’re trying to momentarily escape from. After all, it’s that larger context that created the house movement and brought you here. House is not universal. House is hyper-specific: East Jersey, Loisaida, West Village, Brooklyn—places that conjure specific beats and sounds…

Twenty years later, major distribution gives us classic house, the same way soundtracks in Vietnam War films gave us classic rock. The contexts from which the deep house sound emerged are forgotten: sexual and gender crises, transgendered sex work, black-market hormones, drug and alcohol addiction, loneliness, racism, HIV, ACT-UP, Tompkins Square Park, police brutality, queer-bashing, underpayment, unemployment, and censorship—all at 120 beats per minute.

These are the Midtown 120 Blues.

—excerpted lyrics from “Midtown 120 Intro” - Terre Thaemlitz.