HOUSE MUSIC'S CIVIL WAR

DECADES AFTER CHICAGO'S TRAX RECORDS CHANGED DANCE MUSIC FOREVER, FORMER FRIENDS ARE LOCKED IN AN INTENSE BATTLE OVER THE LABEL

- OLI COLEMAN

IN THE EARLY DAYS of Chicago house music, nobody hustled harder than Vince Lawrence. Vince grew up on the South Side of Chicago. As a teenager in the late 70s and early 80s, he was urbane and in the know. He liked Izod shirts, white K-Swiss sneakers and straight-leg jeans; he ran hip parties, loved import records from Europe, and aspired to make music of his own. A lot of what he and his friends were into, he remembers, "came from us reading GQ and wishing we were rich". Around then, there was a specific vibe at Chicago's high school parties, downtown gay clubs, and on local radio- underground but not exclusive, sophisticated but not so preening that nobody wanted to dance. It was "house" culture, named after a club called the Warehouse. At first, "house music" meant anything that the club's DJ, Frankie Knuckles, played - disco, Italo disco, Philly soul, New Wave, even punk. Amid that swirl, perfectly on-beat digital rhythms meant DJs could experiment with seamless mixing, and synthesisers were becoming affordable enough to be available outside of studios. The result was a new sound - heavy, stripped-down, synthetic but groove-rich - made by Vince, his friend Jesse Saunders, and other, mostly Black, kids. It was what the world came to know as house music, and for all of its epochal innovation, Vince says it had a simple appeal: “It was the best we could do, and we knew it worked at the parties.”