It's a Friday night in Charlotte, and I'm sweating up a storm in the Uptown nightclub HOM, dancing to the hard-hitting sounds of legendary Chicago-based DJ Julius the Mad Thinker. Inside the club, the bass thumps hard and often – like the heartbeat of something that's truly bigger than all of us – and the bodies of the other patrons move close to one another, trying to generate more heat than the DJ is putting out. People from all walks of life fill the dance floor: black, white, Hispanic, Asian, straight, gay ... you name it, chances are you'll find it. I swim through this melting pot of culture to get closer to the speakers so I can absorb the rhythm that's driving everyone tonight: house music.
Yep, house -- that DJ-driven, electronic-flavored musical genre -- has a propensity to unify divergent people (like it's doing tonight), but it's also a polarizing force. Here in the Queen City, for example, the art form has split the populace into at least two groups: One that believes house is a dead sound and subculture, and another group that says it's alive and thriving in Crown Town and beyond.
But, for the uninitiated, what exactly is house music?
"House is a feeling," as more than one bumper sticker I've read suggests. "House, food, shelter, sex (and always in that order)" reads another. Perhaps it is, as a T-shirt I once saw implies "a spiritual thang." It has been known to flourish in larger cities, and was known as "gay dance music" from its inception up until a few years ago, when DJs across the nation started popping up like weeds and forcing the hetero public to take notice. Ultimately house is, for better or worse, a type of music that has been falsely accused, falsely oppressed, and suppressed.
When speaking of it sonically, an easy way to describe it would be an up-tempo version of 1970s-era disco, minus the cheese. On top of that, add deeper bass lines, even deeper bass drums, super-sized or sultry vocals, and, most importantly, the sexiest grooves this side of a good porno soundtrack; or it could be as sparse as a desert, with no vocals at all -- but the groove is sooooo deep you can drown in it. This is house, bitches. Rub the variances over your nipples, and love it.
That "boom-boom-boom" is the backbeat (or as some call it, "the foot") of all house music. A lot of the music is very spiritual, with producers layering gospel-type, "big-voiced" vocals (think Whitney Houston with more grit) over repetitive, but hard-hitting bass drums, acting as a lifeline to a higher power. "It's extremely spiritual. As a matter of fact, there was even a dance called the Holy Ghost," says local "house head" (and my fiancé) Michele Charlan. "House is love."
In Charlotte, the decidedly nonmainstream musical genre can be heard in heavy rotation at a small number of nightspots like Loft 1523 and HOM. The majority of local clubs, however, only play it in small doses -- if at all. It is, for all intents and purposes, a hate-it or love-it type of music that is known to clear dance floors. But a few soon-to-open establishments plan to take the risk and make house their club's predominant sound (more on those spots later).
The Past
You'd think trying to find the beginning of something that lives off spirit and love would be like trying to explain the beginning of mankind, but the music actually does have a tangible starting point. Rising from the ashes of the disco era, house music began surfacing in the late 1970s and early '80s. It only seems right that Chicago -- the city that killed disco -- would be the same city to give birth to disco's bastard cousin (house, that is). (In a truly bizarre incident at Chi-town's Comiskey Park one night, people were asked to bring their unwanted disco records to the game. A massive bonfire was started, the records were tossed in, and so was the death of disco.)
DJ Frankie Knuckles popularized the disco-with-less-music-and-more-bass sound at the legendary Chicago nightclub The Warehouse, even helping to give it a name. (His performances/mixes became so popular that the records he played were sold with a label that read: "As Heard at The Warehouse.") But it was another DJ that would help it develop its own sound. Where Knuckles played up the disco edge, Ron Hardy gave the music a more rhythmic flavor and, at the same time, created a connection with the people by breaking several local house artists. The Music Box -- the nightclub Hardy played -- was the spot where local artists could bring their tapes and have Hardy blend them into his legendary sets, helping house truly become a Chicago trademark. But for us Charlotteans, it was still an out-of-town thing.
Enter Andy Kastanas.
DJing professionally since 1980, Kastanas is probably the first ever Charlotte house music DJ with roots going all the way back to the celebrated club Park Elevator. "Park Elevator was really the turning point for me. We got to do a lot of experimental stuff that nobody was doing anywhere else, and people dug it. This was way back in 1987," he says. "There was no format, no genre [for the club]." Alternative dance music was truly alternative to what was out there. On any night you could jump around from a MC Lyte to Eric B. & Rakim to KMFDM to The Cure to The Cult. Ever since the late '80s, when the house movement really hit hard nationally, I was into it, being that my roots were in disco. The hard part was getting Charlotte into it.
"I talked to the owner of the club [Park Elevator] to start a house night," continues Kastanas, who also "moonlights" as a journalist, club owner and restaurateur. "Ten people showed up the first night. I asked the owner to give it a chance. The next week, 15 people came out, the next week we had 25 people show up. It took forever to get that thing going. We stuck with it, and about nine months to a year later, we were 500 to 600 people. And this was on a Thursday night!
"The biggest crowd of supporters at that time was a black, male, gay crowd. They're the ones that supported that genre more than anybody else. They got into it really big. They created the buzz, and then everybody else started peeking in to see what was going on. They were driving in from all over the state. I remember pulling into the club at, like, 9 p.m., and these guys were all in the parking lot, asleep in their cars because they had been driving for the past three hours. They were coming from Raleigh, Charleston, everywhere. They knew that Park Elevator was the only place nearby that you could hear this type of music. So that's pretty much how it all got started here in Charlotte."
Kastanas' efforts to launch house music in Charlotte were soon absorbed and picked up by other DJs, such as the popular local wax spinner Anthony "That Guy Smitty" Smith.
Smitty, a native Charlottean, got his baptism in house nearly 20 years ago. "I got my first taste of house music while I was in the Air Force in the late '80s. Right about that same time, Andy Kastanas, the Godfather of Charlotte DJs, was starting to drop house music at Park Elevator," says Smitty. "I was stationed in Charleston, S.C., so I was able to come home almost every weekend. I'd go to the Park Elevator and hear this really dope, soulful music. Come to find out, it was house music. And I've been hooked ever since."
Although he didn't start playing until the end of the '90s (complete with his first crate of records given to him by Kastanas), Smitty has maintained a residency at various clubs for the last 12 years. And throughout all the changes that Charlotte's dance scene has endured, he has remained true to the soulful sound of house. "The scene started out as house, then breaks got big, and that's all you ever heard in the clubs. If you were a house DJ, you couldn't beg, borrow, or steal a gig. Then breaks died out and people started playing what they called 'European' or 'intelligent' breaks. That went into trance, then 'progressive house' -- which is not house! People go out on these tangents, and they embrace things. And they try to bring in these new things, but it always comes back to the soul. It always comes back to the groove. It always comes back to house."
The Present
These days, Charlotte's house music scene is driven not only by early adopters like Kastanas and Smitty, but also by "newer" faces such as DJ Johnnie Davis, who spins regurlarly at HOM and Loft, and event promoters Jenn Hurst and a cat who likes to go only by the moniker D.T.
Hurst and D.T. are primarily recognized around town as the team responsible for bringing the aforementioned Julius the Mad Thinker to the Q.C. Julius made his debut in the Queen City in 2004 at Eden, after his sister, Hurst, had an epiphany. "When I came [to Charlotte] in 2004, there was a DJ [Kastanas] playing at Lava that was playing music that I could relate to. I remember calling my brother like, 'Oh my God! They're playing real house music down here!'
"So then I thought 'what if my brother played here?' I started talking to the manager [of Eden], telling him how great of a DJ my brother is, and that they should let him play there. I just really wanted him to play for a couple of hours, but the owner gave me the room for the evening! It was just thrown at me to do! I wasn't sure just what to do, but Julius literally guided me through the process, and the event was unbelievable. The amount of support we had, the people that came out ... so many people told me 'I've tried this before, it's not gonna happen.' But it was that negative energy that drove me to make it happen."
The "it" of which Hurst speaks would be the "Chicago-n-Charlotte" events that she, along with D.T. and her DJ brother, have managed to turn into celebrations for local house heads. D.T. and Hurst first met in 2004, when D.T. was trying (without much luck) to get the house movement off the ground here. "We started bringing Julius about every three months or so," he says, "trying to usher in a whole 'house music era' here in Charlotte." After the success of Chicago-n-Charlotte parties, D.T., through his own event company DT productions, went on to launch a number of house-related events at spots like SK Net Café and Prevue, among others. And the results have been more than favorable.
Despite all of the signs that point to Charlotte's budding house landscape, there is a contingent of local tastemakers who disagree with the notion. Journalist Tonya Jameson and concert promoter Michael Kitchen, who were both introduced to house in the 1980s, have varying opinions on why they feel house ain't hip here.
"I don't think its growing here; I actually do believe it's died," says Kitchen, who promotes shows primarily for soul and hip-hop acts like Jill Scott, Nas and John Legend, among others. "It's just like it used to be back in the day; it's real underground. And you do have a lot of underground heads who look for good music. But as far as here, in Charlotte ... it was real popular when [nightclubs like] Mythos opened. And Tonic helped house music sustain. But after Mythos changed over, and Tonic closed, it was a wrap."
Jameson, who used to write about nightlife for the Charlotte Observer, adds: "The other thing [that killed it] was the rave/dancehall ordinance of the 1990s [Which was a provision aimed at parties that featured electronic music and attracted scores of teenagers to crack down on illegal drug usage at these gatherings. The ordinance stated that club owners would need to apply for a permit to stay open after 2:30 a.m. Clubs admitting teenagers, in accordance with the ordinance, would need to close at 11 p.m. during the week and at midnight on the weekends.] When they cracked down on raves, a lot of promoters were wary about bringing that kind of attention to them. But I agree with Mike, I think that nationwide, house has died, been dying since the mid-'90s. Like, the late '80s early '90s was it's heyday, when everybody was playing house, and you'd go to the clubs, especially the gay clubs and that was all you heard. Now? Even most of the gay clubs play hip-hop."
Despite his pessimism for the scene in his city, Kitchen still has a passion and love for the music, "I love house music. House music is a release to me. The driving bass, the incredible drums -- how can you not like it?"
The Future
The future of city's house music scene most definitely lies in the hands of DJs -- such as all the guys previously mentioned in this article as well as cats like Badala B and DJ Technics -- and the entrepreneurs ballsy enough to introduce new house-centric nightclubs such as HOM (which has been open for business for several months now) and the soon-to-debut Garden and Gun Club and Soul Gastrolounge.
Smack dab in the middle of Uptown (116 W. 5th St.), HOM boasts two floors of pleasure for the house seekers. Upstairs is the larger room, known as Play, where the more well-known, international DJs are brought in, such as Julius the Mad Thinker, King Britt and DJ Heather, as well as our very own local heroes like Arthur Bros and many more. The restaurant Feast provides the buffer between the two house havens, so reaching the lower level, Liv, offers a bit of relief. Not only because you've reached the final floor, but because this where the true house heads gather. DJs such as Johnnie Davis, Badala, and yes, That Guy Smitty have been known to keep the crowd moving down there until 4 a.m. HOM has created quite a reputation as the place for all things house.
Soul, the brainchild of Kastanas, has all the pressure of being pointed to by tastemakers, DJ's, promoters, and house heads alike to be Charlotte's defining moment in the pro-house war. "Soul will be located in the old Perch space, right above Lotus on Central Avenue." Kastanas says. "It's gonna be a lounge. I'm also gonna do light food there. I love food and I love music, and I think it's [perfect] to integrate these two together to where they're on equal playing fields.
"I want people to relax and chill, and listen to the music," Kastanas continues, "and if you wanna dance, dance! If you wanna get a bite to eat, then eat! But people need to be there and hang around and feel comfortable. That's what I'm working on now. Hopefully it's gonna be the house music Mecca. It's all interactive. The DJ will be playing all throughout dining hours and everything. I wanted a place where everything was happening all at once. Music and food. You're having dinner ... what's wrong with listening to some good music? Hopefully that'll be a place a where some of the new guys can play, and every now and again, I can bring some of the bigger guys to come play. I want it to inspire and motivate others."
Where Soul will be open seven days a week for house heads to enjoy, the massive Garden and Gun Club will be open only three or four nights a week. And where Soul is a lounge, The Garden and Gun, scheduled to open towards the end of July in the growing N.C. Music Factory complex, is a bona fide nightclub. According to a recently distributed press release:
"The nightclub's focus will be squarely on progressive dance music and bringing the latest national and international sounds to the Queen City. The 12,000-square-foot venue will have a large dance floor, an impressive sound and lighting system, ample seating and an outdoor garden patio. The concept is comfortable and inviting and will feature art and cultural exhibitions as well."
Kastanas serves as to the club's creative consultant (it's owned by the Charlotte-based TwoDalGals LLC), and he also plans to get behind the turntables again on a regular basis "I'll be the Saturday night resident at Garden and Gun. It's just something I felt I wanted to do, to come back out and play music for people from all parts of life," he says. "It's black, it's white, it's straight, it's gay. It's all about everyone coming together and listening to real good music, the kind of music that needs to present in this city."
For a music that's based on love and freedom, it seems to be the right music at the right time for our city -- one that's welcoming newcomers from all over the world every day. If what we need is love, why not all love under the same roof and in the same "house"?
