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- Music, Music Feature Oct 26, 2020
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Remembering Benji Espinoza, champion of Chicago house music
His work for Quantum Distributors and the D.J. International label helped boost house into its exalted place in the global pop pantheon.
- Music, Music Feature Jun 9, 2020
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Vince Lawrence’s greatest moment in Chicago music history
The house-music pioneer remembers the huge scene-defining parties he helped throw as a teenager.
- Music, Music Feature Nov 20, 2019
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Life was just a party: Prince’s 1999 and Chicago house music
The Purple One could hardly have avoided influencing a genre whose earliest, most ardent fans were queer Black and Brown kids.
- Music, Music Feature May 21, 2019
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Plugging into Chicago’s forgotten house venues
For decades, house music has shaped pop worldwide—but many of the spaces that birthed it here disappeared so quickly they barely left a trace.
- Music, Music Feature Feb 28, 2019
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A tour of FeelTrip’s brand-new record store, No Requests
The multimedia collective has a record label, a dance night, an apparel line—and now a brick-and-mortar shop.
- Music, Music Feature Feb 28, 2019
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Marcus Mixx has lost his home, but he still has house
While his early records fetch hundreds of dollars apiece from a cult of collectors, he just wants a space of his own to make his new tracks.
- Blogs, Bleader Mar 18, 2017
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Cowboy poetry, the decline of the critic, Lil Wayne’s boring prison memoir, and more: the week in music writing
The Reader collects some of the best and brightest bits from the past week's music writing.
- Blogs, Bleader May 5, 2015
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How Merle's 2000 EP became a cult house hit
Chicago dance label Stripped & Chewed reissue the underground record from house veteran Merwyn Sanders this month.
- Music, Music Feature Apr 29, 2015
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How the USA fell for EDM, chapter one
In these excerpts from his lively and meticulous new book, The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America, longtime Reader contributor Michaelangelo Matos chronicles the three-decade ascent of EDM.
- Blogs, Bleader Mar 31, 2015
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Decades later, Steve Poindexter's raw house 12-inch Street Fighter is finally released
Recorded in the 90s with Johnny Key and Track Master Scott, Street Fighter showcases the raw underground Chicago sound in fine form.
- Music, Music Feature May 23, 2013
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The return of Dance Mania Records
Twelve years after it folded, the Chicago label that helped birth ghetto house, juke, and footwork music makes a play for the new EDM crowd.
