Trax Records: The 20th Anniversary Collection (Casablanca Trax)
This bizarre belated outpouring of official recognition is thankfully irrelevant. Frankie Knuckles hardly had to wait around for Chicago to acknowledge his enormous influence on the world of dance music. When Knuckles moved to town in 1977, he set up the Warehouse, which would become the most important dance club in Chicago history. His residency there, along with DJ Ron Hardy’s sets at the Music Box and the Hot Mix 5 radio shows on WBMX, shaped the mid-80s postdisco dance style that took its name from Knuckles’s roost: house. Once house reached Europe–where people cottoned onto it big-time, thanks in large part to the popularization of the drug ecstasy–rave culture was born. House’s impact on today’s pop is as undeniable as that of hip-hop (if nowhere near as thorough), and the genre is the foundation for almost all modern club music.
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Even though the best house is now being made elsewhere, Chicago holds a permanent place in the imagination of nightlife denizens as the genre’s ground zero–for a whole lot of people, particularly in Europe and Japan, Chicago equals house. And just like modern-day rappers from New York’s boroughs, Chicago’s DJs and producers have a leg up in the credibility department because they were born and raised alongside the music they make.
One thing the two labels shared was a reputation for cheapness. Jones bragged to Barry Walters in a 1987 Spin article that DJ International’s 12-inch singles cost an average of $3,000 to record, even pointing out that one was made for $50. (The $50 wonder was Tyree’s “I Fear the Night,” and it sounds it.) Trax was groundbreaking in part because of this cheapness. The barely decorated beats, amateurish vocals, and thunking bass lines all over 20th Anniversary Collection and Acid Classics bear the same resemblance to classic disco as a Roger Corman B movie does to a classic Universal horror film from the 30s. By tearing disco down to a rude skeleton, completely redefining its aesthetic values, Trax helped transform it into the most popular DIY music on the planet.
Appropriately, the vintage Trax sound most directly emulated by current practitioners is the label’s most distinctively alien. That sound–enshrined on Acid Classics, whose tracks date from ’86 to ’94–comes from a manipulated Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer, an instrument originally designed to repeat a programmed bass line for the benefit of a rehearsing drummer or guitarist. Since the machine’s keyboard was only a single octave, there were also several knobs for adjusting the bass line’s pitch–and a manhandled 303 can produce some of the most unearthly squelch imaginable.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Jim Newberry, Marty Perez.
