DJ Sprinkles - Midtown 120 Blues

2/15/2018

Midtown 120 Blues is a seminal Deep House album, and is comprised mostly of delightful long-form warehouse excursions. It's also a forthrightly political work, and on two occasions features voiceovers in which the album's context is set. Given the content, it'd be a bit tone-deaf to excerpt them, and so here they are.

From Midtown 120 Intro

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

There must be a hundred records with voiceovers 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 dance floor 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, Lower East Side, West Village, Brooklyn - places that conjure specific beats and sounds. As for the sounds of New York dance floors themselves, today's house classics might have gotten worked into a set once in a while, but the majority of music at every club was major label vocal shit. I don't care what anybody tells you. Besides, New York Deep House may have started out as minimal, mid-tempo instrumentals, but when distributors began demanding easy selling vocal tracks, even the label Strictly Rhythm betrayed the promise of its own name by churning out strictly vocal after strictly vocal.

Most Europeans still think Deep House means shitty, high energy vocal house.

So what was the New York house sound? House wasn't so much a sound as a situation. The majority of DJ's - DJ's like myself - were nobodies in nowhere clubs: unheard and unpaid. In the words of Sylvester: reality was less everybody is a star, and more I who have nothing.

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, Thompkins Sq. Park, police brutality, queer-bashing, underpayment, unemployment and censorship - all at 120 beats per minute.

These are the Midtown 120 Blues.

From Ball'r (Madonna-Free Zone)

When Madonna came out with her hit Vogue you knew it was over. She had taken a very specifically queer, transgendered, Latino and African-American phenomenon and totally erased that context with her lyrics, It makes no difference if you're black or white, if you're a boy or a girl. Madonna was taking in tons of money, while the Queen who actually taught her how to vogue sat before me in the club, strung out, depressed and broke. So if anybody requested Vogue or any other Madonna track, I told them, No, this is a Madonna-free zone! And as long as I'm DJ-ing, you will not be allowed to vogue to the decontextualized, reified, corporatized, liberalized, neutralized, asexualized, re-genderized pop reflection of this dance floor's reality!

For a couple years now, there's been a lot of talk about experimental club music - largely unlistenable music carrying an immense amount of theoretical or contextual baggage that attempts to salvage its claim of common appeal by pinning itself to the club. It's one of the century's more unfortunate musical developments. Politics and music are of course not incompatible, but the former should not ground the latter - that is, it's pretty fucked up to hijack the music and culture of one community to mount an argument regarding another altogether (not least because this is usually done to great critical acclaim). Midtown 120 Blues is the rare example of doing this well, equal parts jam and firsthand historical document of a set of political concerns that are insisted upon but not exclusionary.

Additionally, this absolutely goes.

Highlights: Brenda's $20 Dilemma, Sisters, I Don't Know What This World Is Coming To, Grand Central, Pt. II (72 Hrs. by Rail from Missouri)