Terre 
Thaemlitz

Published in The Wire

Dance music often enters the mainstream from the margins of society, whether that was jazz or house, disco or rock and roll, and as it came at mainstream from the margins, it's carried the history of the people who made it with it. It's for this reason that, at its best, most potent, dance music's energy and utopian dreamings have felt like they could've changed the world.

Most dance music begins as outsider music for outsiders, ignored first, then denounced as a black market leisure activity for drug takers and sexual deviants, and finally accepted, then co-opted. The fact that the musical styles of these marginal groups could then make it big is challenging and transgressive; few things like dance music have come so resolutely from the outskirts of society yet been so primed for mass consumption. That tension has led to much battling for the "soul of dance music". It's somewhat exacerbated by the fact that dancefloors are places where politics are implicit rather than explicit, all action no theory, or at least except for the bleary eyed one love kind of theory that you spout at five in the morning as the sun comes up. It's a manifesto-less, bottom up politics that worships the utopian mob rule of a dancing crowd.

Few of dance music's voices are as resolutely involved in its politics and history as Terre Thaemlitz, who under a raft of different aliases has spent a career probing and questioning the ethics, as well as the aesthetics, of the house sound. In a career spanning 30 years he's gone from resident DJ of New York's tranny bars and drag clubs, to experimental composer, to dancefloor filler and one of the best DJs on the circuit. But behind everything has been a fierce independent voice, ready to speak about the complexities and contradictions that surround the changing world of dance music.

"When I moved from the Midwest to NYC in 86," Terre Thaemlitz explains from his (their pronouns are flexible) current home in Japan, "The links between house music, queerness, and people of colour were undeniable in ways other than hostility. They were ‘safe spaces’, club's had names like The Shelter."

This is the time and sound he pays homage to in his most well known album, Midtown 120 Blues, a tribute to the musical history of New York's deep house sound and nightlife, but also the marginal lives of the people involved in it. The album opens with Terre speaking… "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." It could serve as entry point to his whole career, an entry point for a forgotten, whitewashed history of house in an age of shufflers, homogenous Beatport charts, beatmatching CDJs and secret Hackney Wick "warehouse" parties.

In 86 when Terre arrived in New York, disco was dying and the new house sound being picked up across New York's gay underground. Terre was beginning his career as a DJ at a drag bar called Sally's II, in New York's Time Square, where he was the resident DJ for two years in the early 90s (earning $10 an hour), before being fired for not playing major label tracks that the rich john's wanted to hear. It was only after getting fired that Terre turned away from just DJing to producing tracks himself.

Midtown and Times Square was the centre of New York's Ball Culture and drag scene at the time, its soundtrack was the deep house tracks Terre was spinning under his alias DJ Sprinkles. At the time Terre was DJing, it was a scene that was being decimated by AIDS, drug addiction, poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, and later the Disney-fication of New York, quite literally, when the corporation bought out Times Square in 1997 and Sally's was moved on.

"The music itself, well, it is never just one thing in and of itself, transcendent of context," Terre says of house music's turn to the mainstream, of its appropriation in Madonna's Vogue, "For example how many chic lounges are there in London playing reggae music to rich, white socialites? Meanwhile, Sally, owner of Sally's II and Mother of the House of Magic, did drag shows lip-syncing to Barry Manilow tunes. You can never count on a sound retaining a fixed meaning or function. It's all about the power dynamics of contexualisation and recontextualisation."
It's this contextualisation and recontextualisation that has allowed dance music to live beyond the immediate, hyper-specific surroundings that it was born out of to find root in myriad global scenes; from Chicago and Detroit, to Baltimore, Brooklyn, New York, London, Frankfurt, Berlin… To transcend beyond those queer roots into music that is at home providing an inoffensive soundtrack to the global yuppie bar scene as it is party music for everyone who wants to lose themselves in 4/4 beats for an evening.

Terre's message, musical philosophy, though, is that you can never lose yourself, that house was never an escape from suffering, because its original DJs and producers and dancers, brought their suffering into the clubs with them. For all the promise and platitude spouted in house music's vocals, it was always more wishful thinking than wish fulfilment.

Before house clubs like The Paradise Garage, it was disco that had been a haven for New York's gay community. In the private parties of David Mancuso's invite only club The Loft they found a space, a hidden domain, that promised freedom of expression and lifestyle. "I honestly can't imagine a time or place where race and sexuality were not apparent," explains Terre, "because those were often the targets of hostility from dominant, heteronormative, white culture. Dance music and disco were constantly framed in racist and homophobic terms." Terre recounts a famous anecdote on 120 Midtown Blues where he wasn't allowed into Mancuso's Loft, even whilst Mancuso was playing one of his tracks. Much of the context that Terre provides to illustrate his ideas and aesthetics on Midtown 120 Blues comes from short, spoken word segments interjected in the beginning and ends of the tracks. It's something else he's done on his other work, setting a Tony Benn speech on class equality to a house beat on a 12".

"There were much more specific relationships between the make up of club goers and the aural direction of the records played in those different physical spaces," he explains, "The house collections were built up through the years, around specific forms of sexual cruising. In this age of portable DJs, I think it is hard for someone in their twenties to imagine this kind of time-fostered link between sites and soundscapes. As I said, that is a big cultural shift, and although it goes largely unspoken I believe it frames all of these contemporary discussions."

The age of the portable DJ might stand as the epitaph on current dance music culture, which cannibalised itself to get Big In America in the sexless, hyper-aggressive form of EDM. It's harder and harder to find those sites of resistance that defined house music's early days in Chicago, Detroit, New York and London; especially in a London that's cannibalising itself even quicker than dance music.

"Sure, this commercialisation happened with the blues, folk, country, jazz, rock, disco, punk, etc. We have plenty of historical reference points for understanding these processes of commodification, and the production of mass culture. This is nothing new, in relation to issues of queerness as well as race. So you'd think the discussion would be quite evolved and intricate by this day and age, but... of course not. This is all part of larger, on going cultural problems."



Yet, instead of lamenting the death through mythologising a house music golden age, Terre's productions, ideas and DJ sets relentlessly examine what makes up those mythologies; for every dance music purist, there's someone purer, for everyone operating on the margins there's someone operating on the margins of those margins. Mythologies are never stable, especially when we're discussing the mythologies of those whose culture was erased in equal parts by AIDS, Madonna and Disney.

"It depends on whether your mythology is romantic or cynical or nihilistic or pragmatic or materialist or spiritual or... Of course, I work very hard at constructing socio-materialist mythologies and alternate histories that speak of the refusal to lose sight of suffering and closets. And, yes, this means being critical of romanticism - including the cheery optimism of dominant LGBT Pride[TM]. The difficulty is that much of the language of dance music is obsessed with romanticism, transcendentalism, fantasy, escape... This presents a contradiction that is difficult for most to overcome.

"You have to go into these discussions with an acceptance that one is speaking from the fringes of a fringe. For me, this means adapting a model of audience that is small, specific, and clued in not because of some divine wisdom, but because of experiences of harassment, violence, discrimination... This contradicts one of the fundamental hypes of dance music's universality.

"Clearly there is little room for optimism in my world view, but that's a whole other story. And I don't really care about dance music in and of itself. I mean, for a long time various forms of dance music have served as soundtracks to particular spaces that I did care about because those spaces were connected to self-organisation amidst poverty, racial bigotry, gender crises, sexual discrimination, rampant HIV, etc. But it is the organisation of people, and not the organisation of sounds, that resonates deepest for me.

"If one wishes to map trajectories of queerness, I think it is better to frame media such as music in relation to the actions and movements of people, rather than hoping to find "truth" or "understanding" within the representational sounds we generate... because so much of queerness - as it relates to experience - is about things which remain invisible and unheard. And that automatically makes any sonic legacy’ incomplete. Understanding that has to be a starting point for any discussion. Especially if dominant culture is so hellbent on framing music as a trustworthy and accurate lens into the minds of others. What a ruse."

“How
many chic lounges are there in London playing reggae music to rich, white socialites? Meanwhile Sally, owner of Sally's II and Mother of the House of Magic, did drag shows lip-syncing to Barry Manilow tunes. You can never count on a sound retaining a fixed meaning or function. It's all about the power dynamics of context  and recontextualisation.”