If you see anything published by the previous reviwer who dismisses this becuase he doesn't like it; don't bother reading it. You can't produce the history of something only from the bits of it you like. That's like missing out on the big bang when writing about the historty of the universe.This early Chicago house was the start of a collosal movement that went worldwide and is still around twenty years later (at time of writing).
Sure it sounds dated now, but in the clubs in the late eighties (not early nineties that scarygeorge says) this was tremendously ground breaking and we danced our shoes off to this stuff. From hearing the first Jack Your Body and Love Can't Turn Around many of us were in the record shops on Saturdays buying up all this stuff week in week out.
I've got all the tracks from this album from origianls in the eighties.
It's all home grown black Chicago house and is pure.
(The only track that doesn't belong is "Pump up London" as this was Acid House but still produced by Mr Lee a Chicago House founder.) If I were on a desert island I might take Ralphi Rosario featuring Xavier Gold's U Used to Hold Me...absolutely fantastic soul lifting spine tingling track.
Anyway listen to this as a sample or a document of what spawned EVERY western non hip hop dance genre since.
I have the box set of this era from London Records series "House Sound of Chicago" label and it has 12 albums of this stuff - the amount of music being produced in Chicago at the time was prolific.
These are just a few of the big hits that made it big at the time. A pity there aren't more comprehensive and definitive catalogues of this retrospective stuff.
If you want a book that tells you a little about this time in music history you can start with the Channel 4 book Pump Up the Volume but there's only a couple of chapters about this era but it does tell the story of the history and proliferation of house with a UK bias up to the early 2000s. I'm looking for more detail of the Chicago House era as it's without doubt the very most important phase in the history of House and dance music.
