Ahead of its UK premiere at Sheffield DocFest this week, Daniel Dylan Wray speaks to house pioneer Vince Lawrence and filmmaker Elegance Bratton about Move Ya Body: The Birth of House, a new documentary that mixes archival footage, original interviews and dramatic reconstruction to illuminate the Black and queer origins of this music we love so much. From the infamous Disco Demolition Night of 1979 to the gay clubs of Chicago’s South Side and beyond, it’s a story that celebrates house music’s originators, and is a living testament to the power of resistance through joy.
On 12th July 1979, 50,000 people descended on Comiskey Park in Chicago for a baseball game that ended in a riot. Fires burned, a sea of fans rushed the field, and riot police stormed in to contain the chaos. All the while, thousands of records sat in a giant heap, melted and burnt.
A local radio DJ, Steve Dahl – a man with an intense disdain for disco music who was known for his shock jock tactics like blowing up Sister Sledge records live on air – had encouraged people to come down for Disco Demolition Night, a communal destruction of disco records that would take place on the field in between a doubleheader of games. Entry was just 98c if you came with vinyl to burn. However, when the wax in people’s hands proved to not just be disco but also funk, soul and R&B, it became clear that what was manifesting was not just a rockers revolt against a particular style, but an intentional destruction of Black music. “We thought it was just going to be another baseball game,” says Vince Lawrence, who was a teenager working as an usher at the stadium at the time. “I had no idea that it was going to turn the way it did.”
On his way home, having to walk through unsafe neighbourhoods due to the disorder around the stadium, Lawrence was singled out by a group and violently assaulted. “Up until that point, I really didn’t believe in racism,” he reflects. “Racism was like folklore that your grandparents told you about to make you get inside before the streetlights came on. So to suddenly see people identifying me negatively over music… We didn’t feel safe.”
At the time, Lawrence was an aspiring musician who had been saving up for a synthesiser. When he received some settlement money from his assault, he was finally able to get one. He soon formed his own teenage band, Z Factor, who are pictured above. Before long, that very instrument had set him on a course to creating what is frequently credited as the first ever house record: 1984’s ‘On & On’, a track he made in collaboration with Jesse Saunders.
Produced by Chester Algernal Gordon, Move Ya Body is a powerful and genuinely original work that joins classic documentaries such as Pump Up The Volume and What Is House? in its illumination of the genre’s origin story. But Bratton’s film goes even deeper into the significance of Chicago itself, thoroughly contextualising the place and how it contributed to the birth of house music. From its heavily segregated neighbourhoods and anti-disco movements, through rising gang warfare, powder keg-like tensions, and the queer-friendly nightclubs that sprung up as a refuge from much of that, it paints a picture of a city and its people as catalyst for a musical movement.
