(photo by Josh Sisk)
For the City Paper’s “Big Music Issue” this year, I did a piece on Baltimore’s house music history and what I’m seeing as a slow but steady resurgence in Baltimore at the same time that the radio and mainstream pop grows increasingly obsessed with a derivative of the genre. I spoke to veterans The Basement Boys and Ultra Naté and also, hybrid electro/club/house producer King Tutt about this. Also in the issue is a really awesome “making of a beat” comic strip and a piece by the dude Al Shipley about Baltimore’s Round Robin hip-hop event, which includes Kane Mayfield, of Mania Music Group, one of my favorite Baltimore emcees and someone I’ve covered on the blog a couple of times.
“I think the Black Eyed Peas really started this whole shit,” Teddy Douglas jokes, as he ponders radio’s renewed interest in four-on-the-floor dance. Jay Steinhour, Douglas’ more reserved friend and collaborator of 25 years, wryly grins. It’s a sunny but not too sunny Thursday in late June at a Mount Vernon café and the Basement Boys are talking house music: what it was, what it is, and if what’s popping off on the radio right now even qualifies.
Will.i.Am, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and, well, everybody else’s anthemic dance pop, however you want to label it, does at least have its roots in European dance, and that stuff most certainly stems from the house that came out of Chicago, New York, and other dance-music hubs, including Baltimore…
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