Going Out: August 2025
Hello! I’m back again in your inboxes to discuss what I spent an afternoon and evening doing this past Saturday. I’m still watching my finances (although I’ve already splurged on a ticket for September’s entry; no spoilers), so when I saw in a piece of promo served up to my work email that Millennium Park was hosting a free day called the Chicago House Music Festival I knew that would be my day out this month.
Although I might still check out the Chicago Jazz Festival at the same venue next month, despite not really being familiar with any of the featured acts, if only because I’ve gotten into the habit of attending every so often with my friend Josh. Jazz — at least the post-Forties vision of jazz as a performance-forward (rather than a dance-forward) music for adults to thoughtfully appreciate — makes sense at the Pritzker Pavilion, a Frank Gehry cavern of swooping metal with plenty of plastic theater seating up front and a long speaker-fed lawn for picnicking behind, in a way that club music, despite its now-venerable history, doesn’t quite, not entirely, yet.
It was that tension between venue and sound that was my primary aesthetic experience as I circled the pavilion multiple times — trying to get my steps in as much as I was trying to keep in the shade, find a place to sit, or eventually get rehydrated, while old-school house thumped joyously from the speakers suspended over the crowded lawn. Normally at the Jazz Festival (and at the Joe Bataan/Novos Baianos show I wrote about last month), I snag a spot in the stadium seating and remain seated unless otherwise moved; when I arrived at the Pavilion around 4:30 (just as the Burna Boy remix of “Jerusalema,” a 2020 South African house song, ended Boolumaster’s set), the lawn was already full of middle-aged Chicagoans of every ethnicity and just as notably their children, and it became immediately obvious that people-watching would be more interesting, and maybe more valuable to me, than sitting with furrowed-brow concentration watching a DJ tweak knobs and press buttons.
I should probably take a graf or two to note that I have very little expertise on house music, either as a historical practice or as a living art. When I first started getting into music in the late 90s and early 2000s, electronic dance music’s history was not readily available in venues I was aware of, my fascination with pop-music history tapered off just about when it got rolling in the mid-1980s anyway, and then by the time I started to engage seriously with modern (that is, post-hip-hop) music in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I was too besotted with the present to do more than cursory backtracking. I have never spent even a single night in sweaty, communally transcendent ecstasy losing myself on the dancefloor to shattering bass thumps and soaring vocals; and even when house was at its peak of commercial prominence in the 90s, I was an over-intellectualizing teenager in a missionary school, as alienated from my body as any white bourgeois throughout history has ever been.
But I immediately understood the atmosphere on the lawn at the Pritzker Pavilion anyway, because this was not a club — an enclosed, private space where the secret selves that working-class queer black and brown youth have to hide from the rest of the world can be let out for a glorious evening of overwhelming sensory experience — but something more like the church events I had known growing up, where individual household fiefdoms came together in ostensible public celebration of a uniting sacredness which was theoretically the ruling passion of every individual life; but in reality each blanket remained a microcosm as concerned with socializing and keeping themselves entertained throughout as with engaging in the sacred mysteries. Young children threw balls back and forth with caregivers, grandparents sat on benches and nodded, teenagers huddled in conspiratorial groups, aging childfree couples lay on picnic blankets making out; but every now and then the sea of seated humanity was punctuated by one or two brave figures, generally women in their forties or fifties, moved by the spirit to dance.
House music as church — the ecstasy and unity of a church service constructed to take you out of your body and into the infinite as imagined by numberless artisans — is an old metaphor, but house music as the pleasantly humdrum experience of a church picnic or church social was new to me, no doubt as much a product of my limited frame of reference as anything else. I pulled out my phone and told Bluesky that on a long enough timescale everything is church, not intending to explain myself until this newsletter.
The mood was so laid-back, so anonymous, that at one point I felt free enough of judgment to pull my Kindle out of my bag to do some reading on a subject I’ll be covering on Just One Song More — and after a few minutes’ reading experienced a kind of historical vertigo, as my reading about Black show business experience in the early twentieth century was suddenly soundtracked not only by the thumping beats and ecstatic piano of house but suddenly by a grainy 78rpm clarinet figure, repeated.
It was Cajmere’s Underground Goodies remix of Dajaé’s “U Got Me Up” (1993), a fact I only learned through Shazam (I told you I was not an expert), which samples a fragment of Benny Goodman’s solo from the 1930 Victor recording of “Barnacle Bill the Sailor” by Hoagy Carmichael and his Orchestra — which, again, I only learned through Whosampled, the second time I heard it played over the course of the afternoon. An obvious move for both DJs, perhaps, as the association of the Pritzker Pavilion with jazz performance would hardly have been exclusive to me, and drawing connections between the long history of Black music (despite the fact that everyone contributing to that 1930 Hoagy Carmichael session was white, they were absolutely playing Black music) and the relentless rhythm of house was no doubt on the minds of the DJs who had been invited to perform at the venue that had been termed the Legacy Stage of the festival.
Because there were three other stages throughout the park where DJs were spinning over the course of the evening. I only experienced two of them briefly in my wanderings, but the Soulful House Stage on the North Promenade seemed to be much more modern and intense than the feel-good oldies being blasted out on the pavilion lawn, and the Chicago House Stage on the South Promenade seemed to be oriented more around high-energy rave. There were more young people at both stages than at the Pavilion, which trended much more middle-aged — gray hair was everywhere on the lawn, including on my own head — although there were always plenty of people of every age everywhere. (In what struck me as a particularly churchy moment, a nine-year-old in Bantu knots was showing her three-year-old sibling how to dance in the aisle of Soulful House tent.)
Given my historically-minded predilections, it’s unsurprising that I gravitated toward the Pritzker Pavilion lawn. I may not have known most of the music being played (save on the occasions when snippets of Michael Jackson songs showed up in the mix; the makossa chant from “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” kicked off one set, and a remix of the title track from Off the Wall kicked off the final one), but I recognized its vintage, and I am no more proof against the temptations of secondhand nostalgia than I am of my own. In fact probably less; I view my own nostalgia with a lot of skepticism, and am harsh on my limited range of experience, access, and understanding, while the youthful experiences of strangers, being not me, can be safely idealized.
I even, at one point, felt comfortable enough to lie down on the grass entirely and stare up at the blue sky and scudding clouds. Letting the blood go to my head, the edges of my face feeling a novel pull from gravity after having gone years without lying down flat on anything — always a pillow or cushion or something propping up my head — I came the closest I would all day to chemical alteration. DJ Tyree Cooper was playing a house remix of a classic disco-era song I didn’t recognize, and gradually slowed the tempo and crossfaded until the original played unremixed, a loping shot of buttery soul for a verse and a chorus before the tempo moved back up. The clouds were different each time I looked at them, patterns incomprehensible. People laughed, shouted, wheeled strollers and bicycles by, talked about haircuts and investments and kids and memories. The music ebbed and flowed like the tides. The shadows of Loop skyscrapers lengthened across the lawn.
The final DJ of the night was Ralphi Rosario, one of the radio DJs who first started playing what eventually became house in the early 1980s, and whose mixes and originals have been a consistent presence on Chicago airwaves for forty years (I learned from Wikipedia on my battery-dwindling phone as his set began). Night had fallen, temperatures were cool, variously-scented smoke wafted over the lawn from hundreds of lit ends. I made my way down to the stadium seating — the back rows were largely empty, although the front was crowded with people on their feet, dancing. Rosario’s set told a story over the course of an hour, starting with “Off the Wall,” moving on to his own signature hit “You Used to Hold Me”, and incorporating snippets of dozens if not hundreds of different songs in both English and Spanish, only a few of which I recognized — Shazam mostly gave up, as he was mixing live to his own beats, not playing individual records — although Marshall Jefferson’s “Move Your Body” and Frankie Knuckles’ “Baby Wants to Ride” were obvious enough even to me. Roving cameras caught people dancing in the front rows and projected them on the screen behind Rosario, interspersed with his own promotional video snippets, a wide cross-section of Chicago-area humanity. Beefy red-faced suburbanite men in White Sox merch pumping their fists, elegant middle-aged Black women twerking in casual clothes, young women who got self-conscious when they appeared on screen, young women who smiled even brighter and danced more assuredly when they appeared on screen, young women who danced up on each other in a self-conscious display of casual queerness, middle-aged brown men in dapperly loose clothing who took their footwork very seriously and received rapturous applause, a young Black girl no older than seven whose head-down commitment to dancing after a moment of hesitation once she saw herself on the screen triggered the most sustained roar from the crowd….
Toward the end of the set, I stood, not quite dancing (I am still alienated from my body) but not content to sit still either. I couldn’t tell you what was playing, but the mood — my mood — was euphoric regardless. Being okay with not knowing is maybe the hardest thing for me, maybe the reason above all others I haven’t poured myself into “getting” house and its tangled web of associated genres with the same comprehensive fervor I’ve dedicated to so many other branches of music, because the ground is constantly shifting, unstable, requires you to be in the moment, get lost in the sound, and not constantly be asking what’s playing, where it fits into the history of the genre, what’s being communicated. If you know, you know — and of course tools like Shazam, Whosampled, and even Wikipedia these days can get you far closer to knowing than anything that was available to me when I was a young music obsessive, but knowing is no substitute for being.
I’ve tried to be both truthful and informative here, but to be honest I’d rather read what people who know what they’re talking about would have to say about the event, people like Britt or Matos, who would be able to place everything they heard and saw within a context greater than anything I could bring to bear. I’m almost positive I had one of the lamest, dorkiest experiences it was possible to have at the park on Saturday, and while I’m okay with that — I have come to terms with my lameness and dorkiness, and managed to have a handful of near-transcendent experiences anyway — a report from a non-outsider would be vastly more interesting to me.
But of course, I’ve already experienced my own experience and I read to experience others’. The hope that anyone reading this is interested in doing the same is the only reason I’m publishing it at all.