The 10 best Chicago House tracks of all time
Chicago House
Where house music was invented: drum machines, disco records cut up on cheap gear, and a gospel sense of release, made on Chicago's South Side after disco was declared dead everywhere else.
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Mr. Fingers / Can You Feel It
Larry Heard played chords where everyone else played drums, and house acquired a soul in the same instant. Four minutes that the next forty years of dance music are still unpacking.
Frankie Knuckles & Jamie Principle / Your Love
A synth arpeggio, a bassline and a whispered vocal. The Godfather of House proved the form needed almost nothing, provided what was there was perfect.
Marshall Jefferson / Move Your Body
Subtitled "The House Music Anthem" and entirely justified in it. Jefferson put a piano on a house record when that was heresy, and the piano house lineage runs unbroken from here.
Steve "Silk" Hurley / Jack Your Body
The first house record to top the UK singles chart, which is how most of Britain found out this music existed at all. Stripped, mechanical, relentless.
Adonis / No Way Back
The bassline is the whole record and it is one of the best ever committed to vinyl. Menacing where most Chicago house was euphoric, and a direct ancestor of techno's darker side.
Lil Louis / French Kiss
The tempo drops to a near-halt in the middle and then climbs back. A structural gimmick that should not work, executed so confidently it became one of house music's defining moments.
Mr. Fingers / Mystery of Love
Deep house before the phrase existed. Heard's chord voicings are jazz musician's choices played on pawn-shop equipment, and the melancholy is entirely deliberate.
Fingers Inc. / Bring Down the Walls
Robert Owens sings it like a sermon, because it more or less is one. The clearest evidence that house came out of the church as much as the discotheque.
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Ten City / That's the Way Love Is
House as fully arranged soul music, with strings and a real vocal performance. The bridge to the garage and vocal-house traditions that followed on both sides of the Atlantic.
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