The Waxonia Desk on Chicago House
Six records from the Chicago rooms themselves rather than from the documentary about them. Two of them are not house at all, which is the point: what a room plays and what a genre is later said to be are different lists.
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Mr. Fingers / Can You Feel It
The record most often used to explain house to people who were not there. What it did in a room and what it does in a documentary are two different things, and the room came first.
Frankie Knuckles & Jamie Principle / Your Love
It circulated on tape for years before anybody pressed it. A city's music is a strange object when its most famous song exists first as a cassette somebody made you a copy of.
Marshall Jefferson / Move Your Body
Subtitled the house music anthem, and it earned the definite article. The piano is the argument: it opened the music to people who needed a tune to hold, and began the long business of making house respectable.
Fingers Inc. / Bring Down the Walls
Robert Owens singing gospel phrasing over a drum machine, in rooms most churches would not have admitted the congregation to. That tension is the whole record and nobody has resolved it since.
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Strafe / Set It Off
A New York electro record that Chicago played as house. The line people draw between the two genres was not visible from inside the booth, and this is the record that proves it.
Loose Joints / Is It All Over My Face
Larry Levan's mix, and the disco record that sounds most like what came after it. Chicago inherited more from New York than the city's own mythology tends to admit.