Stolen Sounds: Tyree Cooper on House Music and Racial Politics

FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Stolen Sounds: Tyree Cooper on House Music and Racial Politics

A Chicago original opens up about inequality

Tyree Cooper doesn't fuck about. Then again, if you were as important a figure in the history of house music, if you'd released tracks as eternal as "Nuthin Wrong" and "Acid Over" why would you?

Cooper ditched the Windy City at the turn of the century, swapping the authentic home of house for the adopted house of techno, Berlin. His arrival in the city predated the boom in the producer-population by a good few years. "I've been here since before it was cool," he tells me. As hard as it is to believe in the post-Berghain world where Ben Klock posters adorn bedrooms from Albania to Zambia, the German city wasn't always a hotbed of electronic exploration. "It was really dead in Berlin around 2003, 2004. When I say dead, I mean it. Nothing happened. 2006, it started bubbling up. By 2008 it was there. By 2009 I was in America or London and people just wanted to talk about Berlin. I was in Israel and these Hebrew cats told me they wanted to move to Berlin. I was like, 'Really?' Shit just started happening."

Advertisement

It wasn't just the geographical make-up of the population that was altering year by year. "I watched it change from hardcore techno and drum and bass with very little house, to hardcore techno with a bit of hip-hop, some drum and bass and a little house, to all hip-hop, no techno, no house - electro was the thing." Now, he thinks, it is house and techno that dominate the city. We'll get back to Berlin, but for now our attention focuses in on the city that started it all: Chicago.

House music is a narrative of American exceptionalism and some of the most exceptional American house music was released by Tyree Cooper on Ray Barney's Dance Mania records. The label is known for it's fast-paced, sexually explicit take on the classic bump of Chicago's 4/4 scene. Cooper's releases for the imprint are a pivotal part of Dance Mania history and he's justifiably proud of his involvement in it. "The music from Dance Mania represented the youth of that time: young black youth. Everything in the mid-90s was fucking fast. The young kids in the hood were dancing fast so the music had to be fast. So Deeon, Milton, Funk, these guys sped it up and made tracks. The tracks represented the dances people would do at parties. You put that shit together it seems like you've got real, raw, hardcore energy that no one's really ready for. Dance Mania was so raw because the kids were…you can find them playing in a cafeteria somewhere, 200 kids in a cafeteria just getting it in. That was what it was about, reflecting that dance culture. Sluggo, Deeon, Waxmaster, they put down some real, real good music. The kids were just in it."

Advertisement

A Dance Mania revival is now in full flow, and next week sees Cooper heading to Fabric for a night that celebrates the label, playing alongside DM mainstay Paris Mitchell. The fast thuds, choppy percussion and see-sawing vocal snatches that form the basis of their sonic aesthetic have become pivotal for contemporary club music. When asked why everyone and their mum is suddenly playing DJ Funk records out, Cooper immediately homes in on home turf. "I think it's again another part of Chicago, another page of Chicago, where there's raw energy. This is the home of house. if you want house you've got to go to Chicago for it. When people want that raw Chicago house they know where to look."

For the past fifteen years, Cooper has been looking at it through displaced eyes, eyes that have seen house and techno's dislocation and relocation, from Chicago and Detroit to Berlin.

The information exchange between the two countries, the way an imported product is repackaged and sold back to the original source, is of great interest to him. As our conversation progresses it becomes apparent that Cooper isn't content to think of house as a purely functional medium that exists only to get people dancing. The relationship between house music and race is, to him, indicative of the way American audiences find African-American artforms unpalatable in their original form.

Cooper and his Chicagoan contemporaries, the Marshall Jeffersons, the Jesse Saunders', the Farley "Jackmaster" Funks, never expected house music to blow up the way it did. "How could you? My whole world was in Chicago. It went from playing parties downtown to somebody telling you: 'Yo, they're playing your record overseas.' How was that possible?" The answer to that, sadly, was the same as it had been for jazz, for rock'n'roll, the same as it had been throughout the history of popular American music: it was appropriated and resold to white, suburban audiences.

Advertisement

Tyree Cooper doesn't fuck about. Then again, if you were as important a figure in the history of house music, if you'd released tracks as eternal as "Nuthin Wrong" and "Acid Over" why would you?

Cooper ditched the Windy City at the turn of the century, swapping the authentic home of house for the adopted house of techno, Berlin. His arrival in the city predated the boom in the producer-population by a good few years. "I've been here since before it was cool," he tells me. As hard as it is to believe in the post-Berghain world where Ben Klock posters adorn bedrooms from Albania to Zambia, the German city wasn't always a hotbed of electronic exploration. "It was really dead in Berlin around 2003, 2004. When I say dead, I mean it. Nothing happened. 2006, it started bubbling up. By 2008 it was there. By 2009 I was in America or London and people just wanted to talk about Berlin. I was in Israel and these Hebrew cats told me they wanted to move to Berlin. I was like, 'Really?' Shit just started happening."

It wasn't just the geographical make-up of the population that was altering year by year. "I watched it change from hardcore techno and drum and bass with very little house, to hardcore techno with a bit of hip-hop, some drum and bass and a little house, to all hip-hop, no techno, no house - electro was the thing." Now, he thinks, it is house and techno that dominate the city. We'll get back to Berlin, but for now our attention focuses in on the city that started it all: Chicago.

House music is a narrative of American exceptionalism and some of the most exceptional American house music was released by Tyree Cooper on Ray Barney's Dance Mania records. The label is known for it's fast-paced, sexually explicit take on the classic bump of Chicago's 4/4 scene. Cooper's releases for the imprint are a pivotal part of Dance Mania history and he's justifiably proud of his involvement in it. "The music from Dance Mania represented the youth of that time: young black youth. Everything in the mid-90s was fucking fast. The young kids in the hood were dancing fast so the music had to be fast. So Deeon, Milton, Funk, these guys sped it up and made tracks. The tracks represented the dances people would do at parties. You put that shit together it seems like you've got real, raw, hardcore energy that no one's really ready for. Dance Mania was so raw because the kids were...you can find them playing in a cafeteria somewhere, 200 kids in a cafeteria just getting it in. That was what it was about, reflecting that dance culture. Sluggo, Deeon, Waxmaster, they put down some real, real good music. The kids were just in it."

A Dance Mania revival is now in full flow, and next week sees Cooper heading to Fabric for a night that celebrates the label, playing alongside DM mainstay Paris Mitchell. The fast thuds, choppy percussion and see-sawing vocal snatches that form the basis of their sonic aesthetic have become pivotal for contemporary club music. When asked why everyone and their mum is suddenly playing DJ Funk records out, Cooper immediately homes in on home turf. "I think it's again another part of Chicago, another page of Chicago, where there's raw energy. This is the home of house. if you want house you've got to go to Chicago for it. When people want that raw Chicago house they know where to look."

For the past fifteen years, Cooper has been looking at it through displaced eyes, eyes that have seen house and techno's dislocation and relocation, from Chicago and Detroit to Berlin.

The information exchange between the two countries, the way an imported product is repackaged and sold back to the original source, is of great interest to him. As our conversation progresses it becomes apparent that Cooper isn't content to think of house as a purely functional medium that exists only to get people dancing. The relationship between house music and race is, to him, indicative of the way American audiences find African-American artforms unpalatable in their original form.

Cooper and his Chicagoan contemporaries, the Marshall Jeffersons, the Jesse Saunders', the Farley "Jackmaster" Funks, never expected house music to blow up the way it did. "How could you? My whole world was in Chicago. It went from playing parties downtown to somebody telling you: 'Yo, they're playing your record overseas.' How was that possible?" The answer to that, sadly, was the same as it had been for jazz, for rock'n'roll, the same as it had been throughout the history of popular American music: it was appropriated and resold to white, suburban audiences.

For Cooper this co-option is symbolised perfectly in a lexical shift that stands in for the difficult relationship between race and power that has played out in America over the centuries. "That shit has been happening since the 90s when they changed the word 'house' to 'dance.' When it came to marketing the music they didn't want to call it 'house music' because that was too black. So they called it 'dance music.' That was how they sold it to the white kids in the suburbs. Dance was vague, thin - you can dance to anything. They never called hip-hop dance and you can dance to that." This semiotic swap is something that Cooper believes has ramifications beyond the commercialisation of a genre. "This is still a problem in America. It has a real issue with fore-fronting black people doing shit."

This, he believes, has led us into the kind of 'techno colonisation' that Bok Bok recently mentioned on Twitter, wherein music with specific origins has been removed from that context and sold back to the wider world as something it isn't. We think about Berlin's current standing as a techno city. "I don't think of Berlin as that. I think of Berlin as somewhere that's enjoyed art and culture. All art is accepted, be it tap dance or fucking house music. As far as it crossing over to Europe and coming back to America, you've got to think of the economy of it. Who benefited the most from that? When it went from America to Europe it was pure. When it came back from Europe to America it was tainted."

This idea of the tainted, of the stained, is pertinent and important - for Cooper it equates to straight up artistic and monetary theft. "It was music that was stolen and the person who needed credit wasn't credited. By the time it came back to America the copycat was credited." As a result, an African-American and Puerto Rican invention ends up being often being thought of by many as a white European invention. "That's America and its music. Everything that started one way is turned. Everything that started out black turned out white."

Tyree Cooper plays Fabric on March 20 alongside Paris Mitchell, Bodyjack and Bok Bok at Fabriclive's Ghetto Madness night. Tickets are available here.

Follow Tyree on Facebook

Follow Josh Baines on Twitter

For Cooper this co-option is symbolised perfectly in a lexical shift that stands in for the difficult relationship between race and power that has played out in America over the centuries. "That shit has been happening since the 90s when they changed the word 'house' to 'dance.' When it came to marketing the music they didn't want to call it 'house music' because that was too black. So they called it 'dance music.' That was how they sold it to the white kids in the suburbs. Dance was vague, thin - you can dance to anything. They never called hip-hop dance and you can dance to that." This semiotic swap is something that Cooper believes has ramifications beyond the commercialisation of a genre. "This is still a problem in America. It has a real issue with fore-fronting black people doing shit."

This, he believes, has led us into the kind of 'techno colonisation' that Bok Bok recently mentioned on Twitter, wherein music with specific origins has been removed from that context and sold back to the wider world as something it isn't. We think about Berlin's current standing as a techno city. "I don't think of Berlin as that. I think of Berlin as somewhere that's enjoyed art and culture. All art is accepted, be it tap dance or fucking house music. As far as it crossing over to Europe and coming back to America, you've got to think of the economy of it. Who benefited the most from that? When it went from America to Europe it was pure. When it came back from Europe to America it was tainted."

This idea of the tainted, of the stained, is pertinent and important - for Cooper it equates to straight up artistic and monetary theft. "It was music that was stolen and the person who needed credit wasn't credited. By the time it came back to America the copycat was credited." As a result, an African-American and Puerto Rican invention ends up being often being thought of by many as a white European invention. "That's America and its music. Everything that started one way is turned. Everything that started out black turned out white."

Tyree Cooper plays Fabric on March 20 alongside Paris Mitchell, Bodyjack and Bok Bok at Fabriclive's Ghetto Madness night. Tickets are available here.

Follow Tyree on Facebook

Follow Josh Baines on Twitter