Dance Mania

Chicago strips house to the frame: raw drums, rude chants, and a track you can't sit through.

What you're really asking

You're asking about a Chicago label and the sound it made its own: fast, stripped, explicit house built for the floor, not the headphones. Dance Mania ran from mid-eighties house into the raw ghetto house of the nineties, and laid the groundwork for juke and footwork.

Where it sits

Dance Mania started in Chicago in the mid-eighties under Jesse Saunders and grew into the home of ghetto house. Through the nineties Ray Barney's label pressed cheap, fast twelves by Paul Johnson, DJ Deeon, DJ Funk, DJ Slugo and Robert Armani.

The sound was deliberately crude and functional, and its rhythms fed directly into the juke and footwork that followed in the city.

The scene

Who: Paul Johnson, DJ Deeon, DJ Funk, DJ Slugo, Parris Mitchell, Robert Armani, Steve Poindexter and the Traxmen. Label: Dance Mania.

What: fast tempos, drum-machine pressure, chanted vocals and a refusal of polish. How a record gets in: it is part of the Dance Mania catalogue or the ghetto-house world it built, not any Chicago house record.