The Music Got Me
Song by Visual
Who invented house music and where?
The purists of the genre will immediately answer Chicago! But with the hindsight of more than 40 years of electronic dance music, the answer is much more complicated.
What is certain is that the song «The Music Got Me» by Visual (1983), produced by the New Yorker Boyd Jarvis, seems to be the starting point of what the house producers in Chicago will do in 1984/1985.
He's also friends with Larry Levan, the famous deejay of the Paradise Garage and Timmy Regisford, who in 1983 had not yet become the legendary deejay of WBLS FM in New York and Club Shelter, or the Artistic Director of Motown, but who will also have a determining role in the foundation and the development of house music in New York.
On Prelude Records, Boyd and Regisford, with the help of Tony Humphries on the mix, will release this now-classic that stands out today as the cornerstone of what house music is three years later in Chicago.
The track involves a Yamaha CS-15 synthesizer, also used by the English band The Human League and Depeche Mode (interesting to see these bands come back regularly when talking about post-disco and proto-house), and an Oberheim DX drum machine (also used in the early days of hip hop and electro-funk).
With these Boyd Jarvis, synthesizes the electronic experiments that gave birth to the Boogie sound, the synthetic gimmicks of Italian disco, and of course, pure disco on the rhythmic level working as a classic beat. Boyd Jarvis is a synthesizer and drum machine nut!
The vocal is more of classical order, sung by Anthony Malloy, but foreshadows how male vocalists will put their voices on the records of Chicago producers sometime later. Like that of Jungle Wonz and Harry Dennis.
The track is instantly a massive hit in all the black underground clubs in the US, London clubs, Manchester, and the Palace in Paris.
Deejays will prefer to play the instrumental version without the vocal because it is more percussive, the bass line more syncopated, the kick drum, and the clap more present.
In more than 7 minutes, the impact on the dancers is immediate. The record's success will lead Jarvis to produce Colonel Abrams (another heavyweight of early house music).
The song will also quickly make emulators and give the desire to producers like Paul Simpson to launch successful productions (his and Adeva) as well as Kevin Hedge, and Josh Milan, who will become Blaze.
All impose their turn of classy and gospel visions of House music, the famous New Jersey Sound, and Garage Sound to get put on the map of dance music. Although, if one is perhaps a little chauvinistic and proud to be from Manhattan, they can claim all these artists are musical descendants of Larry Levan.
What is fascinating and sad is that Boyd Jarvis actually invented the genre, and as Paul Simpson would later say -" Boyd Jarvis invented House."
But once his minimal-sounding records began to take off, DJs around the States started buying and playing them. Seeing how stripped-back they were, they began to realize that they could make records too.
When Boyd was doing it, the sound didn't have a name but, by the time records were coming out of Chicago, it was called House"