Looking back at the career of “The Godfather of House” one year after his death
On March 31, 2014, Frankie Knuckles passed away from complications with diabetes at the age of 59. Though not enormously well-known in life, the DJ/producer had been one of the most influential pop artisans of the past 35 years – streamlining the disco genre into the electronic permutation of house that continues to be hugely popular today. With a documentary and posthumous album down the pipeline, the one-year anniversary of Knuckles’ passing makes it high time to commemorate the musician’s legacy.
Born in 1955, the black and gay Knuckles grew up in Brooklyn, with initial aspirations to be a fashion designer. In the mid-1970s, a side hobby of spinning records would start to take precedence over Knuckles’ first career, however, as Knuckles began getting regular gigs DJing at local hotspots, like Continental Baths and The Gallery. By the end of the decade, word-of-mouth would lead club promoter Robert Williams to offer Knuckles a residency at Chicago club, The Warehouse. Knuckles subsequently packed his bags for the Windy City.
By all accounts a disco DJ, Knuckles’ genre of choice would hit hard times at the dawn of the 1980s, as an inherently bigoted backlash aimed at the genre’s gay and black roots (see Disco Demolition Night) saw disco lose serious commercial momentum. Looking for ways to make the music he spinned more novel, Knuckles would vary up classic disco cuts in his sets with then-contemporary synth-pop and Euro-disco cuts, and set the music to a drum machine to give it a more electronic pulse. Chicagoans would go wild for Knuckles’ “Warehouse” music, with a generation of young black kids-turned-DJ/producers creating the “Chicago house” scene, which would subsequently be co-opted by the British music press before going global.
Following his formative New York and Chicago days, Frankie Knuckles took a backseat as an elder statesman in the world of pop and dance music. Performing DJ residencies in Europe, Knuckles would also be a heavily in-demand remixer throughout the 1990s and 2000s – doing high-profile club edits for the likes of Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, and Hercules and Love Affair. In 2004, his importance to pop culture would even be acknowledged by the likes of current US president and then-Illinois senator Barack Obama, who renamed a street in Chicago “Frankie Knuckles Way.”
Frankie Knuckles’ legacy ultimately transcends a superficial listing of achievements. After disco’s gay and black roots led it to be marginalized from the mainstream by bigoted white rock fans, Knuckles re-imagined disco as a subversive new form of electronic music, before once again penetrating the mainstream – signalling the triumph of black, gay expression. In a modern age where Steve and Chris play on daytime television, and Disclosure and Sam Smith get mainstream pop radio-play, we have Knuckles at least partly to thank, and, for this reason alone, his music must continue to be heard.