Frankie Knuckles
Whistle Song

The term "house-music" does not mean you should listen to it at home in slippers with a good whiskey in hand. No, definitely not...

The story is much more peculiar: Frankie Knuckles was already spinning records in the early seventies at the Gallery in Manhattan, alongside other famous DJs: Niky Siano and Larry Levan. The first true revolutions in "DJing" were brought by these three historic artists of modern rhythm: the so-called "mixing" is fundamentally based on aligning two different tracks by matching the beats per minute, thus using two turntables. Frankie and company added a third turntable to create free effects, and they also started cutting and pasting different tracks together, creating a new concept of the DJ's role.

Now let's make a quick time leap (let's say like a "dog's cock") at the beat of disco music, passing through the shiny spheres spinning above the colorful dance floor and the teased hair of some dandy, arriving at the historic nights at the Warehouse in Chicago, in the late seventies. The undisputed DJ of the place, Knuckles once described the sound of that club as "house-music," referring more to the name of the place. Of course, if the club had been called something like WareShit, if someone today continued to say that some people are dancing to shitty music, well, I think there would be nothing wrong with that. At least etymologically speaking. Let's just say that night Knuckles was lucky, after all, it's always a matter of sliding doors, there's no escaping it...

The sound experiments of our DJ are exemplary; recovering old soul and funky tracks and electronic manipulations using synthesizers and recorders. Increasingly drenched in fame in the eighties, toward the end of the decade he became very famous in the club circuit, which was emerging at the time. Additionally, Frankie was regularly contacted by past artists requesting remixes of their old hits. In 1991, his first real album arrived, followed by collaborations, other records, the founding of labels, and great DJ sets.

The single "The Whistle Song" (1991) comes in three different versions and is also included in the first album. This track is just one of the many facets of Knuckles I could mention; a "classic" piece that smells of the old disco music of the early nineties, the era of Underworld and Robert Miles. The sound starts and grows progressively in a simple and evocative manner, with the typical bass and keyboard layers overlapping, leading to the well-known exclamation: "Oh! Do you remember this?...".The track was recently picked up by Bob Sinclar in his "Love Generation," and it accompanied us, willingly or not, throughout last summer. My advice is to rediscover the original track by Knuckles, and maybe play it in the car between a Miles Davis and a Stan Ridgway, when we head off on our summer vacation.

The music of Frankie Knuckles is one of the pillars supporting modern house-music, and not only that. Carl Craig, Laurent Garnier, Jeff Mills; they all start from here. Because this music is epochal, it may or may not be to one's liking, but it has been and continues to be the soundtrack of boozy nights on the dance floor, of sweat, of close encounters, of flashing lights, of fun, of old and new summers.

It's impressive to think that with this music, the nights of entire generations have intertwined worldwide.