‘Move Ya Body: The Birth of House’ Review: In Compelling Music Doc, Elegance Bratton Explores a Genre’s Black Queer Roots
There’s a moment in Elegance Bratton’s illuminating documentary Move Ya Body: The Birth of House when Vince Lawrence, a key architect of the music genre, recounts his experience at Disco Demolition Night, a riot that took place in Comiskey Park in 1979. The event was organized by the radio host Steve Dahl as a publicity stunt: In exchange for White Sox tickets, fans were instructed to bring a disco record to the Chicago ballpark, to be blown up in the middle of the field. More than 50,000 people showed up and the event took a hostile turn.
At a certain point, Dahl lost control as the crowd stormed the field, chanting “Disco sucks!” Later that night, as Lawrence, who was 15 at the time, walked home from the event, a group of white guys used the chant while accosting him. The moment revealed the racist and homophobic undercurrents propelling the initial rejection of disco and its heir: house music. (The Comiskey Park incident also factored significantly in The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.)
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In Move Ya Body, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, Lawrence and other influential figures within the genre chronicle the origins of house music. Bratton, who poignantly observed the experience of a Black gay marine in his narrative feature debut The Inspection, combines interviews, archival footage and re-enactments to create an accessible doc about a genre whose resurgence makes the project more timely.
While relatively standard in execution, Move Ya Body distinguishes itself in a music doc landscape laden with artist hagiographies. The film finds its groove when Bratton introduces thornier elements of the genre’s history, from Dahl’s disco demolition to the music executive Larry Sherman’s shady business maneuvers.
Bratton, whose early work included executive producing the Viceland reality series My House, ups the stakes of the doc with these additional threads. He uses them to articulate the genre’s contradictions and unresolved tensions, to explore how music rooted in Black queer expression became a viable commercial enterprise that nearly erased that history.
Move Ya Body eventually coalesces around certain people who were effectively erased from the legacy of the genre’s early days. Bratton offers additional context about Chicago house in a similar vein to James Spooner’s Afro-Punk, which explored Black people’s contributions to punk music.
Move Ya Body opens with Lawrence’s biography and a brief history of Chicago in the ’60s and ’70s. This intimate vantage point anchors the film, so even as Bratton widens his purview, asking stars like Lena Waithe about the impact of the genre in the city, audiences never lose sight of the principal narrative thread.
For Lawrence, music was informative and a salve for the bruising isolation of his childhood. He grew up poor and, from the way he tells the story, without many friends his own age. He learned about the Civil Rights movement through anthems, protest songs and other political records. Lawrence learned about disco through his father — with whom he seems to have had an uneven relationship — an attendee of record pool meetings. These casual convenings with DJs and producers taught Lawrence how to understand a record — what made a song popular and why it worked — and he carried these lessons with him throughout his own music journey.
Lawrence’s encounter with the synthesizer changed his life even more. In his words, a light bulb went off and he at last found a tool through which he could connect with more people. Lawrence deeply desired acceptance, and music, he realized, could help him get to it. He started doing odd jobs so he could buy his own synthesizer.
Bratton supplements Lawrence’s perspective with interviews from other Chicago musicians like DJs Celeste Alexander and Lori Branch. Their testimonies — descriptive anecdotes about the underground parties, the vibes and the mission — along with some striking archival footage, help round out our sense of the scene in its earliest days.
After establishing the informal and experimental origins of Chicago house, Bratton zeroes in on how the genre became a commercial enterprise. This section, which comes later, is the most compelling part of Move Ya Body because of the tensions it brings to the fore.
Lawrence talks about his relationships with Larry Sherman, a founder of Trax Record, and Rachael Cain, who has been described as the “Queen of House Music.” There’s a lawsuit brewing right now between Cain and dozens of artists, including Lawrence, who allege that Trax Records engaged in fraud and copyright infringement. Bratton affords space to both parties by interviewing Cain as well. But what ultimately makes this chapter of Move Ya Body so riveting is the bigger questions it raises about who gets credit and compensation for culture in America.
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