In 1987, Francis Nichols released a single called Let the Music Use You. As a DJ and producer, he'd long gone under the name Frankie Knuckles, but Let the Music Use You came out under the name the NightWriters. Dance music aficionados can argue interminably over which of the legendary singles Frankie Knuckles produced in the late 80s singles, you can say without fear of contradiction, that played a part in changing the face of pop music for ever is the best. Some plump for Your Love, with its distinctive keyboard figure that subsequently turned up both on Candi Staton and the Source's endlessly reissued and covered 1991 hit You Got The Love and, of all things, psychedelic rock band Animal Collective's My Girls. Others favour the luxuriant sleaze of Baby Wants To Ride or 1989's gorgeous, lovelorn Tears. But Let the Music Use You is always somewhere near the top: some people will tell you it's not just the best record Frankie Knuckles ever made, but the greatest ever example of house music, the genre that was named after The Warehouse, the Chicago gay club where Knuckles was resident DJ from 1977 to 1982.
The euphoria you can feel on a dancefloor is a notoriously tough thing to capture or even describe: that's why most nightclub scenes in films or in TV drama are so awful and why most accounts of a legendary club or rave fall so short. There's almost nothing to Let the Music Use You a bassline, an unchanging rhythm track based around an insistent synthetic cowbell noise, a two-note keyboard part, a synthesiser that shifts from a melancholy wash of sound into a delirious, joyful ascending chord sequence and a vocal by a forgotten singer called Ricky Dillard who sounds, for the most part, as if he's making it up on the hoof and yet it captures that weird, ineffable dancefloor transcendence perfectly.
by via Electronic music | The Guardian
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