New York City has hip-hop, and Chicago has house music. Although each genre became a global phenomenon, the latter still generates far less mainstream coverage. To this day, a cloud of mystery still surrounds house music with most people largely unfamiliar with its origins and its impact. Director and producer Elegance Bratton, best known for his 2022 feature debut “The Inspection,” along with Oscar and two-time Emmy winner Roger Ross Williams set out to change that with their documentary, “Move Ya Body: The Birth of House Music,” which premiered at Sundance.
Named after the 1986 Marshall Jefferson classic “Move Your Body,” widely considered the house music anthem, Bratton begins the doc with a postcard-worthy nighttime image of the city with “CHICAGO” in yellow letters emblazoned in the middle. Easing into the meat of the documentary, a nightclub becomes the focal point as the pulsating sounds of “Move Your Body” play as an unknown male voice begins framing what’s on the screen. That voice is later revealed to be pivotal house producer and pioneer Vince Lawrence, who played a critical role in “Move Your Body” being released through Trax, a record label he basically spearheaded.
Bratton moves through the genre’s early Black gay influence and as he chronicles DJ Frankie Knuckles and the legendary underground club The Warehouse where he DJ’d, the racial backlash against disco’s inclusiveness and rising dominance led by a popular white radio jock, Lawrence serves as his north star — from being an usher and one of the few Black faces at the infamous Disco Demolition Night at the Chicago White Sox’s home of Comiskey Park where scores of white attendees burned records by Black artists, to his early days fighting to press and promote house records.
The problem with “Move Ya Body” is not that it doesn’t have enough meat. Instead, Bratton juggles too much for his chosen format. Given the many stories he wants to tell, a docuseries probably would have served him better. Bratton also doesn’t seem to have a strong foundation in his subject matter. First, he’s not from Chicago, and because Chicago house music is so under-documented, living in the culture is probably more essential for nailing the story with confidence and authority. A great example of this comes early in the doc when Lena Waithe, arguably the most famous Black gay Chicagoan, and others discuss Black Queer invisibility and marginalization. When house music is played in clubs in New Jersey, from which Bratton hails, and the larger NYC area, Black gay participation dominates.
In contrast, house music evolved from the Black gay community into an inclusive genre embraced by Chicago’s Black community. Many of its most well-known DJs, from Steve “Silk” Hurley to Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, and participants are heterosexual. House music is literally the soundtrack of Black Chicagoans who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s. While the doc does show clips of people partying to house music at Mendel, a storied Black Catholic High School in Chicago, it never notes how many of these parties were held for middle schoolers, because they were alcohol-free gatherings. Since 1990, the annual Chosen Few Picnic & Festival, which has no significant presence in “Move Ya Body,” has attracted thousands of Chicago house music lovers from all cross-sections of the Black community. And elements of house music can be found in songs from Chicago rappers Kanye West and Common.
These misses don’t mean “Move Ya Body” is not interesting. Bratton’s inclusion of the claim by white Chicago singer Rachel Cain, a rock-n-roll singer who worked with Lawrence early on, that she is a house music pioneer and the overall spotlight “Move Ya Body” places on white exploitation of house music is extremely important. And Bratton’s cinematic lens and integration of old photos and footage is consistently fantastic. The dramatizations of Lawrence’s early life are especially well-done and play more like his history come to life than re-enactments.
No one can dispute that Lawrence deserves his flowers and recognition, but “Move Ya Body: The Birth of House Music” falls short of fulfilling its ultimate mission.
