Stuff You Gotta Watch: I Was There When House Took Over the World
There’s no way to adequately grasp the emergence of a cultural phenomenon outside of its social and political context. House music is no exception. Its beginnings coincided with an unprecedented recession and, in Nile Rodgers’ analysis, a growing demand for marginalized voices to be heard in the midst of the gay, feminist, and Black Power movements.
House arrived in the aftermath of disco and quickly topped the charts worldwide. But the conceptual inception of the genre starts in the previous decade, with, for example, David Mancuso’s famous parties at The Loft in 1970. As DJ and producer Nicky Siano explains in I Was There When House Took Over the World, legendary venues such as The Gallery, The Continental Baths, and Chicago’s Warehouse played a vital role in the creation of a community that eventually became a sound and a lifestyle.
Despite clocking in at less than an hour, I Was There When House Took Over the World delivers an extremely informative picture of the birth and dissemination of house music as a global genre. The documentary is split into two parts, “House Was Born” and “House Went Global,” with the first part focusing on the perfect storm that allowed for the genesis of the movement, and the second detailing how it conquered international frontiers.
Review by Ana Leorne. Check out the full archive of the Stuff You Gotta Watch column.