EVERY GENRE PROJECT - March 9 - Jersey Sound
Genre of the Day - Jersey Sound
Album of the Day - Self-Curated Anthology
March 9, 2024
The great state of New Jersey: home of the infamously raucous Jersey Shore, Taylor ham, people who don’t know how to pump gas, and excellent house music. If that last one is unexpected, I’m not surprised: New Jersey is not exactly known as a house epicenter, although you might be familiar with Jersey club which is perhaps its most iconic homegrown genre product. House originated in Chicago, but there’s debate as to whether garage house, which came up in New York and New Jersey, predates the sound. Either way, they developed around the same time and featured similar enough characteristics to classify them under the same umbrella. New Jersey in particular, though, was integral to a particular strain of house that still has reverberations on our conceptualization of the genre.
Gospel and house are rooted in similar musical origins. Both the genre’s spaces allowed Black people to gather together in an inherently social environment, safe from the judgment and harshness of outside judgment and racism, and release through the act of creating and reveling in music. Both unfold in real time: the solo of a gospel singer or the swell of voices united in joyous harmony arrests an entire congregation and sweeps them off their feet, just as a house DJ enacts the same power on the dance floor. It makes almost too much sense that the two genres became intertwined less than a decade into house’s creation.
This is what happened in Newark, New Jersey at just a single club that had a ripple effect across the entire house genre: the exotically-monikered Club Zanzibar. Its history is potent: the watershed film Paris Is Burning was filmed at the club in 1988 that was one of the first major introductions in media to ballroom culture. It was also the home of several house DJs, such as Tony Humphries and Tee Scott, who began developing their own unique sound. They fused house beats with impassioned gospel vocals—a sheltered son of immigrants, Tony Humphries was inspired by his own time in a Baptist choir in his school days and experienced the types of songs where everyone ad libs for “25 minutes” and working at a gospel record shop. He loved Philly soul, which makes sense as the genre consisted of danceable records with blow-off-the-roof vocals, laying the foundation for Jersey sound as DJs would pair huge vocalists with house beats.
Given the smattering of albums on the Jersey sound chart (two)I didn’t feel that it was a large enough sample size to listen to the top album, so I decided to make a playlist of my own–the third time in this column’s history—and select some of the names I’d seen while reading about it. While the sound varies between the songs, the vocals are impassioned throughout with the beats taking a bit of a backseat. Across the first eight songs here, the music is uplifting and bright, paired with encouraging lyrics such as “Special” by Blaze buoyed by a jubilant choir or songs that directly excoriate social and racial division like Aly-Us’ “Follow Me.” While the sound of Jersey house would mutate and deepen in complexity by De’Lacy’s “Hideaway”, the cathartic release induced by house beats married to the lift provided by gospel elation is magic. This would have influence on diva house and ballroom culture, whose impacts are certainly no strangers to today’s mainstream.