We're proud to welcome at Soulcom one of the all times best House artists, Jere McAllister, who, with simplicity, give us his own vision about one side of the House music history.

“Well, since this is the first in, I hope, a series of articles where I get a chance to speak about some of my ideas, opinions, and experiences, of the House/Dance music scene. I thought I should start at the beginning, for me. I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with the Chicago House music scene, pretty much, from the beginning, so I think it only makes sense that I start from my beginnings. What is House music? Where did it come from? How did it get started? These are all questions where you probably won’t get the same answer from any two people. However, I can tell you what House means to me.

To best communicate my experience, I have to start with my old neighborhood. I grew up in a rough part of South Shore, which had been nicknamed “Terror Town”. South Shore had areas that were pretty nice, such as the “Highlands”, where Jesse Jackson, Ramsey Lewis, and other such famous people, have homes. But, if you crossed the wrong street, you could end up in a “not so peaceful” area. My neighborhood was right at the beginning of the worst of the bad part. The farther southeast you went, the worse it got (except by the lake). Just about a block southeast of me was a building that was the “reputed” home of one of the “reputed” leaders of one of Chi’s biggest street gangs (sort of similar to the Carter Arms in “New Jack City”). Needless to say, there was frequent gang activity, theft, shootings, drug trade, etc. There was once, even, a body found in the alley right behind my house.

The interesting thing is that I survived in this neighborhood, without much trouble, because, I had a mother that was very conscious of making sure that she kept us away from certain bad influences, and some of the older “gangstas” put the word out to leave me and my siblings alone. Their usual quote was “they’re smart, they gonna make it outta here”. We were even warned not to walk down certain streets, going to and from school, because they felt that there was too much “B.S.” going on, that they didn’t want us to get caught up in.

This idea of “making it out” is very important to my experience with the House scene. That was what it was about to a lot of us on the early House scene, and escape from the rough neighborhoods (ghettos) that some of us grew up in. My best friend, in high school, grew up in a Princeton Park, a low cost housing area right off the Dan Ryan between 91st and 95th streets, where he went through similar experiences. We were lucky enough to go to one of the best high schools in the city, and experience being around people who grew up in better social, intellectual, environments, escaping our neighborhood schools which were plagued by the usual social and economic issues. Word is that my neighborhood high school was even mention on 60 minutes (or maybe it was 20/20) as one of the worst in the country...

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