Move Ya Body: The Birth of House Music
(USA, 92 min)
Dir. Elegance Bratton
Programme: Premieres (Word premiere)
About halfway through Elegance Bratton’s Move Ya Body: The Birth of House Music, one of the interviewees admits that house stripped much of the musicianship away from previous forms of dance music, trading the impeccable grooves of funk and disco for repeated beats. This was music strictly designed for an effect on the dance floor, creating a recurring, drone-like track that inspired patrons to gyrate for minutes on end.
As far as musicology goes, this comment ranks among the more interesting remarks found in Move Ya Body. The fact that it’s essentially a throwaway comment illustrates that the focus of the film has much less to do with the musical form itself than as it has to do with an appreciation of a subgenre. For a type of music inexorably tied to a single club in Chicago that helped birth its name, it’s fitting that discussions of geography, marketing, record company shenanigans, pawnshop purchases and so on play a far larger role in this story than, say, the actual art and craft of songwriting or DJ-ing.
The scope of Bratton’s film goes well beyond The Warehouse, a famous Chicago club that was a safe space for gay men, particularly those of Black and Brown heritage, to congregate. There, DJs, most famously the Bronx-born Frankie Knuckles, began stripping specific drum hooks and horn lines from disco records, incorporating some of the nascent drum machine and synthesizer technology of the day, and providing his patrons with a mix of the traditional record playing of the discotheque with the addition of newly formed elements that elevated and modernized previous tracks.
Our guide through Bratton’s film is Chicago native Vince Lawrence, whose recollections about his childhood fascination with the scene, and witnessing the backlash to the previous generation of R&B and dance tracks, helped shape his contribution to the culture. Lawrence’s accomplishments as a producer, songwriter, and mover-and-shaker is not to be undermined. His efforts to bring global attention to some of these tracks is a fascinating story to be told.
That said, by focussing on that aspect of the story – the broken contracts, the record pressing, betrayals from the likes of Trax records owner Larry Sherman – the actual musical elements that defined the genre are subsumed by political and economic considerations.
Lawrence’s personal journey does effectively allow Bratton to expand his narrative to wider considerations, particularly the famous anti-disco movements that culminated in the mass destruction at Comiskey Park’s Disco Demolition Night. Footage of rock DJ Steve Dahl festooned in military regalia while thousands of almost entirely white patrons gleefully destroyed disco recordings and other forms of predominantly Black entertainment, has been used in many documentaries to make similar points, but here it’s given the scope and context that’s rarely offered.
Similarly, the story of queer safe spaces for musical expression being coopted, as well as Black and Brown artists having their originality dulled and coopted by the mainstream, has been told in many, many other instances, but it’s not as if such truths need be silenced just for the need for a sense of novelty. The impact is softened, however, when the highly specific circumstances within this Chicago scene in particular are mirrored in, say, the story of three Australian brothers named Gibb and the telling of their own complicated relationship with the disco fad.
While Move Ya Body does well to argue that the forces that fueled the disco inferno were never extinguished but simply transmogrified into house, and the elements continue to provide a beat to EDM, electronica, and just about all pop music forms, it never quite focusses on what set house apart from similar forms that were doing the same in similar clubs in New York, L.A., Detroit, London, or Tokyo. What made house unique in its musicality and performance form is barely registered, its tropes unexplored. Even the stereotypical beats that define it leaves things to the imagination for those not already initiated.
It’s this facet – the inability to truly tell the story of house music, but instead focusing on all the things around it that indeed helped birth it – that makes the film both too wide in its perspective and too narrowly focused on Lawrence’s own contributions. Even when we see via dramatic reconstructions, there’s little time spent actually showing the factors that define the genre, and a smattering of images of young, talented DJs and producers behind control board do little to situate it.
Knuckles died in 2014 at the age of 56, and as the iconic producer who truly helped globalize the sound thanks to his groundbreaking work at the club, but also his production and remix work for the likes of Lisa Stanfield and the Pet Shop Boys, House is Frankie’s story. Some other figures are nevertheless interviewed to buttress the central protagonist’s own recollections, which provided the deeper musicality that made the form flourish. There’s only a few glimpses away from a carefully constructed narrative that shows some flaws in the hagiography, with one snarky aside that notes how one of Lawrence’s tracks wasn’t particularly great. This scene provides an alternate perspective as to why international superstardom eluded him despite the hustle.
Other tabloidy elements come to the fore, such as Rashômon-like contradictions with previous collaborators over who gets to claim to be the originator of the form. It’s not quite chicken and egg, but there’s much to navigate about whether the promoter gets to take credit for the event over the talent (see Woodstock for similar contradictions), or whether a guest vocalist should be the primary factor in a song’s success over the musical elements that were often borrowed from earlier disco tracks.
If there’s one even deeper absence is that’s of Jesse Saunders, the musical partner of Lawrence behind their 1994 house track “On and On.” Sanders suffered a stroke in 2022, and it’s his recollections that would have helped expand the portrait of this period. His own versions of events could have shaded a portrait that seemingly paints Lawrence in an angelic light.
But it’s an odd thing to leave a film about music knowing nothing more about the actual music itself. I challenge any viewer who isn’t already familiar with house to delineate between the similar scenes that produced techno, industrial, and other forms of music after disco’s so-called death. Elements of the Munich scene, which emerged following Giorgio Moroder’s enormous success, or the way that gay subcultures on both side of the Atlantic borrowed heavily from one another—such that house was truly popularized in the U.K. and then was transplanted back to audiences in America– is touched upon but not seriously explored.
The fact that an entire documentary on house doesn’t once mention the Roland TB-303 or SH-101 bass synths, the TR-808 or 909 drum tracks employing saturation to give the tracks some grit with rhythms influenced by not only disco but also by Afro-Cuban syncopation, among other specificities, underscores the narrow focus on Lawrence’s contribution. This is what following the likes of Knuckles more directly could have elicited. The DJ emerged over time as the most pioneering and accomplished artists who came out of the Warehouse scene, but then the notion of this music being a truly Chicago invention would be somewhat stymied.
In other words, there’s much that’s left unsaid about house music itself, and that’s likely not of concern for many people who might watch this otherwise satisfying film. For Bratton’s work does succeeds as a fine journey through the past, one that at the very least lets younger listeners know about the divide between the relatively misogynistic scene of early rap and the comparatively more inclusive queer-friendly dance scenes. That alone will be revelatory for many, as well the scenes of record burning and mass hysteria that continue to be a point of shame today. While Move Ya Body spends more time on the scene than on the songs themselves, it’s still likely to sate many fans of contemporary music looking to know the forces and personalities that helped birthed their favourite tracks.
Move Ya Body: The Birth of House Music premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.