Double the Love Playlist

Disco didn’t die—it was murdered.

The culprit? Fifty thousand rock fans who attended a disco-record-burning-turned-riot in the outfield at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1979. Dubbed Disco Demolition Night, the protest against the ubiquity of disco—a musical style driven by gay, Black, and Latinx creators—and its displacement of rock on local and national airwaves pushed disco from the top of the charts to genre non grata in less than a year.

“The anti-disco movement operated under the guise of ‘musical preference,’” says Bradley Haworth, a classically trained pianist and multi-genre DJ known as DJ Bradley John, “but it was just a way for people to disguise their racism and homophobia.”

Although disco was dead, its records found a safe haven among the queer, Black, and Latinx club kids who frequented Chicago’s Warehouse in the early 1980s. There, DJ Frankie Knuckles chopped and looped disco samples to create a new style of music. Categorized as “Played at the Warehouse” in record stores during the genre’s earliest days, this label was eventually shortened to “house.”

In honor of the new Getty exhibitions Queer Lens: A History of Photography and $3Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives—part of Getty’s Double the Love summer offerings—we asked Haworth to create a playlist to tell the tale of the queer club spaces that thrived despite the discrimination of the times. “House music,” says Haworth, “is a style that only exists because of racial and queer oppression. It wouldn’t exist without those lived, queer experiences.”

The exhibitions capture lived, queer experiences through images and objects chosen from Getty’s ever-growing collection. The images include portraits of queer individuals, visual records of queer kinship, and documentary views capturing early queer groups and protests that depict queer history from the 19th century to today.

“Despite heteronormative bias and discrimination,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, in the introduction to Queer Lens’s accompanying catalog, “LGBTQ+ individuals have influenced art and culture in innumerable ways, and photography was and continues to be a powerful tool in the representation of queer experience.”

Haworth’s playlist accompanies those depictions with the sound of the unique queer experience that was the early days of house music: “a steady four-on-the-floor, a steady, crisp hi-hat, a steady snap. It creates a steady highness that you can absorb, coast on for hours and hours. It creates a euphoria you have to earn, a silver lining to systemic oppression in places of safety.”

To create that sound, Haworth sampled from house’s history, including progenitors like CeCe Rogers, Robin S., Mr. Fingers, and Crystal Waters to “the divas that helped make it happen—the Chers, the Madonnas, and the Kylie Minogues of it all,” and mixes them with the sounds of today.

Now that house music has traveled far beyond its disco roots to become a genre played all over the world, Haworth says it’s important for him to represent its queer origins through his music and to keep the spirit of those early queer havens alive.

“Creating these kinds of parties is so important,” Haworth adds. “It’s how we protect joy, it’s why I DJ. It’s why I made this mix.”

Listen to Bradley Haworth’s playlist here:

Visit Queer Lens: A History of Photography and $3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives at the Getty Center through September 28. You can also experience the exhibition through its catalog (edited by curators Paul Martineau and Ryan Linkof).