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So that really set the tone for you as a music-lover? How about as a DJ? Music was a huge part of all our lives back then. On Fridays we’d get pizza as a family and just dance around to the music we all loved. Being black and from Chicago, which is a very musical place – it had rock, soul, disco – music was constantly on in my house. you know what? I’m just gonna say “black”. But this was just a part of being an African American person growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1970s. But Marvin insisted and so he started that trend for singers baring it all with people like Jodie Mitchell and Carol King coming later. Marvin was spilling his heart on What’s Going On but what people forget is that Berry Gordy didn’t even want to release it! He just wanted Marvin to keep releasing all that smooth shit. People were just freer then – sexually, emotionally, in every way. A good example of this is what we were just talking about, Marlon Brando hooking up with Marvin Gaye… and Richard Pryor too. After the craziness of the 60s culture died out with people like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin dying, the 70s was more about sexual revolution. HD: For me to properly answer that you have to understand the period that I was growing up in, the 1970s itself.
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But if we can start off by going back to your own beginnings growing up in Chicago, I know your father was a huge Marvin Gaye fan in particular, so would you say that soul music – with its unifying, liberalising message – was the first driver for you musically? But there are still good places to party – and to DJ – in New York if you know where to find them. New York is a very different place now than it was in the 90s and that is mainly because of gentrification which you also see in all the big capital cities of the world, I mean London especially suffers from it too. That must be quite a relief for you, as New York has been so important to you as a DJ – and personally too, of course? Honey Dijon: It is very much like New York was before gentrification, yes. Is it like the NYC of old? And can I ask you what it’s like to DJ and party in NYC in these post-Giuliani and Bloomberg days? So you’re playing at Battle Hymn tonight – Luke Solomon has mentioned that place to me before. But strong roots never go out of style and with equality now firmly on the agenda, tQ was more than happy to chat with one of electronic music’s most individual and outspoken characters. What started as the underground music of black and Latino LGBT+ kids is now more white and middle class than ever.
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Dijon is, of course, the perfect choice here: as a trans woman of colour who’s been involved in house music since its beginnings, the contradictions of the scene are her lived experiences. They will then perform at either Snowbombing, Lost Village or at Printworks.
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This project will select ten of the best female and non-binary DJs to be mentored by big-time talents like The Black Madonna, Nastia, Peggy Gou, Artwork and of course Dijon herself. But she will be much more involved in their new Equalising Music project. She even remixed disco deity (and LGBT+ hero) Sylvester’s track ’Stars’ for it with vocals by Sam Sparro (an EP of which will be out for Record Store Day). You may have seen her thing on the decks in Smirnoff’s We’re Open ad campaign to promote more understanding of non-binary identity in nightlife. Now she’s more visible than ever before on club and festival line-ups worldwide, which is the reason for our chat. Her sets at Panorama Bar have, by her own admission, bought her career to another level. More recently, as house music began to re-evaluate its roots after the minimal techno era took a well-deserved backseat, artists like Dijon, who have the history of house music in their bones as well as their ass-shakingly good DJ sets, have ascended again. I mean so technically gifted that even I wonder, ‘How the fuck are you even doing that?’” Here she met Danny Tenaglia, another DJ she still considers, like Carter, “truly brilliant. This was before “Giuliani Time” and Disney taking over the city, so NYC was still a worldwide centre of off-kilter music – house, techno and punk rock all flourished in a city that was still affordable, even if it wasn’t always safe. But it was her move to New York in the 90s that really pushed her towards her calling behind the decks. She discovered this underground scene through her friendship with Derrick Carter, her inspiration as a DJ, along with Mark Farina, another Chicago DJ who would become a lifelong friend.
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As a dancer first (like all DJs worthy of the mantle) she was not even 13 when she started going to the city’s primarily black and gay house clubs using the age-old excuse of sleeping over at a friend’s house, plus a fake ID.
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As a Chicago native, Honey Dijon had the inside track to house music from a very early age.