BC006 - Five Mixes: Starring Rhythm Controll, 1987-2022

Five ways of hearing house music’s unofficial a cappella national anthem.

Though it clocks in under a minute and a half, Rhythm Controll’s “My House (Acapella)” is, by default, house music’s national anthem. Chuck Roberts is the vocalist, delivering a sermon about house music “as a universal language spoke and understood by all,” having been consecrated by one “Jack”—a key word in early Chicago house, gracing everything from Chip E.’s “Time to Jack” to the overtly sexual dance that accompanied it, at least for a while, in the mid-eighties. Naturally, this a cappella has migrated along with house music’s jack—the force with which it landed on the one, the funk within the disco always at house music’s core, the trace element that propagated a dozen or a hundred other styles and variants.

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