DJ Deeon, legendary Chicago home DJ and producer, lifeless at 56 : NPR

DJ Deonn poses in a picture for Dancemania Delights Quantity 4!!! launched on Bandcamp.

DJ Deonn

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DJ Deonn

DJ Deonn poses in a picture for Dancemania Delights Quantity 4!!! launched on Bandcamp.

DJ Deonn

Who’s he? DJ Deeon, legendary home music DJ and producer, has died at 56.

• Deeon ‘DJ Deeon’ Boyd was a pioneer of the Chicago-based home music sub-genre “ghetto home.” The style is characterised by its minimal and uncooked drum machine-driven tracks, usually overlayed with raunchy chants.

• Born and raised in Chicago, DJ Deeon began making music within the mid Eighties. In a 2016 interview with DIRTYBIRD Data, he stated his fashion was influenced by the sounds of Kraftwerk, John Rocca and Soulsonic Pressure: 

“As soon as I heard digital dance music, there wasn’t no different music to take heed to. There was nothing else. My thoughts was simply targeted on that.”

• DJ Deeon’s Fb web page introduced his dying earlier at the moment. The artist had suffered a number of well being points over the previous few years, together with most cancers, quadruple bypass surgical procedure and a sequence of strokes, in response to a 2020 fundraising marketing campaign.

What is the huge deal? Music producers and DJs throughout genres acknowledge DJ Deeon for his affect on dance music.

• In his interview with DIRTYBIRD Data, DJ Deeon recalled the early days of ghetto home, saying the sound first took off at events in Chicago’s excessive rise public housing tasks:

“You used to pay like a greenback to get in…the condo most likely solely maintain like, in the lounge, solely meant to carry about 50 folks within the condo. However earlier than the evening’s over we would transfer two to 300 folks via it…It was loopy. It was wild. It was enjoyable.”

• The ghetto home sound unfold far past Chicago, gaining recognition and influencing artists throughout home music and all around the world. Daft Punk even included DJ Deeon of their 1997 monitor “Academics,” which names dozens of the French duo’s influences.

What are folks saying?

Tributes to DJ Deeon have popped up on social media.

This is what his Chicago-based peer DJ Slugo needed to say on Instagram:

Tiffany Walden, editor in chief of the Chicago-based publication TRiiBE, posted this:

And the file label that launched the Lee Walker and DJ Deeon collaboration “Freak Like Me” wrote:

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