The Black Madonna

Lauren Martin

The woman next to me is a DJ, a producer and one of the creative minds behind one of the best electronic music venues in the United States, smartbar. Please help me welcome the Black Madonna.

The Black Madonna

Hello.

Lauren Martin

I'm very much enjoying the cape with the sofa, it's like ultimate relaxation.

The Black Madonna

My mother would really approve of this, she's a cape woman. The first time I went to Europe my mother was like, “Oh wait before you go, I have to give you something.” She gave me this enormous cape, she was like, “You can't go to Europe without this.” Now I'm a cape woman, it's fulfilling my destiny and completely turning into my mother before the age of 40.

Lauren Martin

I think we're pretty much all on the way there already, but thank you very much for joining us. I introduced you as somebody who's synonymous with Chicago but you're not from Chicago. Where are you from?

The Black Madonna

Well I am from Kentucky in America. My hometown is Jackson, Kentucky but I was born in Lexington, Kentucky because Jackson is so small that it doesn't have a hospital. I am the first generation of my family to live largely outside of the Appalachian mountains and before that my mother and my father and my grandparents grew up completely in a very rural area known primarily for coal mining and tobacco farming. That's pretty much it. I've lived there as a small child and then moved to the great big city of Lexington, Kentucky, home of the University of Kentucky Wild Cats. And eventually to Louisville, Kentucky, which is the biggest city in Kentucky.

Lauren Martin

How big is the biggest city in Kentucky for those who are unfamiliar with it?

The Black Madonna

I think including the city county incorporated, I think it's about 2 million people but really the city itself is quite quaint. I mean it's not a big city.

Lauren Martin

What's the social landscape of Kentucky? How would you describe it when you were growing up?

The Black Madonna

There's a big shift between country living and city living for sure. Country living in Jackson was much more insular. Appalachia is its own unique universe outside of anything that you can compare to the rest of America. They say that the words and the sounds and some of the phrases in the really, really super Appalachian dialect have as much in common with the Queen's English in Elizabethan times as anything else. I think even two generations back, I think a lot of you would have a hard time understanding my family members speaking, some of them. I mean some of them are just like me. My accent is largely gone because I had speech therapy when I got to Lexington so my accent is not as bad. You can hear it sometimes but for the most part it's not as strong as my relatives, even my near family members have much stronger accents than I do. In general Kentucky is very warm, very close, very connected, very kind of everybody's in each other’s business.

Lauren Martin

A lot like dance music then.

The Black Madonna

Yeah right, it's like dance music except far less evil.

Lauren Martin

Apart from the speech then, what is the sound of that part of the Midwest? What's that sound of Kentucky? What kind of music did you grow up on? I know that your family were quite musical right?

The Black Madonna

Yeah my dad is a pretty well regarded blues musician named Nick Stump and then people that I don't know as well in my family, other family members are active in bluegrass and other regional stuff. I lived for a little while in a place called Whitesburg, Kentucky, and my family worked for an arts collector there called Appalshop, which is at this point a royal cultural institution dedicated to preserving Appalachian arts and supporting that culture.

On one hand I grew up with all the stuff that's regional but my parents and my family, I would say, in many ways are very sophisticated and my dad often tells the story about how in older times radio used to go a lot further. You would get these radio stations from hundreds and hundreds of miles away which is where you first heard the blues and living in eastern Kentucky in a small house and his dad is a county agent. Being this kid that hears this thing coming through a box and it's this magical sound.

Then on the other side my mom's family, my grandfather was an academic, a minister also but an academic. I grew up in a very musical family. On one side I definitely had the blues and things like that and grew up with a really world class education with all that stuff. Grew up playing instruments, learning from my dad, went to an art school, continued doing that and on the other hand my mom and my stepdad are just both incredible record nerds. As much as anything, my own taste mirrors theirs I would say. My mom, I found this amazing text message from her from I guess maybe a couple years ago where she said, “Oh I just remembered when we both discovered ‘When Doves Cry.’”

Lauren Martin

What happened when you discovered “When Doves Cry?” That's an amazing song without a bassline, which is quite unlike your taste.

The Black Madonna

Right. Well we went crazy for Prince, and I was like six or seven but I mean it was like Prince everything in our house. Just completely insane and I would say that as much as anything, and my mother was a crazy Stevie Wonder fan. I mean just insane and so I heard a lot of that kind of thing in the house. Then when my mother married my stepdad, Roger, who is one of the great unsung collectors in the history of record nerd-dom, he really changed our lives forever in many ways. Not just musically but in general. But Roger made these mixtapes and then my mother started making these mixtapes and I found this amazing tape that my mom made me that had Lauryn Hill. You know, it was like all of these things that you don't think about your mom listening to. And Aaliyah!

Roger really brought in electronic music into our family and that was a big huge life changing thing because I was about ten when they got together. That was when we started to listen to the Pet Shop Boys and New Order and eventually he introduced me to the KLF. I mean there's so many things that Roger liked way before most people liked it and then to have a parent playing these things in the house was… I think my brain was right at that age where it just soaks up music. The music of your adolescence becomes the music of your whole life and for me I was extremely lucky to hear the things that I heard.

And I was maybe 12 or ten, I can remember Roger giving me my first copy of Paul's Boutique you know, and I'm in Kentucky in this little school with all these morons that love Debbie Gibbs and Tiffany and shit like that. I was totally ostracized, I mean I'm getting dropped off at the school, all these nice kids they have health insurance and new shoes and things like this. I'm getting dropped off in a Chevette with Public Enemy stickers on the back of it. You know at the time it was just so devastating because everybody hated my guts and wanted me to die but now I look back at it and I'm like, “Oh my god my parents were so great.” You know, thank god they stuck with me and turned me into a little mutant. It was worth all those years of hell.

Lauren Martin

I was going to ask, how did that idea about music and playing music fit into the landscape around you, but it sounds like you stuck way out, like a sore thumb.

The Black Madonna

Let me tell you, I was mercilessly bullied. I mean I can remember... I mean you could make a television show out of the horrible things that happened to me. I remember a bunch of my girlfriends sent me a package, like secretly in the mail, telling me all the things they thought were wrong with me. I can remember being put in detention for failing to show up with lunch money one day. I mean it was like, just... I had no point of connection really with anyone. You know, because everybody else... this is Kentucky, lots of horse people, lots of very nice white upper-middle-class families, and I'm the child of a musician and a librarian. I don't have two of nothing. I'm there because my dad taught me how to play guitar, not because I had lessons.

It was like being Dawn Wiener, like any classic movie outcast. I was absolutely so dysfunctionally thrown into this mix and I think, were it not for my parents, I would have been less defiant, but what I can remember is being completely defiant, the entire time. And I remember going to school and having, you guys are all so young, but there used to be a thing called cassingles. It would be like a tape that had a single on one side and then there would be the B side, and you could get these for like $1.50 at the mall or whatever, and that was like a big treat, if I could go to the mall and get this.

I had my little black zipper bag of cassingles that I loved, and it was like Black Box, Public Enemy “911 is a Joke,” which had on the other side of it, “Revolutionary Generation,” which was the song, I wish that I had brought it here with me today, I'd play it for you, and we will play some things at some point, but the song that unlocked my brain in some kind of primal way. And it really was the path out of whatever land I was in before then. I was defiant, and absolutely hated by everyone.

Lauren Martin

Well you didn't stay there for very long, did you, because you made a point of leaving Kentucky and taking on like the mixtape legacy, didn't you? You got involved in the rave scene at like 14 years old.

The Black Madonna

Yes. I'm not kidding you when I say that I heard about the rave scene on a show called Beverly Hills 90210. I really liked the dance music, but I didn't know anybody else that liked it. I was always looking for signs of life. I feel like one of those things that listens for alien sounds, but all I had, I real briefly lived in Tennessee, and so really the only thing I had going for me at that point was TV. There were two things. I watched your normal TV, and 90210 was such a big show at the time, and then also there was a show called Club MTV, which later became The Grind. Club MTV for a brief and shining moment, I think it was filmed in the Palladium, and Downtown Julie Brown was the host, and a lot of those kind of breakthrough ’90s British house crossover records and some of them were Belgian stuff, were played on that show. And even things like LaTour “People are Still Having Sex,” which probably none of you all remember.

There were these kind of like club hits that crossed over and they would have dancers, but then I heard about raves on 90210, and then when I got back to Kentucky I had this job in a coffee shop and some kids that were graduating high school, from the high school I was getting ready to start in the fall, broke me out of the house that I was in and drove me an hour and a half north to a party in Cincinnati called Sonic Two, as in Sonic the Hedgehog. And you could play Sonic the Hedgehog on this big screen, and of course everybody was on acid and stuff. The second that I got there I knew I was done. I can remember them having to peel me off the speaker, and I remember exactly what I was wearing at this moment.

Lauren Martin

What were you wearing?

The Black Madonna

I was wearing a mini skirt, black and white striped Alice in Wonderland tights, and a blue velvet tuxedo jacket. And I had purple hair, shaved off underneath and pulled up into this beehive thing. It was really a look.

Lauren Martin

Was it? Was it almost like the candy raver type aesthetic that was going on?

The Black Madonna

It didn't exist yet. At this point everybody wanted to be like, Lady Miss Kier. It was more of that kind of like, club kid, New York, 1990.

Lauren Martin

More fab than candy.

The Black Madonna

Psychedelic. Very like knock off Pucci print tights and stuff like that, big Alice headbands and things. I can remember them physically having to pull me out of there and like, “I never want to go home again, I can't go back to high school, I don't want to do this.” Just completely devastated that I could not go to this world forever. And as it turned out, actually you can.

Lauren Martin

Because you actually left... You didn't start high school? You left at 16 and just went, “This is it for me.”

The Black Madonna

I went to high school for one year, and I got all As and Fs. It was completely miserable at the time, I mean the bullying at this point, I don't know if I can overstate it if I tried. It was so bad that I had a teacher that made me take my classes in his office so that class could continue without disruption. Because I was so different, I mean this is Kentucky, this is the buckle of the Bible belt, extreme evangelicals and I'm this psychedelic 14 year old. I hadn't taken drugs but I was just like naturally that strange and my whole family backed it up. They're like, “Yeah, cool, you look great.”

I went to raves during my first high school year. I made two friends in high school, or three friends, who I still have to this day.

Lauren Martin

That's more than most do, to be honest from high school.

The Black Madonna

Right.

Lauren Martin

That's good.

The Black Madonna

Who were also ravers. This little group of us, at that time, got involved in what I now understand to be the nucleus of the north American rave scene, at the very, very, I mean the literal first parties that existed.

Lauren Martin

I would love to talk about the rave scene in the Midwest at that point because I think people who are familiar with American dance music tropes think of the big cities like Chicago, Detroit, New York. They have a sense of like hip-hop in LA, and it's very like a coastal, not necessarily metropolitan, but large city kind of sounds that emit from that. But there were millions of people in between those coasts, and there are vast waves of States and places to travel and raves that happened in the Midwest that were very distinct from that, had their own flavor. Could you talk about how they were different, and what about it attracted you to it?

The Black Madonna

The thing to remember about the Midwest rave scene is that Chicago and Detroit are in the Midwest.

Lauren Martin

I mean like not big cities.

The Black Madonna

I say that to say this which is that, for the same reason that if you're from the UK and you grew up in the ’90s you probably went to a lot of raves out in fields. We had a lot of those too, because we have a lot of fields in the Midwest. A lot of farms, and a lot of kids that had college money that they needed to blow on something stupid. There are a lot of warehouses in the Midwest because of manufacturing. What happened was that after about 1992, there really weren't enough people that each city would have a party each weekend. What would happen is that one city in what we loosely called the Midwest, but Kentucky really isn't the Midwest, it's sort of the mid-South or Southeast, but this loose belt of cities, going down to Nashville and Memphis, and up to St. Louis, and Chicago, and Minneapolis, basically anywhere that wasn't New York or wherever, that you could drive five or six hours between them, all became this kind of connection. There was actually an alliance for a while called, I think, Gathering of the Vibes.

Lauren Martin

It sounds like you just made that up on the spot, to be fair.

The Black Madonna

No, I think that's what it was called. Gathering of the Vibes. It was all the different promoters that would kind of like trade information and promotional routes and support and so we would all drive. I mean we were thousands of people every weekend. I did so largely from 1994 to 1998. I spent about four years not only attending raves but selling mixtapes at raves because the internet wasn't good enough to download a DJ mix. If you wanted to hear a DJ mix you either had to go to a rave or buy a tape from me or one of maybe three or four other people. Even that was such a small nucleus of people. The result of that was that I got to watch a magic irreplaceable moment in American dance music culture unfold in a way that almost no one else did and it was... I mean I got to see the first Plastikman live performance ever and sleep on his floor afterwards.

I got to see Derrick Carter when he first broke through as this revelation in just the technique of playing house records. I got to see Aphex Twin in the woods in Wisconsin and I got to stand three feet from Daft Punk on two hits of acid without their helmets and watched them do this live performance. All of these things because I worked. That was how I made my money and there was really only one or two a weekend so basically I got to see it all. It was an experience that will never be duplicated. A lot of it was hard and sad and a lot of those people who did get super involved in drugs and stuff just didn't make it out. I'm lucky that I had a pretty healthy family and never really got too wild, but in general I feel extremely… it was just the right place at the right time.

Lauren Martin

I'm wondering about, we talk about the values and the ideas and kind of the politics of being involved in something that's special at that kind of time. I know people aren't born with values and ideas, they're developed, they're grown over time. Can you remember something that happened in that scene that kind of made you stop feeling like the teenage girl from Kentucky and feel like somebody that, something radical was happening and there were ideas developing within you that kind of made you who you are?

The Black Madonna

Yeah. I mean, I was very lucky because the person that really became my, as much as you can say this, my parent in that world is a guy named JJ Haus. JJ at the time ran the computer lab at the University of Kentucky which had the internet and the internet was really, as it was being built, I can remember him being like, “They're building this thing that's called the web. Someday you're not going to have to type in 75 numbers and know exactly where you're going to get the information you want.” The people in that community that were kind of the net ravers, there was a really heavy philosophical component and if you look online there's a few people that are starting to really scan the [inaudible], rave zines were like a huge thing and I have a ton of them too.

There was this kind of psychedelic utopian and maybe in some ways naïve aspect of the things that we believed we were a part of at the time. I look back at it now and I know that raves were much more dangerous than I imagined them to be. Some of that was my teenage hopefulness, but there was always a heavy political component. We talked about things like temporary autonomous zones and we were all students of the KLF. There was a very kind of friendly anarchist rave utopian... it was always an aspect of it. I don't know that we were good at acknowledging the problems that were in our scene. I think we thought of ourselves as outside of the world and of course dance music is in the world. Dance music is on Earth, which means it had sexism and racism and classism and every other -ism. It's everywhere. It's in every club, it's in every rave, there's no escaping it and it's something if you really do care about it you have to tangle with it, but at the time we were very blissfully unaware.

For the most part, I have to say, things were pretty peaceful. I can remember the first time that there was a drug overdose at a rave in the Midwest and it was a big fucking deal. It was like, “We have to talk about this. There are real drugs here now. Somebody got hurt.” And there was massive conversations about it. The girl that overdosed came back and actually spoke to everybody on this one message board. It was like, “Someone was harmed at a party.” Can you imagine this now? It's like, how many kids died at Mega Rave XYZ this weekend. Within three or four years it was just so far the opposite it was like when there was the big, huge GHB explosion in the late ’90s in the rave scene.

These parties in the Midwest came with a body count by a certain point and there were kids that died constantly. Like any scene, people start with one thing and they graduate to another. Eventually people were doing heroin and all of those things happened. People went from all the lovey dovey stuff to a certain component, graduated up and then things got very, very dark. I would say late ’90s, early 2000s. That's when I left and went to college.

Lauren Martin

It seems like the music, the idealism of that time is really contrasted with the reality of it and I don't like to use the phrase “music as escapism,” but was there an element of that once that reality kicked in that the music was a more important vehicle than ever?

The Black Madonna

In the beginning it really wasn't even that much escapism. You have to remember, this is before the world was ending. Bill Clinton was President, MTV still showed videos, income was going up in America, not down, people had jobs. There were bad things that happened of course, but there really was kind of a like, in general, America was much more hopeful at the time. This is also shortly after the fall of communism. There was a lot of kind of idealistic stuff floating around about that and it was just a different time. So it was more, as much as anything, I think the rave scene was kind of an outgrowth of this maybe delusional sense of and false sense of optimism that we had. In the end of what I would call that era, once we get to 1997, 1998, 1999, at that point, the drugs got hard and the music got extremely shitty. It was kind of like dark times. Only now is America recovering.

Lauren Martin

On a slightly happier note, is there something that you can play from that rave time that actually encapsulates that lovely moment of everything coming together well...

The Black Madonna

Oh sure.

Lauren Martin

... and then we can get on to the darkness. We can get into the darkness.

The Black Madonna

No, no, no. It's okay. We can stick on this stuff.

Lauren Martin

We can stick in the darkness. OK, we'll stay in the darkness.

The Black Madonna

Let's see.

Lauren Martin

What have we got?

The Black Madonna

Well, I can tell you something that was… in the beginning… I think rave music, there just wasn't as much of it and so the stuff that we had was the same stuff that everybody else had. Some of it was things like this, like Altern 8...

I had all of the... I was there. I had the gas mask.

(music: Altern 8 – “E-Vapor-8”)

When I first started going to raves this was really the kind of thing that was super big. I mean this and a lot of Belgian, early happy hardcore, stuff like... Oh, I can remember seeing Moby in this abandoned cathedral and him doing “Next is the E” and things like that. Eventually there wasn't that much house music in super early American or Midwestern rave culture. It was more whistles and shit like that.

Lauren Martin

Just a whole bunch of whistles.

The Black Madonna

American techno starts creeping in more. Proper Detroit techno and proper Chicago house kind of were slow to seep in. At first we were all really duplicating I think what we imagined as this Summer of Love thing. It's like, “Oh, it's finally come here. Get a whistle, and everything's neon, and have smart drinks, and take 35 hits of acid,” and all this kind of stuff. Then eventually we started to hear, Speedy J had a really big rave hit. You probably won't even believe this is Speedy J.

(music: Speedy J – “Pull Over”)

… When I play them now, it's like I've got a magic trick or something. It's phenomenal.

Lauren Martin

What happened after the whistles. Was there an after the whistles?

The Black Madonna

Yeah, several things happened. Real techno started coming in, you would see like Claude Young at raves and Juan Atkins and that was like, “Holy shit.” Like Jeff Mills at a rave like [makes head explode] you know? I'm a white girl from the mountains in eastern Kentucky and I walk into a rave and it's fucking Jeff Mills, and you know. It's like, “What is he doing?” That started to happen, and then the thing that really, completely blew my mind and I can remember exactly where I was, I was 18 years old. I was at a party called Sittori in Cincinnati Ohio, and I'm going to admit it, somebody gave me a very strong hit of LSD and I walked into what they said was the jungle room and I thought that it was going to have plants and stuff. (laughs) I'm like, “Cool, sounds great. I need to chill out man.”

I remember walking up the staircase, and it's so funny what you remember. I had this hallucination that the guardrail was a snake. I was like, “Oh this is some really... This is fucked up.” I walked into the jungle room and I heard this, or something like this.

(music: Congo Natty – “Junglist Soldier”)

I looked really good in camo. (laughs)

Lauren Martin

Amazing.

The Black Madonna

I had an Ecko camo hat before it was spelled with a K, before they had to change their name.

Lauren Martin

Amazing. That was very vivid, thank you very much for that. I enjoyed that a lot. When you left Kentucky and that particular scene, how did you start mixing records? I've heard a lot about the influence, the fashion, this humor, the politics, the values. When did you get to the point where you thought, “I kind of want to do this.”

The Black Madonna

That actually started happening when I was in Kentucky. I started, as a lot of people do, on college radio. There was a very terrible college radio station at the University of Louisville called WLCV 1390 AM, which no longer exists. It broadcast in about a three-block ratio. The main selling point of this radio station was that they had speakers in the student activity center and they had turntables. As with many jobs that I have had, I went in and offered to do anything, and within a month and a half had basically stormed the castle and took over the whole thing. I was the general manager immediately. I come in and under such innocent auspices. When the school would shut down for Spring Break they would just put on a playlist and everybody would leave. Because I worked there I was able to stay on campus over Spring Break and I had keys to the station.

Right when I started college, my mother, god bless her, I had been at my grandmother's house and I was asleep on the couch and having one of those great naps that you can only have in your grandmother's house. My mother woke me up from this dead sleep holding a Roger & Zapp record. I was like, “What? What do you want?” She was like, “Do you want this?” I was like, “Yes, but where did this come from?” We're way out in the country. She was like, “Oh I was at this junk store and there was a whole box of these, I think they belong to some DJ and they all have this guy's name on them,” and they were from the late ’70s and early ’80s. She's like, “Do you want to go back and look?” We went back and found this entire DJ’s, clearly from Ohio, which is actually a really big center for funk in America, Dayton in particular, Dayton and Cincinnati, we found some Ohio funk DJ's entire funk collection.

Lauren Martin

How big was the collection? Do you remember?

The Black Madonna

It had to be 3- or 400 pieces. At first we were pulling sections of it out one at a time because they'd been mixed in with other vinyl stuff. Then the guy who ran the place, or lady I can't remember, but they said, “Oh we have a barn.”

Lauren Martin

A barn of records?

The Black Madonna

A barn of records outside of Somerset, Kentucky. There we found the complete collection.

Lauren Martin

How big was the complete collection?

The Black Madonna

Oh, it was probably, we got it in pieces over time, I would say probably a thousand records, all marked. Not particularly well cared for, but not particularly damaged either, I mean very playable. I started my college radio career with those, but I didn't know how to DJ. I'm trying to do stuff that even... the process of learning how to mix soul, and disco and unsequenced records is something that you can spend your whole life doing. It makes regular normal DJing with house and techno, that's like training wheels compared to playing those kind of records artfully on a technical level. I started off trying to play those. One day on the air I accidentally mixed two records together.

Lauren Martin

What do you mean accidentally?

The Black Madonna

I pushed the crossfader over and they were on. One was OutKast, “I'll Call Before I Come” and The other one was Isley Brothers, “Between the Sheets”. It's a great mix now if you try to do it yourself. I was like, “Wait I get it.” Once I started trying to do it, it was like I could DJ very quickly and then the one fateful Spring Break where everyone was gone, I put on the playlist and put the speakers on audition and I DJed for a week straight, 12 hours a day, and would go pee, get a slice of pizza, and come back. Then after that I bought turntables and had them in my dorm room inside my room. Within… six months I was playing professionally. It was immediate. I was like, this is it.

Lauren Martin

Do you think your knack to pick up really quickly came from making mixtapes and selling them and knowing how to put a mixtape together?

The Black Madonna

Absolutely. Also you have to remember I did go to a special school for the arts. I grew up in composition. I'm the child of a musician. I grew up playing by ear, by the age of four or five. I still can't read music, but I write fairly complicated stuff without any formal skill. My brain just works like that. I don't mean to say this in a way that sounds cocky or whatever but some people have a photographic memory and I have a really phonographic memory. Once I hear a melody or even a mix or a whole section of things, my brain memorizes it. I can play back something if I'm interested in it, I can play it back in my mind like a tape, like any mixtape that I loved. If you handed me a notebook, I could diagram each mix and when it came in, what the record was. I was not cognizant of that until I started DJing. The guys that I learned to DJ with at the same time did not learn as fast as me. It was because of this weird audio. My memory for audio is very good.

Lauren Martin

OK. Why did you want to move to Chicago?

The Black Madonna

I did not want to move to Chicago.

Lauren Martin

Why did you not want to move to Chicago?

The Black Madonna

Because it's cold. It is fast and people are not as friendly as they are in Kentucky, and because I was afraid and I thought everybody was mean and unfriendly. Now when I go home to Kentucky, everybody's like, “What happened to you? Your attitude's a little different.” What I realized is that people in Chicago were just much more direct. In Kentucky, no one says anything directly. It was very like, you would make a pie for somebody you wished death on. It's very like, “Bless your heart.” Which is like, “I hope you fucking die.”

Lauren Martin

In Chicago, they say, “I hope you fucking die,” right?

The Black Madonna

In Chicago it's like, “I don't even know her.” What happened though is one of the guys that used to be my competition in the mixtapes I sold, started a label group called Dust Traxx, which became 45 labels and actually Paul Johnson, whom I'm playing with tonight, was the first official A&R for Dust Traxx. It's still technically his imprint. A very interesting guy named Radek Hawryszczuk, white Polish guy from Chicago, lived in a house with his family. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe at the time, the Dust Traxx had been founded, Radek was actually in college to become a cop. He lived in this big multi-generational family. The family owned a bakery. Dust Traxx started because Radek was at a party and he heard the record “Work That Motherfucker” and was like, “This is the greatest thing I've ever heard in my life.” He became friends with Paul and they put out the first Dust Traxx releases. Dust Traxx became a label group. Then it became a distributor and then it became a digital distributor. At the time that Dust Traxx was making the jump to digital, we had no idea what we were doing. They brought me in to try to figure out how to turn records into mp3s and sell them. I did. I was actually one of the first people to work in that field. We were one of the first distributors to work closely with all of the digital stores that still exist now, and many others that died painful deaths along the way. My competition from the mixtape hustle wouldn't leave me alone. He was like, “You're the only one who can do this job.” Finally I gave in and decided to do it and I moved into this house with him. All of my other co-workers...

Lauren Martin

How big was this house? I don't think it was very luxurious from what I remember you saying before.

The Black Madonna

Actually the house itself is very nice but the room I lived in was a converted tool shed. It flooded all the time. Chicago has a flooding problem. I lived in the basement and it flooded all the time. As the years went on, I made it up into the penthouse of this house called West Eddie. The house itself was really magical. A lot of incredible things happened there.

I remember when Daft Punk was in town. Radek used to talk about how he knew Daft Punk. It was one of those things we always assumed was bullshit until they pulled their tour bus up in front of West Eddie when they were there for Lollapalooza and Radek called me at work and said, “I need you to come home and start cooking.” I was like, “Why?” He's like, “Because Daft Punk is here and we're going to have a BBQ.” I was like, “Yeah, har, har” and put the phone down. He calls back and he's like, “Get home now and stop at the store and get two bags of potatoes and whatever it is you use to make that macaroni and cheese and we're going to make chicken on the grill. Daft Punk is here right now. Their tour bus is here. Get home.” I went home and lo and behold Daft Punk was in my fucking backyard. This is right after I moved to Chicago. It was one of the most astounding things that's ever happened to me in my whole life.

It's so funny. Radek's mother, this lovely Polish woman named Stasha. Stasha goes, “Oh yes, I remember this Thomas [Bangalter]. He was here in the ’90s. He was too skinny. I gave him five dollars to go to McDonald's.” (laughs)

Lauren Martin

Like a good Polish mother does.

The Black Madonna

Totally, I'm sure she filled him full of paczki. I worked there for a while. I had a little melt down, I was like, “I don't want to do dance music anymore.” I went and took a very terrible copywriting job for two years in a windowless office and I wrote about women's underwear and things like Spanx and corsets and girdles. It was for a store that sold all this and so I would write these extremely technical descriptions of this. Then one day smartbar called.

Lauren Martin

What did smartbar say?

The Black Madonna

First off I want to say hi to Joe and Tara. Where are you? Joe Shanahan, the founder and owner of smartbar. Smartbar is America's, and I think it's the world's, oldest dance club. Sub Club says they're the oldest but we're older than them.

Lauren Martin

Excuse me, Glaswegian over here, I’ll argue with that.

The Black Madonna

We're definitely older than Sub Club. (laughs) Sorry. I love you Sub. I'll see you guys in a month. In 1982, first guest was Frankie Knuckles. Everybody on Earth that you've ever heard of has played there. It's a crossing point for anybody into the American underground, and I think it's bar none the most important club that still exists, and I can remember my friend Jason Garden and I in the club one night before we worked there, we said, “Wouldn't it be great if we took over smartbar someday?”

One day, one of my old co-workers from Dust Traxx called me and he said, “Hey, what are you doing?” I said, “Nothing.” He goes, “What do you do for a living right now?” I said, “I'm writing about women's underwear.” He's like, “Hey, I want you to come put in a job application at smartbar.’ I was like, “OK.” He goes, “By the way, don't tell anybody this, but I'm leaving next year and when I do, you'll probably take over the whole thing.” I was like, “What?” I went in and I sat down with Joe, and I can say in my entire life, in the whole history of people that I've met, there's a tiny handful that I knew that, “This person is going to be in your life and change it forever.” The minute I sat down with Joe, I knew that would happen, and I knew at first I was going to be given the assistant job, which is a job typically done by people in their 20s, and at this point I'm 35 or whatever, but I was willing to do anything, and I did. I did. When I started, I would scrape gum out of the DJ booth with my fingernails, and... I would do anything. I wanted so much to be a part of this, and then eventually Nate did move on, and I stepped in as the buyer for the club, and I was the first woman buyer in 30 years, and overnight my life changed.

Lauren Martin

I'm very curious to know about... you've said before you didn't really play outside the States for at least the first ten years of your DJing much.

The Black Madonna

Oh, 15.

Lauren Martin

Ten, 15. OK.

The Black Madonna

I didn't have a passport three years ago.

Lauren Martin

Wow. I'm curious about this because I think it's very interesting. Part of the reason I want people to understand the depths to which you were involved in various parts of the US original rave scene is that having played for so many years for better or for worse in different places around the States, and having not really traveled out of the States, you had a really intimate knowledge of the widespread, varied dance music culture in the States. When you became a buyer, did that become part of the idea of smartbar, not just to bring in people from abroad, but to celebrate what's actually here and what was undervalued?

The Black Madonna

Yeah, that was always it. Number one, the second, and I waited for this job, I knew exactly what I wanted. Number one, you couldn't be a resident unless you were a special guest, unless you lived in Chicago. There was no being a resident from afar.

Also, we kind of went in, and it was like hardcore, old school, American, Midwest techno and house, period. No bullshit, no Burner techno, no... none of that. That's all fine, but as far as the identity of the club, and the club is wonderful because anyone can play there. If you come, if you play dubstep, you can come to smartbar, and we are a perfect venue for that. If you play hardcore, you can come... anything. The club itself is a blank slate. That's why so many people had passed through those gates.

As far as the residents' program is concerned, I wanted to identify and reinstate the value of North American house music, and North American techno in the most serious, legitimate, underground way that we were able to do that. Not only that, not only people that we liked what they were playing, but people who were involved in the feeding and caring of the underground scene. We put emphasis on people that had their own underground events. We did something at the time which I caught an enormous amount of shit for, but we went through and we decided we were going to have a more diverse residence program. It wasn't just going to be men. Now, dance music talks about this kind of stuff all the time, but you have to understand, four years ago, the shit that I caught for what I did in Chicago, you cannot imagine. Whole threads on Facebook, “Who does she think she is?” “What, I can't DJ there anymore if I'm not making records?” Every other club on Earth is mostly DJs who are also producing.

We set some standards and values, and if you were going to be a DJ who was just a selector, you had to be so fucking good. You had to be Mike Servito. You had to be that person. Or, even Derrick Carter doesn't make many records anymore. He's Derrick fucking Carter. Right? I think, at the time, there was this sense in America, in dance music in general, that if you were just like a bro in the sea and everybody got a turn. I didn't have that sense at all. I was like, “You know what? I got one shot at this, and if dance music is really a meritocracy, which is what you guys have been telling me the whole time, and why I'm not allowed to play this and that, woah... it's just not going to work, it's a meritocracy. We don't have a place for you here. This isn't marketable, this guy has more experience, x, y, z.” OK. If you want dance music to be a meritocracy, smartbar is a meritocracy now. Then what? People lost their fucking shit.

I got so much hate mail, at first, and then all of a sudden things started to change. You started to see smartbar in the press, and people really... the way that I felt about it, I think... and I started to tour at the same time. The day that I moved my stuff into my desk, I moved one desk over, I became the buyer, I used to come in really early, before anybody. Joe remembers this. It would be me and maybe the accountant. I would come in early, because I'm an early bird, and just have my coffee, and whatever, and this person that had kind of been talking to me about coming to Europe said, “Hey, can I call you?” I said, “OK.” Nothing had happened. She's like, “Do you want to come to Europe someday?” We just never really talked about it again. I submitted a mix through this one series, and nothing happened. The day that I move my desk over to the new job, she called me and said, “I got you your first job in Europe.” I said, “OK, what is it?” She goes, “You're going to play at Panorama Bar.” I was like, “What?” She was like, “You need to get a passport.” I was like, “A passport?” “This is in two-and-a-half months. You need to get a passport right now.”

My time as the buyer at smartbar and my time as a touring DJ kind of happened in tandem, and I think we couldn't have planned it any better, but it became this circular thing, where, because people would listen to what I had to say as a DJ, they wanted to see what we were doing in smartbar, and all of the things that I got shit for, and I got so much, really personal stuff, even things like... I can remember there was a time this really atrocious dude who's now in jail for revenge porn, whatever his name is, Hunter Moore, who's also a DJ, was playing in Chicago and I said something about it. I can remember people tearing me a new asshole for even daring, in my role, even as a human being, to speak out about it.

Now I think people know that I have a big mouth, and accept it, but at the time there was a lot of boat rocking, and it was really, really difficult, and I give Joe credit for sticking with me because I think a lot of people would have been afraid, but Joe was so steady and reassuring to me, and he never wavered, and even when it was time for me to step out of the position and hand it over to my assistant, who is now the buyer, Jason Garden, who's an accomplished DJ and producer in his own right, Joe stuck with me and we still have this close relationship, and now I work with the club in different ways, but it was such a… at the time, to go from this windowless office to all of this in a period of just a few months, it was disorienting.

Lauren Martin

Do you have a piece of music that we could play that kind of sums up the energy of smartbar, and the feeling of what you wanted to do with the club?

The Black Madonna

You know, I don't think you can really… smartbar is such a unique space. If there's one track that I would say always makes me think of smartbar, it's this one, and I… there are a few memorable times in my mind where I can remember hearing it played. Right after we lost Frankie, but even before then. This track called “The Pressure” by Sounds of Blackness and Frankie-produced. It's such an emblematic song for Chicago in general, but just so many times, I can remember having very emotional moments in the club to this, where people would kind of stop everything and let it play, so I'll do the same thing...

(music: The Sounds of Blackness – “The Pressure” / applause)

Lauren Martin

We'll just tease you with it.

The Black Madonna

I don't want to say that smartbar is just house music, because obviously it isn't, but there is no moment in our club that is purer and more transformative than when Chicago really is its most Chicago. We do everything well, and like I said, the club itself is a blank slate, but there is just something that happens in Chicago that, when it happens, is unmatched. There's a million ways to describe it. I think if you were a religious person, you would call it the Holy Spirit. I don't mean that… I mean it absolutely in earnest. There's a thing that happens, and it doesn't happen everywhere else. There's a really… there's this great video of this guy at… Chosen Few is this great DJ collective in Chicago, and they do this picnic, it's like 50,000 people every year, which you've never heard of, and they also do events around the city of Chicago, and I saw this amazing video of this… the guy had to be, like, 47, white dude, and they're playing in front of the Daley Center in Chicago, which is kind of the area of a lot of professionals, and this guy is just getting it. The top comment was just like, “Yup! House ghost got him.” (laughs) I thought, “That's it. The house ghost.” It's this thing, and you see it in other places, but there is something about Chicago that remains undefeated.

Lauren Martin

OK, to break the love spell a little bit, you're saying that smartbar does everything well, and Chicago does pretty much everything well, but not everywhere does everything well, or, well, just at all. You've become quite known for a brief… what's been dubbed a manifesto of thoughts and feelings about dance music, but one particular line of it, just the last sentence of it, is, “Dance music does not need more of the status quo.” I'm curious, having traveled around the US, traveled around the world in recent years now that you've got a passport, what have you noticed as the contemporary status quo, and what do we need less of it? What needs to be more radical about it?

The Black Madonna

Well, one thing I would say is that if you're a white person in dance music, you need to figure out how to help the people and put on the people that inspire you, and they are most likely not white people. I think being cognizant of that and the idea of using whatever influence… for me, I would say this is a big thing, is to try to offset any kind of interest or privilege I have. Privilege is a word that's thrown around a lot, and I don't mean to become too deeply philosophical about this other than to say I think we all need to think about doing what's right, and let's just take this out of pure politics and philosophy and just talk about humanity, and just think about what's the right thing to do. I get this wrong all the time, but I have tried really hard to do better and to pay my debt to the people that have given me so much, and it's always a process and I'm always trying to get better.

For example, when I did the record that sampled the crowd on the Rohan video, rather than just sample it, we talked to Rohan, we made sure it was okay. We put him on the other side of the record, and then I made him a resident at smartbar. That's an example of a time where I felt like I got it right, because he was my hero, but people were paying attention to the record that I made instead of him. I mean, him too, but I felt like it wouldn't be right to just do this record that was a tribute to him and not literally pay tribute to him, and that's an example of a time where I felt like that was how I want to do things. There have been many times that I have not gotten it right, but the status quo is always going to lean white and affluent and whatever, and I think any time you can do your best to pay back the people that create this thing that we love, I do strongly believe that dance music is for everyone. I know from my personal relationship with many of the people that we enshrine in the history of dance music that those people are proud of the way that house music and things like that… or, many of them, the people that I know, are proud of the way that house music truly is global, and that's great, but if it's global, we need to think about what we can do as a planet for the people in Chicago who created this music.

There are a lot of things that… I think anything you do is good. For me, the way that I designed the residence program at smartbar, there was one thing, was just to try to think a little bit more about… another word that's overused is diversity, but I think as much as anything, I just wanted to have a lot of different viewpoints, and I felt that it would affect the club in a positive way and it would reflect our city more accurately, so it wasn't just a matter of theoretically doing the right thing, it was a matter of making the club better, and I think that happened. I think we all need to be thinking about things like conservation if we really care about house music.

Most of you all here are young folks, and one thing that we all need to be mindful of, as that first generation of people in house music are getting older, is caring for them and conserving their legacies. I have been honored and privileged to work with the Frankie Knuckles Foundation, with Joe also, and that… it's a nonprofit organization that has several missions. One of them is to care for and expand Frankie's global message as an ambassador of house music, but some of it is just about archival stuff. We've worked, sections of our organization have worked to just preserve his record collection. Some of it is about… some of it is simple stuff, like making sure people are not abusing his likeness, and I think that when we talk about, “We don't need more of the status quo,” the status quo has shifted in dance music, and some of that just comes with being… we're a bigger pool now, but whatever your piece is, whatever thing you decide to do, for me, it means the stuff that I do with smartbar and the stuff that I've done with the Foundation and other things, even things like, I'm pretty active in taking parts of my DJ fee and donating them to several things like… a few pet causes, but one of them is bailing out protesters in Chicago. All of those things are things we're… I just think that that's my job, to pay back into the community that has given us so much, but each person can do that in their own way, and it doesn't have to be a hyper-political message. It can just be a message of humanity and empathy, and whatever way works for you. (applause)

Lauren Martin

We've talked a lot about your work, your ideas, but I'd really like to talk about your music. Your own music. I think the romantic sincerity with which you do everything is also in your own sound, and I think that personally, you play very deliberately with the genre in a very interesting way. Disco seems like the lovely gold thread through a lot of it. I thought it'd be great if we could play a track that you would like to talk about.

The Black Madonna

One of my own?

Lauren Martin

Yeah, absolutely. I think people would be very curious.

The Black Madonna

Right now, I'll just give you guys a little… I'm working, right now, on a new project, and I've kind of returned to an older way of making things, and I have… I'm working with live musicians to make disco. It's a much slower, more difficult, much rending of clothing and pulling of hair, but all of that started, for me, when I shifted… when I first started making records, I made techno under a different name. It wasn't very good. It was very normal, kind of minimal bleepy-bloopy kind of stuff, which was good to learn but was not something I really felt strongly about. The big turning point for me came when I got really super into Metro Area, as I'm sure many people are, and I thought, “Oh, I wish I could make a record like that.”

Of course, I failed disastrously, but I did start to make real disco and to write these sort of 20-piece arrangements with strings and things like this, and now I'm doing it all with live stuff, and I cannot wait for you guys to hear that. I cannot play it for you now, but it will be out in November. The next big single that I've been working on with Davide Rossi, who is the string arranger for Röyksopp and Goldfrapp and a lot of people, and I finally got my little orchestra that I always wanted. Guy named Christoforo LaBarbera, who is the jazz musician John LaBarbera's son, and I've been working with Rupert Murray, who is my longtime friend and partner, to kind of return to an older way of doing things, but the first time that I took a step out into this world was with the first record on Argot, and a song called “A Jealous Heart Never Rests”, and this was the record that sent me to Europe, and it was also my first foray into making disco a little more like the way that people used to make it, and not “nu disco” stuff. I don't even know what that is.

(music: The Black Madonna – “A Jealous Heart Never Rests” / applause)

Lauren Martin

It sounds so lush with the strings in it. Could you tell everybody how you started to make that on your own because I know originally right at the start you were quite slavish about doing everything yourself.

The Black Madonna

I used to have a production partner and we stopped working together and afterwards I remember that I had said something on Facebook and he made a little jab at me and said to another guy on Facebook, "Hey so and so, why don't you go help her make a track." I thought, “I am never going to be in that position again, I am never working with anyone, I am definitely not working with a man," and for many years I did not. I wouldn't even let a guy mix it down. I wouldn't let anyone touch it until it was time for it to go, until it went to be pressed to a record.

I mean it's just stories all this time. What poet was I just reading about? That like half of her works ended up getting credited to her husband, I mean it's just the most, it was a very sensitive topic for me and so I was like, "Well that's over and my career has failed and so I'm going to make these records that sound exactly like what I want and no one’s going to touch them. And if they sit on SoundCloud forever and collect dust then that's fine. Everybody can eat it but I will have at least made records that I care about.” And that's when I made all the records that anybody ever cared about. (applause)

For the record, they did sit on SoundCloud for like three years. I mean they did, you used to be able to download the master to this off of SoundCloud, it was really very, these were not desirable. I mean at the time that I made this was really when we were in the throws of drug chug ketamine techno and I couldn't have made anything that was more oppositional to this kind of phony euphoric bro shit.

Lauren Martin

It actually very much reminds me of how Björk said that as somebody who is always creating and is to be quite frank genius, there's always a sense that she is still breaking through with her ideas, this ingénue, this muse for other producers and she doesn't get her true credit. As somebody that well known, that talented, that diverse, faces those problems, how does someone that is to be quite frank, not Björk, face those problems?

The Black Madonna

Girl, Hillary Clinton had to debate Donald Trump last night. That dude hasn't read a book since he was reading coloring books and she's you know, she's a graduate of Yale Law School, she's a brilliant academic. Like her or hate her, she makes him look like a fool and she still has to suffer his questions gladly? I mean if anything in the history of the Earth has ever demonstrated the kind of shit that women have to put up with in terms of how their work is valued versus the way that men are graded on a curve, that's it. It was that way for me too, I mean it took me so long to get any credit for the things that I did. Just working in a duo was always assumed that… I don't know what it was assumed but it wasn't that I was the one driving anything.

I feel very lucky to have the production partner that I have now, Rupert Murray, who also works for Sound Investment who handles all the sound for smartbar in Chicago, he's just the best guy in the world. We share a brain and now that I'm doing this much more complicated stuff with, you know, I think we had 50 channels in this record that we just made. I'm so lucky to have him because he's the opposite of all of that but I don't think that I would have felt comfortable reaching out to work with other people until I had passed that thing where people knew that I would stand on my own merits. There was a period of time where they didn't know.

Lauren Martin

What do you still consider a radical idea?

The Black Madonna

I don't know if there are any radical ideas. I mean if there are, there are a lot of radical ideas probably in dance music but I'm not very interested in them. I mean I am glad that things like experimental music exists and I have learned to appreciate those things and I have profound respect for people who are pushing the margins, but as a listener I don't usually enjoy experimental music. I think that most musical experiments fail and a very few of them become things that work and I'm a very pragmatic DJ and a very pragmatic producer. I make records that make people want to go on the floor and dance and I DJ in such a way as to cause the most reaction from people and it's in a diplomatic way. It's not to say that I will choose the most low-hanging fruit, not at all but I am interested in provoking an explicit set of responses from people. Certain kinds of records do that.

I know that there are people who would want to do other things and I respect them and those are the people who will make the next acid house. When that thing happens and it works, I will play it but I am not an experimental musician. My husband has a very, “This music is interesting but boring,” and he loves all that stuff. That's totally his universe and I'm grateful that it's there because the things that emerge out of that stuff that do work like techno itself, like acid house, those things were all, those are experiments. Those experiments are ongoing and I'm glad that they happen.

As far as radical ideas, I am deeply pragmatic. I want records that achieve a very certain, I want you to feel a certain way, I want the room to look a certain way, I want you to have a certain set of feelings, I want to be in control of those things and I want to cross a lot of territory. I want to tell the story of the world and I want you to come along for it and I want you to feel a certain way and over 20 years of DJ and almost 20 years and however many years producing, I'm finally starting to understand how that works. For me I am not radical, I am pure pragmatism.

Lauren Martin

I think that's a pretty strong sentiment to end on so thank you very much the Black Madonna (applause). Does anybody have any questions for the Black Madonna? We'll get a mic to pass around. Does somebody got a mic, OK? Thank you.

Audience Member

I was just wondering if you could speak about your experience as a touring DJ whether you feel like when you're playing in Berlin are you being sort of an ambassador for smartbar and your upbringing in the Midwest to give these people who've never heard it a slice of that? Do you feel like you're doing that or is it more personal, these just are the songs I like.

The Black Madonna

I think that happened very accidentally but for sure and I've often said a lot of the times I'll got to a country and maybe somebody doesn't speak English and they'll say, “Chicago, smartbar, Frankie Knuckles,” and it's like I'm just a white girl from Kentucky but I don't think there's any escaping it. I also think that Chicago DJ culture is so different than the rest of the world because, and if you come tonight you'll see Paul Johnson and Sadar [Bahar] who are superhuman and then I want you to imagine yourself having to DJ in a city with them all the time. There is a kind of intense pressure in Chicago to be really, really, really good so that you don't embarrass yourself, and I think the ambient level of general dexterity and flexibility in the city of Chicago, you are required to know more things and do more things, and some of that goes with you. I always feel like every time a smartbar resident goes on tour for the first time, people kind of gasp and I'm proud of that, but there is a little bit of that. You carry the mantle of… some of that is just that there's only a few of us that lived to tell the tale, you know?

Only a few of us that come out of that ancient Midwest rave scene are still touring, it's me and Derek Plaslaiko and Mike Servito, and there's some of us that come out of that world, but a lot of those people from that first generation of American DJs, they really aren't touring, and they certainly aren't touring internationally. Our people that we loved, they were only famous in America, most of them, for a long time. My favorite DJ growing up was Terry Mullan. You guys probably don't know who that is, but he was like the baddest motherfucker on Earth. So I think, as much as anything, what it is, is that those of us that do come out of that universe, we are witnesses and repositories of a very brief but special time in dance music and we are armed with that as we go into the world.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Lauren Martin

Anyone else? Lords. OK, here we go. All the way behind you. That seems, everybody. I don't know, you pick.

Audience Member

Hi, I just have a brief question. What was the name of the track you played that represented smartbar? The one with the piano and the vocals? It's amazing track.

The Black Madonna

Yeah, it's really good. It's called “The Pressure.”

Audience Member

“The Pressure.”

The Black Madonna

Yeah, and…

Audience Member

Who made it?

The Black Madonna

I want to give you the complete, real information here. The group that it's by is Sounds of Blackness, but you can also find it on the… I recommend that you get the entire, there's a Frankie Knuckles anthology.

Audience Member

I know Frankie Knuckles, but I didn't know that production.

The Black Madonna

Yeah, right. It's one of the great ones. There's a recent one that's come out, and I believe even some of the proceeds go to benefit one of the foundations. It's got all the ones you want, and it's got this one.

Audience Member

Great! Thanks.

Lauren Martin

What about other people in that row just there?

Audience Member

Hello, just a quick question. You spoke about how you got into DJing and the whole backstory behind it, but obviously, you were around people who were producing as well. What made you get into producing music after DJing?

The Black Madonna

My friend Gavin told me that nobody would ever really pay me to tour unless I started making records, and he was right.

Audience Member

Awesome. Thank you.

Audience Member

Hello. I'm another person that grew up feeling different and weird in my environment and situation, and I was wondering if you could perhaps pass on some advice for other people who have gone through that or are going through that. Particularly for young women, because I think we definitely feel much more pressured to comply. Is there anything you'd like to pass on to those people?

The Black Madonna

Hang on by your fingernails, and don't listen. All I can tell you is that, for my entire career, nobody wanted anything to do with me until they did, and then everybody acted like it was the most natural thing in the world, and there was not a point until the last, really, two years that I was not met with total resistance at every level, and even… Oh my god, I can remember playing these terrible raves in Ohio, with some asshole headlining who was, whatever the idiot flavor of the month was, and thinking, “My god, this guy, he can not mix a cake.” I'm going to open for this dude, and I just remember thinking, “Man, I am going to eat your kids. You are dead.” (applause) Don't be afraid to feel that! At the time… you have to remember, things are so much better for women now. You do see women that have… with Discwoman and all these different groups, you see women that look all different kinds of ways. I was always sort of a weird-looking… I was not conventionally pretty, and all of these things, and I was made to feel so bad about it, and this was really… when I started DJing, this was really the era of the halter top woman DJ, and there were fantastic DJs, but there was this kind of, like… you were expected to, like, model, too, and a lot of them did. A lot of women DJs would also kind of model for headphone companies and be a woman in a halter top and then she's holding her headphones in some weird way. I'm just like, "What am I going to do?" I looked like somebody's mom when I was 27. I totally was not able to do this thing at all. All I can say is, things are changing, and I hope… boy, if there's one thing I can hope, if the fact that I am an extremely average-looking woman who did everything wrong can be useful to anyone else, then that is good enough for me, because you do not have to do it. You do not have to be a halter top DJ. Nobody wants that.

There's nothing wrong if you are that person, but you don't have… things are changing, and I swear to god, if nothing else, if I did one thing well, it was that I outlasted everyone. I was like a castle under siege. Whatever you can do to reinforce yourself spiritually and emotionally. Create a visualization… I know this sounds trippy, but I can't tell you… I always envisioned the most wild success and just really an unreasonable amount of optimism, which was completely unfounded. I think whatever you can do to reinforce your castle while it's under siege and, I hate to say it, just be better than everybody else. (applause)

Audience Member

Thank you.

The Black Madonna

You can be! You can be. You can be better than everybody else. Imagine the person that you love, and then imagine destroying them. I'm sorry, that is really… you're not supposed to say… I was hyper competitive. In my mind, in person, I was, “Oh it's very happy to be here, thank you so much. It's really an honor to be here,” and I'm thinking, “Just let me get on.”

Lauren Martin

Anyone else?

Audience Member

Thank you for making some extremely relevant points and ideas. Thank you. A short, maybe boring, and technical question, and if you don't want to share about it, it's fine if you want to keep it a secret. Before the world ends, could you talk a little about the strings sound you made? How you go about that, how you record, and the way you do that?

The Black Madonna

I'd be delighted. With the thing that I just played you, what I did was two things. I didn't have any money at the time, so I couldn't hire anyone, but a friend of mine sent me this amazing sample pack from, I think, the Philadelphia… some enormous well-regarded orchestra and it had all of the kinds of string sounds, like vibrato, pizzicato, etc. And it had it broken down by key, so I write the strings with one of the onboard string synthesizers in Logic, and then I had all these different drums and sample packs and things like this and that. I would load those into drum machines and then play all those by hand. Then I did the strings. I'd play those by hand, but then on top of the synthesized strings… I still use this. I did this on the new record as well, I always write in synthesizers.

In this case, I took the sample pack and I layered the real string on top of it, because the difficulty with string sounds is to get the texture of it right, and the humanity, the way that it sounds when you touch a thing to a thing. That's why string synthesizers tend to sound great, but not really like strings. They kind of have some of the aspects of it, but not the humanity, and so I took and I layered the real thing over it so that it would have the feeling, the scratchiness or the tenor of it, and I did that until I was able to get a real person to do it, and when I got a real person with the new record, I just played everything as I did with this, but then he replayed everything live, and it sounds even better. He's so phenomenal.

We layered… it's like a 50-piece… I deeply admire things like Salsoul Orchestra and Vince Montana and things like that, and I'm a huge Philadelphia disco freak, and of course Metro Area, who I should send royalty checks to for my failed attempts at someday becoming Morgan Geist, but yeah. It's just sleight-of-hand, essentially.

Lauren Martin

I think maybe we'll take one more for here, but if you really want to pick her brain, I'm sure she'll hang about a little bit later. Actually… OK, you have the mic.

Audience Member

Thank you very much for speaking, and for your passion and your honesty. It's been really great listening to you. I wanted to ask you about the curating aspect of the club. I'm real ignorant, I already forgot the name.

The Black Madonna

Smartbar.

Audience Member

Smartbar.

The Black Madonna

It's OK.

Audience Member

I wanted to ask you about… how do you feel about the Chicago kind of sound, in terms of… as a musical language, these kinds of sounds, this history, these references, versus a set of values, or a way of approaching music, like a certain type of atmosphere, like knowing the whole history of it. How do you find the balance between the two? Not to be always the same, but also not to lose that thing that you really like about it?

The Black Madonna

Well, with the residents program, what I found was that if we did it right, the sound matched our values, because the people who are still interested in things like Wax Trax! and industrial… which is a huge, a huge component of Chicago dance music. People always talk about house music, people don't talk about how important industrial is to our culture, or people that are interested in the various wave stuff. All that stuff is a massive part of Chicago culture, so when we went through, and you go, “Well, Chicago is house music,” it is also things like industrial and electro, and when you start to look for the people who are making that, what you end up with is, you end up with Derrick Carter, and you end up with the guys from Ben's Room, and you end up with everybody from Gramaphone, and you end up with Honey Dijon, and you end up with… The people who were doing those things that really represent the city and the history musically are the people who have always been doing those things, so you end up with a club that is incredibly diverse, and so I didn't find it hard to match our sound with our values, because the people who were doing this stuff… We weren't going to have, like, the ketamine house residency, you know? It was very easy to kind of… we just looked for the people who were doing the very best thing, and that's how we ended up with Hugo Ball, which is this phenomenal dadaist punk techno party, and it's badass. And Queen, which is not only this amazing house night, but has this phenomenal drag culture built into it. All of those things, you've got to be mindful of it, and I would be lying if I said I didn't look at the residents' list and go, "OK, how many women? How many trans folks? How many black folks? How many gay folks?" I did. I sat down with that matrix, but that was the last thing I did, not the first, and we didn't make choices based on that. What we found was that when we looked for who was doing the best and most interesting work in the city, it solved the problem and met our values, and I think the club grew and changed as a result of that.

Audience Member

Thank you very much. I guess it's just a matter of looking hard enough for the people doing the great things.

The Black Madonna

Right now, we live in a time where… there's more good dance music right now than there has ever been in the history of the world, and anybody who tells you differently just is not looking in the right places. Dance music is so big, and so wide, and so vast, that you can fall into sections of it and never come out. You can lose yourself, and boy, what better place to do that than Chicago? (applause)