Baltimore house is as indigenous to the B’more/D.C. area as those faggy motorized scooters are to the diaper-wearing, wanna-be-gangtsa teens of New York’s LES. But instead of making everyone laugh and point, the mid-Atlantic’s take on house makes you want to throw strange men down on the filthy dancefloor and ride their dicks to glory.
Also known as “bhouse,” “bclub,” “doo dew,” “Baltimore trax,” “ghetto trax,” and a bunch more useless names that took about half a stoned second to come up with, this sub-sub-genre is what you’d get if you were black and decided to take all the white-boy shit out of normal house music, then drop the bass until it was practically nonexistent and speed the whole thing up a bit. Ultimately, it’s just the raunchy, hip-hop version of house.
But what sucks is that there’s no bclub version of Lil’ Kim or Beyoncé. In fact, there are no women at all involved on the production side of things. And for a scene that thrives on girls who grind up on their baby daddies so hard that the front of the guy’s jeans wear thin, that seems a little fucked up.
Women like Mz. Thang, Ms. Mocha, Kotton the Cutie, and Lady Shaundra all, at one point or another, defined the sound of Harm City Hit Squad and Knucklehead. They all had killer, unforgettable voices. Not killer like “It’s so fucking cotton-candy R&B that it’s going to kill me,” but killer like “I never really liked girls singing on dance tracks, but now I do!”
Today they’re all gone. Underpaid and forgotten, the women who gave Bhouse its voice were shuffled out of the studio the second they finished the track.
If you’re looking for someone to blame, check out guys like Dukeyman, KW Griff, and DJ Technics. They had total control over the music being made and are totally pleased about the lack of credit the singers receive. “I created a lot of these girls,” says the current monarch of Bhouse, DJ Technics. “They’d sing on my tracks. And once I didn’t need them anymore, then our relationship was over. That’s it.”
SUSAN L. D’ERIDGE
