For Honey Dijon, house music is, and will always be, a family affair. The values of community and chosen family are as essential to Dijon’s house as a four on the floor, and the Chicago DJ and producer has been outspoken in her modus operandi to return house to its rightful home with queer, BIPOC creators. “I grew up in a generation where music was attached to cultural and social change,” she told Mixmag in 2017, and by all accounts that history has formed the foundation of Dijon’s approach to music making. Speaking about how house music has ultimately been “sold and repackaged to the people who created it,” she said this year, “I have a word for it. Colonisation.” It’s a poignant and astute observation.
It’s arguable that Dijon approaches her work foremost as protest, an urgent insistence to remember the origins of the sound and culture she champions. It’s the reason why Black Girl Magic, her hotly anticipated sophomore album, reads like a festival lineup with its roster of guest vocalists and collaborators. In fact, not a single track on the list goes without credit to Dijon’s guests. Even in the case of tracks like La Femme Fantastique, where most other artists wouldn’t have bothered to credit the vocalist providing the nondescript vocal loops, Dijon shares her space. Her collaborators tie into her political motives, and Black Girl Magic sees her working alongside Black legends like Eve and Mike Dunn, and the new guard of queer and BIPOC innovators like Pablo Vitar and Dope Earth Alien. This gives Black Girl Magic a sort of warmness, an openness that manages to bubble over into the music, which is for all accounts effervescent and euphoric.
Download and stream Black Girl Magic here
A good number of these tracks have been around for a while, from Downtown to Work, and the familiarity of these songs works in Dijon’s favour. Altogether on one track list, Black Girl Magic feels like coming home, and in many ways is preceded by this charm. Dijon doesn’t seek to reinvent the wheel here, but rather pay homage to the wheel itself. This is a purist house record if ever there was one, and amidst the recent surge of house in pop music (a surge Dijon herself has had a hand in), looks to hold space for the origins of the form. She doesn’t attempt to mine emotional depths or imbue the music with sweeping political statements. Rather, she honours the notion of house as a shared experience, one that unites rather than alienates. In this sense, Dijon makes sure to never complicate things, and her mastery of the four on the floor always makes sure to leave just enough room for everyone to understand where she’s coming from. Love Is A State Of Mind is pitch perfect piano house, Dijon’s loops creating enough space around Ramona Renea’s idyllic, soulful vocals so that each work in tandem to support each other. Dijon plays squarely within the boundaries of house, never straying too far from this lexicon. It’s Quiet Now and Work add humid touches of balearic and jungle, the audaciously sass-soaked Drama visits micro-house, while there’s lashings of Hacienda acid on C’s Up with Mike Dunn. European sounds also find their way in, particularly on the Italo leaning Everybody featuring an appropriately camp Pablo Vitar, and the tech leaning Don’t Be Afraid.
The influence of ballroom is particularly palpable, from Dijon’s guest MC’s delivering lines like “work for me” to the subtle working in of vogue crashes as heard on Drama or the bass stabs on Love Is A State Of Mind. The essentialist approach does mean that Black Girl Magic can lapse into a sense of sameness, but track for track Dijon presents an impeccable dissertation into the roots and subsequent offshoots of house music. Is it the most groundbreaking she’s sounded? No, but that’s beside the point. Black Girl Magic wears its heart on its sleeve vehemently, the values of Dijon’s dancefloor baked into the DNA of the music. “It’s not about you, it’s not about me, it’s about us,” croons Hadiya George on Not About You, speaking this manifesto out loud. And in case that wasn’t clear enough, it’s stated right at the top of the album for good measure: “Come correct, because there’s room enough for everybody.”
Listen to Love Is A State Of Mind from Black Girl Magic below.
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