For the entire Labor Day weekend, festival-goers young and old danced from dusk to dawn around Chicago courtesy of ARC Music Festival. From Thursday night to the late hours of Tuesday morning, ARC Music Festival hosted a weekend celebration of house music and the city itself.
“You can find house music seven days a week here and you can’t say that about many places,” Chicago house music legend Mike Dunn said. “There’s always going to be some house in the city. Somewhere, in some nook or cranny in the city.”
While now a mainstream genre, some may be unaware that a small community in Chicago laid the foundation for house music that’s enjoyed around the world.
“The ashes of Disco’s black and queer culture in the late 70s laid the foundation for a new genre of dance music that was conceptualized in the clubs of Chicago, and thus house music was born,” SPIN magazine wrote in 2021.
It still thrives decades later, with the proof coming at the ARC Music Festival, which was filled with house music for three days at Union Park.
