There’s a retro tinge to Honey Dijon’s DJ-Kicks—numerous this music is from the ’90s—however that’s additionally as a result of her style and elegance is as timeless as her signature leather-based jackets. Even the brand new tracks she performs are classic in spirit: Waajeed’s glowing, Rhodes-dotted “Proper Now” is from 2022 however sounds straight out of the mid-’90s, and her personal “Discovering My Method” is a pitch-perfect vocal home monitor within the vein of Kerri Chandler. Replete with flute, piano, and provoking phrases from Ben Westbeech, it’s nearly corny, but it surely works completely because the blissed-out climax. Alternatively, the itchy-feet percussion of Sir Lord Comixx’s “Soul Home” sounds prefer it may have come out of London’s up to date jazzy home scene, however truly dates again to 1996.
Dijon’s analysis into these outdated information highlights how tendencies dwell, die, and loop again in new types in dance music, a historical past that’s consistently in dialogue with itself. There are at all times information you haven’t heard, uncommon gems or secret weapons that reveal some new wrinkle in a style’s story. Dijon is an professional at connecting these dots, becoming a member of eras and audiences on the identical time. Who else may pair Artwork of Tones’ “Reward,” to me an terrible late-’00s tech-house monitor (and one among simply two sore thumbs on an in any other case stellar combine), with a Waajeed home jam, and make it sound so proper?
All of this musical historical past comes with a social historical past, too. Dijon has been a vocal proponent for reminding newer audiences the place this music got here from: Black and queer individuals like herself. You may hear this on the combo, with its string of wonderful Black home music information courting from the ’90s till now, and you may learn it in her interviews. However she’s additionally a realist who acknowledges that issues change—she’s not a scrappy underground DJ anymore, and she or he doesn’t have to be. As a substitute, she’s elevating an enormous tent and needs everybody to really feel welcome in it: “I wish to be in a room with drug sellers and prostitutes and trans girls and queer individuals and non-binary individuals and hedge fund individuals,” she mentioned in a latest interview.
Whereas some followers will bristle on the concept of hedge fund managers in underground dance music, Honey Dijon’s profession arc reveals that none of that is actually underground anymore. DJing is larger than it’s ever been, and if which means artists like Honey Dijon are lastly getting the dues they deserve, that doesn’t look like a nasty factor. Her DJ-Kicks looks like a triumphant calling card—one thing you’d play for a dance-music agnostic to transform them to the trigger. Filled with killer choruses, richly textured instrumentals, and empowering messages about wrestle and redemption, it underlines the enduring themes of home music, whether or not we’re speaking a Chicago nightclub within the ’70s or a glitzy Ibiza bar in 2024. It’s common, and it has one thing for just about everybody to understand—and isn’t that the purpose of this complete factor to start with?
