DJ Deeon, star of Chicago house music scene, dies aged 56
DJ Deeon, the dance music pioneer whose exuberant productions helped popularise Chicago’s “ghetto house” style, has died aged 56.
An administrator for his Facebook page announced the news, confirmed by his press representative, who said Deeon had been “battling with on going health problems and heart complications. He passed peacefully in hospital with his family around him.”
The DJ and producer, born Deeon Boyd, established himself in Chicago’s storied house scene in the mid-1990s, releasing his debut EP Funk City in 1994. Cleaving to a fast, raw sound that moved the city’s house sound onward from its 80s heyday, and adding catchy and amusingly lewd chants on top, he released numerous tracks now regarded as part of the house music canon.
The most successful was Freak Like Me – a mainstay of house sets ever since its 1996 release – but others including the disco-sampling 2 B Free, and the ultra-insistent likes of HouseO-Matic
and The Freaks, are also considered genre classics. He described his work as escapist and sexually frank: “Get-freaky-with-a-stranger music. Girls kissing girls music. Stress-relief music.”
New generations of producers successfully sampled and remixed his work: Freak Like Me earned a second life via a Lee Walker remix featuring pop singers Katy B and MNEK in 2016, while Hi-Lo had a techno hit in 2022 by sampling 2 B Free, and that year Boyd added vocals to another popular track, Dance System’s Work It. Daft Punk namechecked Boyd as an inspiration, in their track Teachers.
In 2020, he launched a crowdfunding initiative to cover his medical expenses, and described his longstanding health issues: “Years of ill education on health in my younger years led me to quadruple bypass heart surgery, then suffering through cancer and chemotherapy, and then finally they took my leg. I cried like a baby. But I kept fighting, I said no to the wheelchair, so they gave me a prosthetic and I wore it every day since.” He also suffered diabetes, and beginning in 2018, “multiple mini strokes in 12 months”.
His health issues continued – in June 2022 he wrote on Instagram: “In hospital, amputation, pneumonia, now ICU with heart infection” – but so did his creativity, and he released new music as recently as 27 May.
At the weekend, he posted a picture on Instagram from a hospital bed, asking his followers: “Pray for me, please.”
Tributes were paid online, including from his peer on the Chicago scene DJ Slugo, who wrote: “30+ years and so many damn memories … you will be missed but never forgotten”.