Mike Dunn: the funky freak still uniting rap and house
‘Well all right, you squares …” So begins Mike Dunn’s 1995 house classic God Made Me Phunky, as if he’s settling into an acid-tongued children’s story. The track becomes a rambling tale of how God takes him “on that spaceship up to, y’know, the funkiness”; his voice, full of sensual braggadocio, booms out over the beat, where raw drums crash underneath a looping piano hook. It’s one of the hip–house genre’s finest moments, a blend of dance and rap music that Dunn pioneered and is still pushing forward.
He’s just released his 2017 album, My House from All Angles, digitally for the first time, 29 years after his 1990 debut Free Your Mind. The ups and downs in the intervening years are a key part of house history.
He grew up in Englewood, a black neighbourhood in south central Chicago. After graduating from high school in 1983 he started playing records in parks and community halls with fellow producer Tyree Cooper, among others, for kids who were “too young and too poor” to go to clubs in the city. He made a name for himself as a performer, turning up to parties with two reel-toreel tape recorders and drum machines, playing live jams that he’d rap and sing over. Without money to record and cut vinyl records, Dunn says it was cheaper and more fun to play this way, and it made him an instant draw. “You only heard my music if you came to my party,” he says.
When legendary club the Warehouse opened its second location in 1990, Dunn was invited to perform. Using vinyl records, reel-to-reel tapes and a pitch-controlled cassette deck, he produced live edits on the fly, creating a dramatic, multilayered sound. He ran three record labels with fellow Warehouse resident Armando: Dance Mutha, which focused on “funky hip– house” tracks, Warehouse “for the weirdos who couldn’t get released on DJ International or Trax” (the two biggest house labels of the time) and Muzique, for “deep house grooves with a touch of acid”.
For as long as Dunn had been producing house music he’d been producing for rappers, too. But, says Dunn, “New York City ran the rap game and the Chicago house scene was crazy, so, apart from people like Twista, Crucial Conflict and Do Or Die, nobody wanted to do rap here.” This is why he, Cooper and fellow producer Fast Eddie incorporated their love of funky rap vocals and hip–hop beats into house grooves and came up with hip–house, “because we weren’t taken seriously with rap”. But word of his rap production, under the name the Incredible MD, eventually spread to the coasts. A bidding war started between Jimmy Iovine’s Interscope Records and Sean “Puffy” Combs’ Bad Boy Records.
After choosing to sign with Bad Boy, Dunn’s luck hit a wall. In December 1999, Combs and the rapper Shyne were arrested for their alleged roles in a New York City nightclub shooting. By the spring of 2001, Combs had been acquitted of all charges and Shyne sentenced to 10 years in prison. The tabloid drama created a domino effect at Bad Boy that tipped over Dunn’s deal. “We never got to the point of releasing anything … because [Combs] was so concerned about going to jail,” says Dunn. “We were waiting on the sidelines until he got finished, and when he did he basically got rid of […] anything that was in that period that was bad for him, and my label was part of that.” He admits, though, that there was “not correct business on my end,” says Dunn. “I rubbed [Combs] the wrong way.”
After the deal collapsed, Dunn kept a low profile. “I was in a real dismal place and I didn’t want nobody seeing me,” he says, “so I went underground.” He started playing at neighbourhood parties again and word spread of his return. “When you come back out after a long time, people start appreciating you a little different,” he says. In 2008, he released his most celebrated club track, Phreaky MF, but only after a long delay – he promised his grandmother that he wouldn’t release it while she was alive, because she disapproved of its hardcore sexual lyrics.
“I needed something to play that night at the Warehouse,” Dunn says, “so I just threw the track together, went in the booth, and started talking crazy over it. Nothing was written down or rehearsed – just me freestyling some wild stuff.” That wild stuff still turns heads in the club in 2019 – it regards exactly what this enthusiastic and adventurous lover, who goes by the name of Mr 69, would do to you, blending chocolate, whipped cream and saliva with much raunchier fare. His macho kind of sexual bravado has aged surprisingly well on record; the track is a favourite of DJs such as Four Tet, and has a sonic kinship with the low–slung bombastic funk of groups like LCD Soundsystem.
One of those who noticed his return was Wayne Williams, seasoned label A&R and elder of the Chosen Few, a respected group of house DJs that Williams founded in the late 70s. In 2012, Dunn earned a new nickname, “The Baby,” as only the second member to be invited to join in 30 years. “In the last 10 years, there’s been a resurgence of house in Chicago, which was in dire straits before,” says Dunn. He sees the growth of the Picnic, the Chosen Few’s one–day festival that draws upwards of 40,000 people to Chicago’s Jackson Park each July, as a shot in the arm for the dance music community in the US. “It let people know that it was still alive,” he says. “We had to get it back to where we were looked at as the birthplace of house, not the graveyard of it.”
My House from All Angles features a new, garage–tinged remix of Phreaky MF, but it’s the new tracks that really shine. Going back to those live jams that made his name in Englewood, he punches out tough rhythmic jams on the Roland equipment that defined the sound of Chicago house’s first wave. Guiding the beats are his vocals, deeper and raspier than before. His personal favourite is the track Body Muzik. “It’s got the funkiness, the old school rapping, the acid and the hard distorted vocals,” he says. “I just love it.” God may have made him funky, but Mike Dunn has kept it going ever since.
• My House from All Angles is out now on Defected / Classic Music Company