Entry · catalog no. 9640
ghetto house
/ /ˈɡɛtoʊ haʊs/ /GET-oh howss
noun · Chicago, Illinois · 1990s
✓ Verified
1.
A subgenre of Chicago house music from the early 1990s: hard, fast, bass-heavy drum-machine tracks, repeated vocal chants and frank sexual lyrics, made for the South and West Side party and the dance floor. Also called booty house.
“Old-school house heads wouldn't play it in the club, but the streets kept asking for the ghetto house records.”
Origin & Attribution
Named and made in Black Chicago, centered on the Dance Mania label run by Ray Barney out of Barney's Records, with producers such as DJ Deeon, Jammin' Gerald, DJ Funk, DJ Milton, Parris Mitchell and Waxmaster. Barney recalls first seeing "ghetto house" printed on a record with DJ Funk's Ghetto Trax EP (as DJ #1, 1994), and says distributors were already asking for "the ghetto stuff"; the label's own catalogue spans 1986 to 1997. Artists remember that club DJs at first would not play it. The sound is a direct ancestor of Chicago juke and footwork, ghettotech and Baltimore club, and belongs to Black Chicago, not to European dance music.
1994
DJ Funk, as DJ #1, puts "ghetto house" on a Dance Mania record with the Ghetto Trax EP.
1997
Dance Mania, the label behind the sound, ends its original run.
2014
Strut reissues the label's catalogue as Hardcore Traxx: Dance Mania Records 1986-1997.
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Midwest
Chicago, Illinois · 1990s
Spoken by
Chicago DJs, producers and house-music dancers
$GHETTOThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady20 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
40/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1994
in the culture
Recorded here
2026
point of first record
Mainstream crossover
2014
search interest spikes
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
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Chicago, IL
@detlex
Detroit, MI
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Citations & Sources
■
DJ #1 (DJ Funk), Ghetto Trax EP (Dance Mania, 1994), as recalled by label owner Ray Barney
record, 1994
■
Chris Kelly, "Oral history of Dance Mania," FACT, 4 March 2014 (interviews with Ray Barney, DJ Deeon, Parris Mitchell)
oral history, 2014
■
+ Cite a sourceVarious artists, Hardcore Traxx: Dance Mania Records 1986-1997 (Strut, 2014)
compilation, 2014
See also