City Paper: "Bigger Than Baltimore" (Bmore, Philly, & Jersey Club)

So, my real big article on Club music's different strains in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New Jersey is up over at City Paper. It's part of the yearly "Big Music Thing" and I'm really psyched to have gotten so much space to try to figure out the "differences" between each city's version of Club music. Thanks to Michael Byrne, City Paper's Music Editor for thinking of me to do this and Arts Editor Bret McCabe for some crucial help on this thing. Also, Sasha Frere-Jones' quick excoriation of each city's Club sound was the starting point for this article.

And big thanks to all the people I interviewed, DJ Booman and Jimmy Jones, Scottie B, Emynd, DJ Sega, and DJ Tameil. Sega and Tameil even drove down to Baltimore together to talk to me which was beyond helpful. I hope I did everybody well in this thing:

"Club Music is the new hip-hop!" Philadelphia's DJ Sega howls his mini-manifesto in Rod Lee's Club Kingz record store in downtown Baltimore, then laughs. "I wanna get a shirt made that say that shit." DJ Tameil, of Newark, N.J.'s Brick City Bandits, grins in agreement.

Give it a few years, maybe a generation, and Baltimore club may become the "new hip-hop." Right now, the city's homegrown dance music claims a Billboard-charting jam from one of its OG producers, steady interest by music fans worldwide, and burgeoning, autonomous scenes nearby. It's called "Brick City club" in Newark, "party music" in Philadelphia. To Doo Dew Kidz vocalist Jimmy Jones, however, it's just called club. "Keep it as 'club,'" he says. "It don't make sense to call it 'Baltimore club' or anything else. It's club."

Scottie B, co-founder of Unruly Records and one of the city's most fervent club ambassadors, is wry about the name tiff. "You know when people get mad, though?" he asks. "When you brand something that's already something and brand it something else. Tameil's branded it through his name--he's bigger than Brick City. [Philly] started calling it 'party music' because New York's first, Philly's second, Baltimore's third, and you can't go up the chain. Philly's not gonna call anything Baltimore something." Fair enough."