Honey Dijon: DJ-Kicks: Honey Dijon Album Review | Pitchfork

7.7

Genre:

Electronic

Label:

!K7

Reviewed:

October 24, 2024

Few people are as cool as Honey Dijon. The epitome of the superstar DJ, she lives the glamorous life, playing art fairs and fashion parties, and taking Polaroids with celebrities. She counts Madonna and Beyoncé as fans. She has a residency at Panorama Bar and started a new one in Ibiza this past month. She even has a Commes des Garçons line, and she’s always dressed to kill no matter what time of day or night it is. She’s what the word “iconic” was coined for.

But Honey Dijon is also a nerd, and she probably knows more about music than anyone else in the room. Growing up steeped in Chicago’s house music scene, and later New York, she started clubbing as a teenager alongside fellow future DJs like Derrick Carter. She has a crazy record collection and an even crazier recall for house tracks, and she knows how to play for almost any audience, whether it’s a tiny bar or a gigantic festival stage. Her mass appeal—she plays bold, bouncy house music—belies her love of obscure and often weird tracks. She calls herself a “big fan of research,” and she used her long-deserved entry in the DJ-Kicks mix series to explore the outer reaches of her sound and into a land of off-key vocals, cheeky horns, and more bongos than you knew you needed.

Her DJ-Kicks functions like an alternate history of house music, where a track like Psychedelic Research Lab’s “Keep On Climbin’ (Mix 2)” is an acid anthem and Maydie Miles’ “Keep On Luvin” was featured in a pivotal Sex & the City scene. Dijon sheds light on lesser-known names like Michi Lange and the Dance Kings, whose “Climb the Walls” is another highlight, with an insistent hook that mixes joy, frustration, and anger over a galloping beat. There are darker moments, like the deeply paranoid Mr. Marvin remix of Johnny Dangerous’ “Dear Father in Heaven,” but for the most part the mix cruises through catchy hook after catchy hook, from the bizarre manipulated vocals on Cassio the Cassmaster’s “Getting Hot (Broad & Market Street Mix)” to D:Ream’s 1992 smash “U R the Best Thing.” That’s the other thing about Honey Dijon: She knows that some of the most mainstream dance cuts still hit, especially when you balance them with the stranger stuff.

There’s a retro tinge to Honey Dijon’s DJ-Kicks—a lot of this music is from the ’90s—but that’s also because her taste and style is as timeless as her signature leather jackets. Even the new tracks she plays are vintage in spirit: Waajeed’s glowing, Rhodes-dotted “Right Now” is from 2022 but sounds straight out of the mid-’90s, and her own “Finding My Way” is a pitch-perfect vocal house track in the vein of Kerri Chandler. Replete with flute, piano, and inspiring words from Ben Westbeech, it’s almost corny, but it works perfectly as the blissed-out climax. On the other hand, the itchy-feet percussion of Sir Lord Comixx’s “Soul House” sounds like it could have come out of London’s contemporary jazzy house scene, but actually dates back to 1996.

Dijon’s research into these old records highlights how trends live, die, and loop back in new forms in dance music, a history that’s constantly in dialogue with itself. There are always records you haven’t heard, rare gems or secret weapons that reveal some new wrinkle in a genre’s story. Dijon is an expert at connecting these dots, joining eras and audiences at the same time. Who else could pair Art of Tones’ “Praise,” to me an awful late-’00s tech-house track (and one of just two sore thumbs on an otherwise stellar mix), with a Waajeed house jam, and make it sound so right?

All of this musical history comes with a social history, too. Dijon has been a vocal proponent for reminding newer audiences where this music came from: Black and queer people like herself. You can hear this on the mix, with its string of excellent Black house music records dating from the ’90s until now, and you can read it in her interviews. But she’s also a realist who recognizes that things change—she’s not a scrappy underground DJ anymore, and she doesn’t need to be. Instead, she’s raising a big tent and wants everyone to feel welcome in it: “I want to be in a room with drug dealers and prostitutes and trans women and queer people and non-binary people and hedge fund people,” she said in a recent interview.

While some fans will bristle at the idea of hedge fund managers in underground dance music, Honey Dijon’s career arc shows that none of this is really underground anymore. DJing is bigger than it’s ever been, and if that means artists like Honey Dijon are finally getting the dues they deserve, that doesn’t seem like a bad thing. Her DJ-Kicks feels like a triumphant calling card—something you’d play for a dance-music agnostic to convert them to the cause. Full of killer choruses, richly textured instrumentals, and empowering messages about struggle and redemption, it underlines the enduring themes of house music, whether we’re talking a Chicago nightclub in the ’70s or a glitzy Ibiza bar in 2024. It’s universal, and it has something for pretty much everyone to appreciate—and isn’t that the point of this whole thing to begin with?