30 Tracks Celebrating 40 Years of Dance Mania, Part 1
A curated tour through some of the best bits of the vaunted Chicago label's extensive catalog.
As a general rule, I’m not big on electronic music anniversaries. Five years, 10 years, 20 years … these are arbitrary milestones, and yet the industry seems intent on flooding the market with nostalgia bait, commissioning a seemingly endless stream of deluxe reissues and anniversary label compilations, oftentimes in celebration of things that weren’t necessarily all that remarkable to begin with.
Some things, however, are absolutely worth celebrating.
Dance Mania is one such thing, as the Chicago label is responsible for some of the most storied chapters of house music history. (I won’t try and recount its history here, mostly because it’s been done many times before, but for those in search of a primer, this 2013 Resident Advisor feature by Jacob Arnold is a solid place to begin, as is this mini-documentary that Strut Records released the following year.) Founded in 1985, the label last week unveiled the details of a forthcoming party in its hometown, one that will bring together multiple generations of Dance Mania contributors and celebrate 30 years of ghetto house, juke and footwork.
I most likely won’t be in attendance—geographically speaking, Chicago and Barcelona aren’t exactly close to one another—but the news did prompt me to dive back into the Dance Mania catalog, which is almost comically extensive. Before the label embarked on a lengthy hiatus in 1999 (it eventually relaunched in 2013), it offered up approximately 300 releases, and I decided to start at the very beginning, reacquainting myself with familiar anthems and also unearthing some gems I’d never heard before along the way. It wasn’t always easy; in all honesty, the quality of Dance Mania releases varies wildly from one record to the next, and the label’s archives also include a number of unexpected (and not always pleasant) surprises, including a wildly corny Christmas rap and an extremely NSFW rework of house classic “The Percolator.”
As arguably the defining ghetto house label, Dance Mania has long been associated with raunch, and while it’s inaccurate to paint the entire catalog with that brush, the imprint was unquestionably responsible for a whole lot of dirty, sexually explicit and downright misogynistic records, particularly during the mid-to-late ’90s. Appetites for that sort of thing will vary—speaking for myself, it’s not really my cup of tea—but it’s fair to say that many Dance Mania records, including some of the label’s defining releases, exist in a zone that’s well outside what’s considered to be politically, socially and culturally acceptable in 2025. (Then again, considering the ongoing rise of far-right politics and the rapidly disappearing sense of decorum on social media, established notions of what’s “acceptable” currently appear to be on rather shaky ground.)
In honor of the label’s 40 years of existence, I slowly but surely started putting together a list of my own Dance Mania favorites, and though they don’t include much of the XXX material, they do represent a rather broad range of sounds, from blippy acid house and pensive deep cuts to speaker-rattling jack tracks. The 30 tracks I ended up with are not meant to constitute a “best of” list; what I’ve put together is more of a curated survey, one that’s been deeply colored by my own musical lens. But whether you’re already a Dance Mania lifer or you’re someone who’s barely acquainted with the label’s catalog, I’m confident that you’ll like what you hear—and, hopefully, will encounter at least a few tunes you haven’t heard before.
The songs have been listed chronologically, and in the interest of space, the list has been divided in two. Part one is below, and the second half is now available here.