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‘Thing’ Documents the Early Days of Chicago House: ‘We Were in the Middle of History’
'Thing,' a reissued zine ran for 10 issues from 1989 to 1993, as house music "was blowing up" in Chicago.
By osmosis, “house culture was a big part of Thing magazine,” according to Terry Martin, who contributed photos to the publicationand worked on another short-lived, house-focused publication titled Cross Fade with Ford. Along with the Evans interview, the second issue of the magazine contained a House Top 100 ranking full of 1970s disco and early 1980s boogie, singles recorded in Philadelphia (Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “Bad Luck”) and New York (Unlimited Touch’s “In the Middle”). Martin’s point was made explicitly in the November, 1992 issue of Cross Fade, which lamented that, “as Chicago-based labels like Trax and DJ International became relatively successful… Major-label record executives took notice and began to rampantly exploit and misuse the term in an attempt to cash in on this ‘new’ sound.”
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