While techno and house have become widely commodified by white Europeans, Tedra Wilson’s documentary Dark City Beneath the Beat shows how Baltimore Club kept its highly localized aesthetics, and proves the richness of Black club music in the 21^st century.

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Tedra Wilson, aka TT the Artist, shines a light on Baltimore club music – an underrepresented, highly specific local scene of electronic music, primarily by Black artists – in her documentary Dark City Beneath the Beat. Seen mostly through the idealized lens of music video set pieces – complete with saturated colours, costume design, incredible dance routines, and even narrative flourishes – very little footage was shot inside an actual club. Instead, the key fly-on-the-wall scenes come from the city’s annual Queen and King of Baltimore dance battles, where contestants flex and contort to sometimes gymnastic levels to compete in front of large, enthusiastic audiences.

The extent to which this kind of talent competition informs Bmore’s breaks is something familiar, well-documented in Chicago footwork, New York’s ballroom walk-offs, and especially rap MC battles. Although the battle format for both dancers and vocalists came to the U.S. at least partly from Jamaica – see, for instance, how Jamaican toasting became rapping – and possibly to Jamaica from somewhere in Africa, it still thrives today in America’s Black community strongholds.

Various Cultural Lineages

This reinforces the connection, which is clear enough in the music, to a hip hop lineage just as much as to house or techno, something else Baltimore club has in common with other regional Black American club styles. Like New Orleans bounce, Detroit jit, krumping in Los Angeles, and the aforementioned footwork and ballroom, the dancing is integral to the music. B-boys, or breakdancers, were also indispensable to early hip hop culture, although this aspect faded away as the genre grew to be a pop music megalith and global phenomenon.

Zooming in on the idea of locality, one elucidating moment comes when a hot number with brassy big band samples is presented in a tableau with a trombone player in full marching band-style regalia. The city of Baltimore is situated between New Jersey and Washington DC, and this track in particular recalls not just Jersey club – which is closely related to Bmore club (and in fact Jersey club producer UNIIQU3 is responsible for several of the tracks featured) – but also DC go-go, a regional funk that often features brass.

Proximity Is Important

In another scene, the almost aggressively hetero street-styled male dancers pull moves straight out of the voguing/ballroom handbook – a club phenomenon native to New York’s queer and trans clubs. Indeed one of the film’s set pieces is performed in ballroom style and preceded with an interview with trans dancer Deniim. So, proximity is also important, in the same way that Detroit and Chicago’s dance music scenes had so much crosstalk partly due to their geographical closeness.

While Dark City Beneath the Beat is more showcase and celebration – it’s radiant in its affection, which is hard to resist – than historical document placing the music in context, it nonetheless serves to fill in some details of another part of the rich tapestry of American regional club music. While techno and house, both genres widely acknowledged to have originated with Black artists, may have been co-opted by white Europeans, these local scenes and still location-specific genres are a fascinating, living, breathing legacy of resolutely Black electronic music.