In the chaos of Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park, a teenage usher named Vince Lawrence witnessed the fiery backlash against disco—a sound that defined freedom and pride. Venturing into the underground sanctuary of The Warehouse, where Frankie Knuckles spun revolutionary sounds, Vince teamed up with Jesse Saunders to form Z Factor, a scrappy collective of visionaries who captured the pulse of Chicago’s underground on wax. Their track, On and On, became the first recorded house music anthem, sparking a movement that transformed a local DIY culture into a global phenomenon.

This music then travelled from those gritty Chicago streets to underground nightclubs in 1980s Northern Ireland, and eventually to stages worldwide. The birth of house music is an electrifying testament to how a dream, born in the ashes of rejection, ignited a genre that continues to unite and liberate people across th  e globe.

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