Last month, when I was putting together the strands of information that would go into 5's story on Spencer Kincy, I happened across a lengthy profile from a UK magazine on the "new House sound of Chicago" - circa 1994. For the Brits making the sojourn to what they considered the "House Mecca", they were in for a pretty grim disappointment.

Far from dominating the local airwaves, they could hardly find a couple of minutes of real Chicago House on local radio. Clubs like the Warehouse on Randolph weren't hard to find but a bit in the shadow of the megaplexes dishing out commoditized commercial nonsense. And to local media, it was like this beautiful thing then transforming local culture didn't exist at all.

That's been the name of the game in Chicago. It's not just that Mark Farina, DJ Sneak, DJ Rush and many others of that generation blew up into full-blown stars when they left Chicago, but hilariously enough were only deemed worth of "local coverage" by the press after they moved away. If you think that's an unfair characterization, compare them with two DJ/producers of the same stature - say, Mike Dunn and Mark Grant - who remained in Chicago, and compare the coverage between them. The fact that these guys are in this city making music that's played all around the world and can be seen almost weekly is deemed less important in column-inches compared to someone who used to live here releasing a new compilation and appearing for one night only.

So it was with some shock that I opened this week's Chicago Reader - the local "alt-weekly", though it's owned by a conglomerate based in the South and is, like the other major newspapers in the city, in bankruptcy - and learned that Hip House, a genre of music pushed hard by Chicago's Tyree Cooper, Fast Eddie, Kool Rock Steady and others and all but ignored by the local Chicago press in its heyday, is suddenly popular:

Given all that dramatic irony, as well as the broad targets presented by the wardrobes on display, it's surprising that "Chicago Hip House Documentary 1989" didn't attract more snark when it propagated across the Internet. Chicago hip-hop blog Fake Shore Drive, which covers nu-gangsta rap alongside relatively dance-friendly "hipster-hop," posted it with the one-word commentary "Dope," and the site's pool of hard-line commenters‹who can usually be counted on to savage anything that doesn't meet their impossible standards‹barely raised an eyebrow.

I credit this to the present-day crossover between hip-hop and dance music, which has blurred the distinction between the two - and against all odds redeemed the reputation of hip-house. What seemed corny just a couple years ago now looks prescient‹maybe hip-house's problem was that it arrived 20 years ahead of its time.

Putting aside the issue that a couple of blogs posting a video with the "one-word commentary 'Dope'" makes for wide critical acceptance, I'm going to guess that the irony of a newspaper wallowing in nostalgia for a video they probably took no notice of when it came out 20 years ago shot about four miles over the head of the Reader.

There's actually a really interesting story about the rise and fall of Hip House in this, and it has nothing to do with jaded Hip Hop aficionados doing a 180 and praising what they condemned as "crazy ass fag shit" back in the day, or nostalgia for something that the media damn near murdered by negligence back when it mattered. This is from Rees Urban's interview just seven months ago with Tyree Cooper, about his encounter with the pimps of commercial Hip-Hop at the New Music Seminar:

BET used to have a show called "Rap City." There was a guy called Prime. Prime and I were in New York during the New Music Seminar. Prime says, "Let's go to this rap unity conference and talk about the unity in rap music and why they don't play Hip House videos. Ask why BET plays Fast Eddie and Mr. Lee but MTV was bigger and they (Ed Lover and Dr. Dre) were getting the same videos but weren't playing them."

The panel was Prince Paul, MC Lyte, Ice-T, Ed Lover and a couple others. Prime said, "Why don't you go to the mic and say something about why they don't play any Hip House videos if you're about unity?" So I did. I said my name and they recognized me because Ed Lover tried to do a Hip House record and said it didn't work. I said you should have got me to do the production. So he asked me why, when Rappin' Duke did "Da Ha Da Ha," they didn't call it "Country Hop."

I said, "Well that's cause it was B-Boy Music, it wasn't even Hip Hop then."

So we got into an argument and the panel kind of closed after that. It was getting heated. A Tribe Called Quest, Brand Nubian - all these Hip Hop heads, and lot of them didn't even have deals then, they we're just young guns. A lot of them were like, "Fuck all that dance music, all that crazy ass fag shit."

I'm like, "You don't know that shit was born and bred in Chicago on the South and Westside. Just as hard as y'all think y'all are, MFs in Chicago is just as hard." Twenty years ago, Hip House would have been the Down South rap of the time, it was the next big thing.

When Dr. Dre from NWA got in contact with Benji asking for me or Fast Eddie to do House mixes or a House track for a new artist they were producing, that's when that shit got big. The artist was The D.O.C. "Portrait of a Masterpiece" came out, and that was the same thing. Then you had Daddy-O from Stetsasonic openly dissing House Music but "Talkin' All That Jazz" was just that. Big Daddy Kane, KRS-One - no one liked Hip House but everyone knew it. New York on their own were still trying to get their respect. For another sub-genre to come along was threatening to them. If that didn't do it, all the shit that came after it did it. All the records from Europe that were getting played in America that were called Hip House or had a Hip House mix and it wasn't anything to do with Hip House. But commercial stations like B96 were playing and it and there were too many sub-genres for the stations to keep up with it.