Todd Terry is the most underrated man in house music

In the long list of underrated house music pioneers, New York’s Todd Terry might be the most underrated of all.

Terry’s achievements since making his recorded debut in 1988 include creating a genuinely New York house style that was separate to Chicago; fusing hip hop with house; producing the biggest remix in history with his take on Everything But The Girl’s Missing; releasing UK top 20 hits in both the 1980s and the 1990s; and putting his name to at least five all-time classic house tunes as well as numerous crossover rave anthems.

Terry may also have invented filter house — that remains open to debate — he certainly produced one of the first American jungle albums, helped pioneer the tribal sound, had a hand in Masters at Work with Louie Vega and Kenny Dope, and twice charted high in the DJ Magazine Top 100 DJs poll. And yet these days he’s probably not quite as well known as Todd Terje.

Born in Brooklyn in 1967, Terry’s first musical love was hip hop. His initial excursions in DJing saw him spin at school events with the Scooby Doo Crew, later getting into freestyle, Italo disco and Chicago house. The journey from hip hop to house was a fairly standard one for many US producers of the era but Todd Terry was arguably the first — and perhaps the only — producer to be able to translate the sharp energy of rap into his house music productions, creating Terry’s signature sound.

Terry’s first two records — 1987’s Alright, Alright and Dum Dum Cry under the Masters at Work name — veered closer to electro than house (although the former was included on the pivotal Jackmaster 1 compilation) but he nailed the hip hop / house fusion on his first release as Royal House, 1987’s Party People.

While the song plays out to the four four beats of house, the rough, insistent way that Terry employs his dense armoury of samples feels very hip hop-inspired, closer to a party DJ scratching his way around a Bronx block party than the smoother blends of disco. So dense, in fact, is the song — including a stretch of Marshall Jefferson’s Move Your Body apparently sampled from tape — that I’ve seen it called a “megamix” rather than an original production.

“I didn’t really know about house when I started. I came from hip hop and then I came from freestyle,” Terry told 909originals in 2023. “So when I got into house, I was kind of learning as I go. I didn’t really understand the pure essence of it — I got that a little bit later. However, I always liked the hip hop influence in it — something funky, a little out of the ordinary that shocks you.”

Party People bursts with ideas, energy and attitude, a combination that — along with its rather scuzzy, two-note synth riff — helped it to cross over to the UK’s burgeoning rave scene. When Terry remade Party People the following year as Can You Party it reached 14 in the UK’s rave-mad charts, with the song getting yet another run around when the Jungle Brothers borrowed Can You Party to make I’ll House You, almost certainly the most important hip house single of all time.

The next few years saw Terry perfect this hip hop-influenced house style on classic songs like Black Riot’s A Day In The Life, The Todd Terry Project’s Bango (To The Batmobile) and Weekend, Swan Lake’s In The Name of Love, CLS’s Can You Feel It (as later covered by Daft Punk on their Alive 97 tour), Orange Lemon’s Dreams of Santa Anna and Todd Terry Presents Sound Design’s It’s Gonna Be.

Listening back to these songs, you realise how far ahead Todd Terry was in his field. It’s not just that his hip-hop-influenced sampling style was so different; he was also the first producer (or among the first) to use many of the samples that would later become staples, from Yello’s Bostich and Manu Dibango’s Soul Makossa on A Day In the Life to Dinosaur L’s Go Bang on Bango (To the Batmobile). What’s more, he is often credited with inventing the filter house style that DJ Sneak and a legion of French producers would later take into the mainstream. (Although I think Louie Vega got there first.)

Going further afield, with songs like Party People and A Day In The Life Terry arguably invented that two-fingered, crude but exciting, rave keyboard riff style, which would go on to be fundamental in hardcore, jungle and beyond, while Terry’s 1993 single Sume Sigh Say (as House of Gypsies) proved the blueprint for that percussion heavy, New York dance style later known as tribal house.

At the same time, Terry was earning a reputation as a fierce remixer, thanks to his work on tracks by Byron Stingily, The Cardigans and — especially — Everything But The Girl. Terry’s remix of the latter band’s mournful Missing is arguably the most successful remix ever, transforming the band’s slightly scrawny original into a worldwide hit in 1995.

I’ve heard Missing far too many time to offer anything even close to an objective viewpoint. But I can still admire Terry’s craft in rubbing up the original song’s very subtle club elements into a monster remix that worked both on the dance floor and mainstream radio. The result of the collaboration sounds entirely natural, as if Terry has simply given Missing a gentle nudge to send it rolling down the hill into house.

Missing turned around the career of Everything But The Girl. It also made Terry into the hottest thing in commercial house in the mid 90s, a situation he took advantage of by releasing Keep On Jumpin’ and Something Goin’ On (In Your Soul), both top 10 hits in the UK. This isn’t my favourite period of Terry’s work; but even when serving up straight commercial house music, Terry’s beats and bass remain tight, fierce and funky.

He made some more interesting music in this period, too. Babarabatiri, a 2001 single under the Gypsymen nom de plume, is an excellent example of tough, twitching Latin house, despite the familiar source material, while his 1999 album Resolutions was a decent stab at drum & bass, at a time when the genre was still fairly underground in the US.

At the time, Terry’s excursions into jungle felt odd, for a producer then clearing up at big house clubs. But if you consider the importance of Terry’s early singles to the rave scene, which later gave rise to hardcore and jungle, the producer’s turn to jungle feels like the long awaited return of the Prodigal Son, a pioneer reaping what he has sown.

All of which adds up to Todd Terry being one of the most important producers in electronic music, a house production master who also thrived in the rave era. He should be playing Sónar, Movement and Fabric in 2024. But, instead, his last visit to Barcelona saw him play a table service / VIP bottle-type club where locals fear to tread.

I have several theories about why Todd Terry isn’t more widely revered. For a start — and this is a drum I’ve long been banging — house music producers on the whole don’t get the historical recognition they deserve and those from New York even less. Chicago, obviously, is the home of house music; and Detroit the home of techno. Which leaves New York — which had a very important role in both styles — a little abandoned.

Then there is the sheer volume of Todd Terry material, which has built up steadily over the years, with something like 21 releases in 2020 alone. Discogs lists 17 albums for Todd Terry, as well as numerous EPs, a number that climbs even further when you start to explore his 39 (!?!?) listed aliases.

That’s a fearsome amount of music for any artist, much of it packaged up into compilations of unreleased projects and dubs. It doesn’t help, either, that Terry likes to revisit his own work. There’s the Party People / Can You Party / I’ll House You do over, for example, while Jumpin’ has come out in several different iterations over the years.

At the same time, there is no one definitive Todd Terry studio album that I could point you to. Ready For A New Day, which he released in 1997 at the height of his commercial powers, is maybe his most coherent album but, for me, it is far from his best work.

So what about a compilation? Again, tens of different compilations of Terry’s work exist. Some of these — like the House Masters compilation or his mixed Greatest Hits from 2000 — are excellent. But they can get lost among the stream of lesser round ups. (Incidentally, in a 2024 interview with Gray Area, Terry said he has “a retrospective album [three parts]” coming out later in the year.)

A playlist, then, would seem to be the perfect introduction to Todd Terry. But Spotify’s This Is Todd Terry and Apple Music’s Essential Todd Terry unduly dilute the classics with a load of weakling collaborations. (I’ve made my own Spotify list, incidentally, should you want an intro.)

This rather chaotic back catalogue is, in many ways, a fabulous thing. I’ve been listening to Todd Terry for more than 30 years and I still discover excellent work lurking among the corners of the streaming platforms. (Recently, for example, I chanced upon I’ll Do Anything, which was released in 1992 on the first Unreleased Project EP, and samples LFO’s LFO.)

But if you don’t know who Todd Terry is or why you should listen to him, this back catalogue chaos can be distracting. What’s more, Terry’s fascinating story of mixing hip hop and house and revolutionising house music often gets lost, leaving him seriously underrated.

Does he care? I doubt it. Being rated doesn’t necessarily pay the bills and Todd Terry is busy in 2024 with a packed touring schedule and a steady stream of releases. (And, just to be very open about this, the four (or so) times I have asked Terry’s various representatives for an interview he has shown no interest.)

But the fact that Terry doesn’t care doesn’t mean that I won’t. Todd Terry is a titan of American dance music, a top five house music producer whose chaotically inviting back catalogue can rival anyone in the game, even if you need compass, map and torch to make sense of its frantically funky depths.

NB this was first published on my Substack. If you like it why not sign up, for free? https://linenoise.substack.com/