There’s a retro tinge to Honey Dijon’s DJ-Kicks—a lot of this music is from the ’90s—but that’s also because her taste and style is as timeless as her signature leather jackets. Even the new tracks she plays are vintage in spirit: Waajeed’s glowing, Rhodes-dotted “Right Now” is from 2022 but sounds straight out of the mid-’90s, and her own “Finding My Way” is a pitch-perfect vocal house track in the vein of Kerri Chandler. Replete with flute, piano, and inspiring words from Ben Westbeech, it’s almost corny, but it works perfectly as the blissed-out climax. On the other hand, the itchy-feet percussion of Sir Lord Comixx’s “Soul House” sounds like it could have come out of London’s contemporary jazzy house scene, but actually dates back to 1996.
Dijon’s research into these old records highlights how trends live, die, and loop back in new forms in dance music, a history that’s constantly in dialogue with itself. There are always records you haven’t heard, rare gems or secret weapons that reveal some new wrinkle in a genre’s story. Dijon is an expert at connecting these dots, joining eras and audiences at the same time. Who else could pair Art of Tones’ “Praise,” to me an awful late-’00s tech-house track (and one of just two sore thumbs on an otherwise stellar mix), with a Waajeed house jam, and make it sound so right?
All of this musical history comes with a social history, too. Dijon has been a vocal proponent for reminding newer audiences where this music came from: Black and queer people like herself. You can hear this on the mix, with its string of excellent Black house music records dating from the ’90s until now, and you can read it in her interviews. But she’s also a realist who recognizes that things change—she’s not a scrappy underground DJ anymore, and she doesn’t need to be. Instead, she’s raising a big tent and wants everyone to feel welcome in it: “I want to be in a room with drug dealers and prostitutes and trans women and queer people and non-binary people and hedge fund people,” she said in a recent interview.
While some fans will bristle at the idea of hedge fund managers in underground dance music, Honey Dijon’s career arc shows that none of this is really underground anymore. DJing is bigger than it’s ever been, and if that means artists like Honey Dijon are finally getting the dues they deserve, that doesn’t seem like a bad thing. Her DJ-Kicks feels like a triumphant calling card—something you’d play for a dance-music agnostic to convert them to the cause. Full of killer choruses, richly textured instrumentals, and empowering messages about struggle and redemption, it underlines the enduring themes of house music, whether we’re talking a Chicago nightclub in the ’70s or a glitzy Ibiza bar in 2024. It’s universal, and it has something for pretty much everyone to appreciate—and isn’t that the point of this whole thing to begin with?
