DJ Deeon

Deeon Boyd was born in Chicago in 1966 and grew up in a South Side housing project, where Kraftwerk's Numbers and the house mixes on WBMX pulled him towards electronic music. He started DJing in 1980, helped Ray Barney build the Dance Mania label and did as much as anyone to define ghetto house: minimal, raunchy tracks driven by a Roland TR-909 and call-and-response chants, made, in his words, for the strippers and for the street. His Funk City EP came out on Dance Mania in 1994, followed by Freak Like Me in 1996, and Daft Punk named him in Teachers. Later records appeared on Numbers, Teklife and Drumcode. He played Lentekabinet Festival in 2016 and died in 2023.