You know Baltimore club music when you hear it. Through a combination of relentless triplet bass kicks, cheeky sample flips, staccato vocal chops, and bombastic effects, these tracks are built to grab the attention of even the most blasé partygoer. The music’s accompanying dance styles stand out too: It’s all in the legs—throwing your knees and allowing your momentum to propel you across the floor. More than anything, Baltimore club is a joyful release. But it’s not the first thing many people consider when they think of the city, which is still often bogged down by preconceptions of poverty and neglect.
TT the Artist is aiming to change that. The producer, DJ, and label owner’s directorial debut Dark City Beneath the Beat, now streaming on Netflix, shines a light on the producers and dancers who make the city’s club scene go. It’s part documentary, part visual album—a technicolor collage that matches the community’s vibrancy breakbeat for breakbeat. The film, which counts Insecure’s Issa Rae among its producers, doesn’t retread history, nor does it delve into the co-opting of Baltimore club by mainstream artists like Diplo. Instead, it focuses on how the music, and the culture around it, moves the people who have dedicated themselves to it—both literally and emotionally.
“I realized that we didn’t need another film that just showed dancers in the streets, or young Black males getting chased down by the cops, or shots of abandoned buildings,” TT says. “That’s when I decided this would be a musical documentary; not just talking heads and B-roll footage, but an experience that will help people feel what these dancers feel when it comes to this music.”
A Miami native who moved to Baltimore to attend the Maryland Institute College of Art as a teenager in the mid-2000s, TT was first exposed to the scene while working part-time as a go-go dancer in the city’s nightclubs. Even then, she knew she wanted to capture the feeling of community that coalesced around the Baltimore club sound. “It was just so raw and energetic to me, and it made me connect more with the city, too,” she says. “I was like: Someone has to document this.”
The Netflix exposure means Dark City is one of the most prominent mainstream representations of this regional dance music ecosystem to date, and an opportunity to tell a story about the beauty and pain surrounding a uniquely Baltimorean movement. TT spoke to us about the long road in making the film, giving women pioneers their due in the canon, and more.
TT the Artist: The first attempt to officially shoot it was in 2011, and it was originally going to be a more traditional short doc, like 15 minutes long. But everything that could go wrong went wrong: I had gear that was stolen, and hard drives blew out, and I lost 70 percent of the original footage that I’d captured. I was super frustrated, like, “I don’t know how I’m going to do this.”
I reached out to a lot of people during that time, and the one group that always understood and accepted me was the dance community in Baltimore. The moment I went to my first King of Baltimore dance competition, it reignited my motivation to want to get the film done.
I wanted to show the art, but also tap into the social climate of the city. A lot of the tension has to do with spaces and access for artists to be in those spaces. For example, there’s a scene with the dancers—I call it the “Resist” scene. They’re dressed in all red at the Inner Harbor, where dancers used to come together, but the police would kick them out. It’d be like young kids, too. They just wanted to dance. It’s like, “This is our city, too.” So that scene became a moment of reclaiming space—a flash mob of performance art.
When I entered the scene, K-Swift was the face of Baltimore club. With her DJing on 92 Q FM, she created a way for independent producers coming out of Baltimore to get their music on the radio, and she gave them exposure in the clubs when she spun their records. She started the club queen wave; she was the first club queen. When I started my record label, I wanted to call it Club Queen Records. I named it after her, and after what she started, because I loved what it stood for. It’s a movement that she started, and one I’d hate to die out without having gotten its proper time.
K-Swift was doing the work—but I also feel that, when it comes to being a woman, we don’t always get the recognition for the roles we play in leading movements. People don’t give women their just due. So we spoke highly of K-Swift because the generation that’s reflected in this film grew up during her era.
Yes. But I also think it’s been going on for over a decade, because I’ve been leading it. I started making club music with Mighty Mark in 2009, and when the blogs were coming to Baltimore, they were calling me and Mighty Mark, and we put a lot of people in position. People don’t know that I played a big part in the resurgence of Baltimore club music, because when K-Swift passed, the whole scene went underground. Everybody was in their own pockets.
Today, you’ve got mainstream artists like Ciara doing club music with producers from Baltimore who I speak with every day. When I saw Ciara perform her club record on New Year’s, I saw myself on that stage. But Baltimore isn’t a music hub—you don’t have labels who see those artists, or somebody to take you out of there and connect you with the right people. It’s amazing to see the sound travel, but it would be great for more artists to reach out to get features from artists from the region.
I am trying to show people that there is talent in Baltimore, and that Baltimore club music is a sound that comes from Baltimore. I hope that through this, a lot of those artists will be able to get resources to build out their creative ideas and collaborate with people in other cities that may not have even looked to Baltimore as a hub for talent.
Of course, Mighty Mark. There’s an amazing producer named HI$TO, he’s super dope. You’ve got YG Beats, who’s a platinum-selling producer. And of course UNIIQU3, who’s a female producer out of Jersey.
Kariz Marcel, who’s featured on our soundtrack, produced a song called “Hey Baltimore” that I caught wind of two years ago and thought we could breathe new life into it. Now I see people in Los Angeles playing “Hey Baltimore” and I think to myself, This could be the new anthem of Baltimore City. We can really think that big.
