Review: MoPop’s New Exhibit Traces the Pulse of French House Back to Chicago’s Dancefloors
By Kennedy Molly| March 30, 2025
SEATTLE — The Museum of Pop Culture (MoPop) has never shied away from honoring the forces that have shaped modern sound, and its latest exhibit, “From Chicago to Paris: The Birth and Rise of French House,” is a love letter to a genre that turned dance music into an art form.
Opening this week, the exhibit is an immersive, neon-drenched exploration of French house music, the sleek and deeply rhythmic genre that emerged in the 1990s, led by artists like Daft Punk, Justice, Madeon, and Étienne de Crécy. But what makes the exhibit truly compelling is its insistence on anchoring French house in its rightful origins: the sweat-drenched clubs of Chicago, where house music was first born in the 1980s.
A Story of Two Cities, United by a Beat
The exhibit unfolds in two halves, beginning with a richly detailed dive into Chicago’s dance music revolution. Archival footage, vintage flyers, and interviews with house pioneers—Frankie Knuckles, Ron Hardy, Larry Heard, and Jesse Saunders—paint a picture of a thriving underground scene in which Black and queer artists built an entirely new sound. Through Roland drum machines, hypnotic basslines, and gospel-infused vocals, house music became the spiritual successor to disco, an ecstatic, liberating genre that was more than just music—it was a movement.
Then, the narrative shifts across the Atlantic, where French producers, enthralled by Chicago’s sound, transformed house music into something warmer, funkier, and cinematic. The exhibit showcases Daft Punk’s signature helmets, Étienne de Crécy’s iconic Super Discount album visuals, and a deconstructed version of Justice’s pulsating live rig, illuminating how these artists refined house into the glossy, filter-heavy, and deeply emotive genre that would take over global dancefloors.
The Experience: A Dance Party in a Museum
MoPop, ever the champion of multisensory storytelling, has gone beyond static displays. The interactive installations steal the show. One room allows visitors to mix their own house beats on vintage Roland TR-909 drum machines, while another offers a floor-to-ceiling visual explosion of French Touch album covers, projected against a pulsing light display that syncs to classics like Stardust’s Music Sounds Better with You and Cassius’s 1999.
The crown jewel, however, is a Daft Punk-inspired infinity room, where visitors can step inside a mirrored installation soundtracked by a deep cut from Homework or Discovery, experiencing the genre’s signature looped, euphoric hypnosis firsthand.
The Laser-Fueled Grand Finale: A Dance Party Like No Other
If the exhibit builds like a perfect house track—layer by layer, groove by groove—then its finale is the euphoric drop: an immersive laser light dance party that turns the museum into a living, breathing nightclub.
Tucked into a cavernous space modeled after legendary dancefloors like Paris’s Rex Club and Chicago’s Warehouse, this final section of the exhibit is nothing short of spectacular. Ceiling-mounted laser arrays slice through the air in perfect sync with French house anthems, washing visitors in a kaleidoscope of deep blues, radiant purples, and pulsing neons. Fog machines thicken the air, while a meticulously curated setlist—spanning Daft Punk’s Revolution 909 to Justice’s D.A.N.C.E.—thumps from an astonishingly well-tuned Funktion-One sound system.
For those bold enough, an interactive DJ booth allows visitors to trigger lights and beats with the press of a button, blending different elements of Chicago house and French touch in real time. It’s a celebration of the spirit of dance music itself—communal, transcendent, and endlessly fun.
By the time visitors step out of this final, electrifying room, they aren’t just attendees of an exhibit. They are part of the music.
The Verdict: A Must-See for Music Lovers
More than just a retrospective, “From Chicago to Paris” makes a case for house music as one of the most influential art forms of the last half-century. It reminds us that dance music has always been a dialogue—a transatlantic exchange that took shape on the margins and ultimately conquered the mainstream.
In a moment when electronic music has been fully absorbed into pop culture, MoPop’s exhibit offers a powerful reminder: before there was the rave, before there was the festival mainstage, there was a dimly lit club, a vinyl record, and a kick drum that changed everything.
