Credit: Dangerous Minds / Deee-Lite

I dropped down one of those deep Internet rabbit holes yesterday, looking for footage of New York nightclubs in the 1980s. I did this for hours, until my wife rightfully insisted that I stop and pay attention to her. I found some crazy good stuff, but I took a major detour along the way, watching vintage live Deee-Lite performances, some of which I was in attendance myself.

Although the members came from all over the globe—Super DJ Dmitri hailing from the Ukraine, Towa Tei born in Korea, but raised in Tokyo, and Lady Miss Kier Kirby grew up all over the place, mostly near Pittsburgh—I thought that Deee-Lite were the most “New York” sounding group of their day.

The very embodiment of the East Village zeitgeist, Deee-Lite led a multi-racial, pan-sexual party on wheels for a few years before their worldwide breakout hit, the 1990s ‘Groove Is In The Heart’. I don’t know how many times I saw Deee-Lite play—in the dozens and dozens—but let me tell you, they were a fucking amazing live act and a wicked good time.

When they started on the scene, Deee-Lite’s futuristic, uniquely funky, jazzy “sampladelic” sound was something that no one had ever really heard before and it was obvious, from early on, seeing them at places like The Pyramid Club (I lived around the corner), Tunnel, and at the yearly Wigstock event, that they were going to be huge.

Frankly, I thought that they were destined for a more sustained career than they ended up having together. It’s difficult to point to the reason why that didn’t happen, because it wasn’t the music, which continued to be incredibly innovative, their videos were great, and Lady Miss Kier—easily one of the top five foxiest girls in NYC of that era—was an instant style icon and a supremely confident frontwoman.

She’s what they call a “belter”, like Ethyl Merman. Back then, she was a tiny thing, but her voice had the power of a seasoned soul diva. I thought their act was magic, capturing a particular type of distinctly East Village lightning in a bottle.

Seeing Deee-Lite live back then was like being shot out of a glitter cannon into a dimension where George Clinton ran Studio 54 and no one had ever heard of hangovers or heterosexuality. It wasn’t just a show, it was an event.

Kier stomped around in six-inch platforms like a psychedelic Tina Turner doing sci-fi drag, belting out those wild, breathy soul notes while Dmitri and Towa tore through crates of breakbeats, disco loops, and warped Parliament samples like mad scientists working the decks. They didn’t “perform” so much as detonate, and if you were lucky enough to catch them at Limelight or Palladium in full flow, you know exactly what I mean.

Deee-Lite were so far ahead of their time that they were from another timeline entirely. Long before everyone started blathering on about “diversity” and “inclusivity” like it was a TED Talk, Deee-Lite were living it, sounding it, dancing it. They were the downtown New York of the early ’90s in human form: queer, multiracial, global, political, wired on caffeine and club drugs, dressed like cartoon characters who just crawled out of a Danceteria dressing room.

They made house music safe for weirdos and made psychedelia cool again in a city that had forgotten how to smile. Deee-Lite were the freaky utopia we were all promised but never got…and they made it funky as hell.

Like most good things that burn hot and fast, it didn’t last. Towa Tei dipped out early, back to Japan where he’s still making weird, beautiful records to this day. Dmitri kept DJing, popping up on comps and remix credits like a ghost in the machine. And Kier? She became a kind of anti-corporate culture warrior, refusing to license ‘Groove Is in the Heart’ for ads, suing fashion brands for ripping off her look, and staying loud, weird and proudly uncancellable ever since. She’s still around, still DJing, still blowing minds at queer festivals and underground throwbacks. I guess they never really broke up, just dispersed like confetti at the end of a perfect night out.

In hindsight, Deee-Lite were less a band and more of a time capsule that you could dance to. They took all the optimism of the post-Studio 54, post-AIDS-crisis club world, and jammed it all together. And maybe that’s where they belong now: not on nostalgia playlists, but right here, right now, when things are grim and weird and in desperate need of fun.

Spin ‘World Clique’ again. Crank ‘Power of Love’. Wear something ridiculous. And remember a time when the future sounded like it might be funky after all.