Paul Johnson

Though Paul Johnson never achieved the fame of some of his peers, this underground house titan was revered by his fellow DJs: Johnson, in fact, is the first artist cited on Daft Punk’s “Teachers,” their 1997 homage to house music’s originators. Born in Chicago in 1971, Johnson began DJing as a young teenager, and by the late ‘80s had incorporated a reel-to-reel player into his sets in order to play his own unreleased tracks. (After being hit by a stray bullet in 1987, Johnson was paralyzed from the waist down, and henceforth performed in a wheelchair.) As a producer recording for labels like Dance Mania, Relief, and Cajual, Johnson specialized in both driving, minimalist machine jams and the kind of flickering disco cutups that would inspire Daft Punk. Though his most recognizable hit is 1999’s “Get Get Down,” Johnson kept the tunes coming throughout the next two decades, laying down his unique brand of funk until succumbing to COVID-19 in the summer of 2021.