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.