Traxman, DJ Rashad, and DJ Spinn. Photos by Erez Avissar.
Chance the Rapper posted a short video to Instagram a few months ago that illustrates the enduring legacy of footwork music and dance. Chance, who toured extensively with the late footwork pioneer DJ Rashad, holds a new box of shoes—Red Octobers, the infamous crimson high tops designed by Kanye West. Chance opens the box, smiles for the camera, then starts footworking. Rashad’s classic juke track “K-Swiss” thumps in the background.
Chance, who is from the South Side, knows footwork has long been written into the style, soles, and bodies of black Chicago. Like Rashad and Kanye, he grew up in places where dancers included footwork in their routines, where DJs played tracks at parties to instantly put dancers in “battle-mode.” Footworking (the dance) and footwork (the music) inspire each other, but the dance pre-dates the music. Chicago’s first footwork battle cliques formed in the early ‘90s, dancing to the sub-bass sounds of ghetto house originators DJ Deeon, Jammin Gerald, and DJ Milton. Things changed later in the decade, when DJs like Clent, Rashad, Spinn, and RP Boo shifted ghetto house’s four-on-the-floor template into a polyrhythmic grid: “I took what I did as a dancer,” RP Boo told me, “and turned it into a style of music.”
Footwork tracks are customized to incite footwork dancing. So-called “battle tracks” exemplify the genre because they emphasize drama—war-trumpet-like sounds rile up crowds; halftime rhythms make space for dancers to battle. Like most footwork producers, Rashad started out as first as a dancer. This cycle from dancer to DJ to producer is part of what has kept footwork vital as a culture and collaborative art for over a decade in Chicago.
A battle between footwork dancers AG and Litebulb vs. Charles and J-Ron:
In the late 2000s, largely because of YouTube videos posted by local dancers and videographers, footwork emerged prominently on international radars. Underground DJs and writers, like Dave Quam, Venus X, J-Cush, and Planet Mu’s Mike Paradinas, were among the first to pick up on the sounds, and book the DJs and release their music across the world. YouTube hit at the right moment in Chicago, too: Rashad and Spinn were on a rampage, holding court at informal venues across the city, often debuting new music at battles, surprising and inspiring dancers while training the next crop of DJs, including DJ Manny, DJ Earl, Sirr Tmo, DJ Taye, Boylan, DJ Tre, and others.
By 2011, footwork had migrated from a local Chicago practice at underground venues, parades, and talent shows, to an international business and creative global network. Artists who never left Chicago found themselves touring for the first time, in some cases after nearly 20 years of obscurity. Footwork originator RP Boo justifiably called his 2013 debut album Legacy to call attention to the shadow history behind his sound.
Though footwork music is form-fit for footwork dancing, not every footwork track is a battle track. And to understand footwork music, it is crucial to know that it is a DJ’s music—tracks are made to be mixed with other tracks. It’s a paradox Rashad negotiated well: He made songs that sounded extraordinary on their own terms, but when blended with other tracks from his crew’s extended family, a magic was enabled, a formula executed.
Some of the most important footwork tracks narrate the stories of the scene itself. These genealogies and histories are not just a matter of context—this stuff is actually on the tracks. DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn, especially, maintained the tradition of calling out the names of collaborators, including DJs and dancers. These tracks weren’t like bonuses that come at the end of a record. For Rashad, in the tradition of ghetto house that preceded him, the names of his crew became instruments that he pounded against the minds and bodies of dancers: “Rashad, Rashad, Rashad, Spinn, Spinn, Spinn,” the samples iterate.
Even before Rashad became famous outside the Midwest, he inspired thousands to DJ and dance. Rashad’s music converted people into footworkers for life, and the impact was both similar and different when he started to play abroad. Double Cup, his critically lauded 2013 breakthrough, saw Rashad smoothing down some of the edges in his brackish, track-ish approach. This was less about him leaving the footwork dance floor behind, though, and more about his identity as an artist in motion. Rashad stood by the DJ credo: to make the crowd—any crowd—move.
Footage from a recent DJ Rashad tribute in Chicago:
To do this, Rashad often brought Chicago dancers and DJs with him on the road. As his friends and colleagues testify, Rashad always shared the stage and often split his fees generously with others. Double Cup especially included a surprising amount of Rashad’s protégés and collaborators with co-writing credits. This brotherly approach to music—rooted in all night studio sessions and the closed circuit between dancers and DJs—is part of what makes footwork a window into a world that’s much larger than what we might expect or glean from afar.
While the labels Hyperduband Planet Mu have rightly been celebrated for their footwork releases, it was 2012’s Welcome to the Chi, a 20-track treasure trove put out by a label Rashad himself co-founded, Lit City Trax, that best reflects the way DJs and dancers listen to this music in Chicago—as a data dump, as a .zip file, as “tracks.” Dancers and DJs keep hard-drives and USB sticks full of tracks—it’s big data housed in small, ephemeral archives across the city and world. There are just so many good tracks, so many kinds of tracks and unreleased tracks, so many collaborations and lineages to sort—it’s not surprising that footwork challenges non-native listeners.
The following selections offer a few guideposts for a new listener (and reminders of old favorites for the devotee) as to what characterizes Chicago footwork, and some tips on how to listen to and access the plenitude of information and artistry distilled into each track. Admittedly, this historical approach, though useful, is a somewhat contradictory gesture when it comes to appreciating footwork, a genre that has been about hearing the newest tracks, fresh from the basement or bedroom studios of young producers. Nonetheless, with footwork mutating so fast and in such far-ranging ways, it’s valuable to shine a light back on Chicago. (Listen to some of the footwork tracks mentioned below with this Spotify playlist.)
DJ Rashad: “Ghost”
If you ask footwork dancers and DJs to pick their favorite track, DJ Rashad’s “Ghost” will top many lists. The song’s title and lyric refer to “the ghost,” a footwork move developed in late ‘80s Chicago on the West Side. That move and the idea of that move—an emphasis on gliding, on ghosting, on dance that defies the eye—still defines footwork. “Ghost” hinges on a sample of a sample—Rashad sampling Kanye sampling Diana Ross. “I’m still dreaming,” she sings, an echo of an echo that Rashad grounds with a sample of his own voice: “ghost, ghost, ghost, ghost.” The meaning of “ghost” dissolves into the word’s texture, into the way it hits your body. Later in the track, Rashad recognizes four crucial Chicago dancers: “Poo, AG, Q, Litebulb,” he repeats. “That was everything to me,” Litebulb told me. “To get your name on a Rashad track and to be listed with those guys, that changed my life and helped me launch my career as a dancer.”
DJ Manny: “All I Do Is (Smoke Trees)”
In Chicago’s footwork inner circles, it’s a rather indisputable fact that DJ Manny—who is among the best footwork dancers in the city—also makes the coldest tracks, and he does it by the dozen. “All I Do Is Smoke Trees” is one sign of Manny’s genius, but most of his tracks—hundreds of them—have not been released. (This is one of many Lil Wayne flips from the footwork scene circa 2010, check Traxman’s “A Milli” for another.)
Traxman: “Footworkin on Air”
Traxman, a DJ for three decades in Chicago, has been through multiple generations of house music and he’s known for his deep crates—and especially what he finds in them. Here, he samples and elongates an mbira solo played live by Maurice White from Earth, Wind and Fire. In the mid-‘70s, White’s mbira symbolized his connection to Africa. On “Footworkin on Air”, Traxman takes the connection further, interlacing the mbira with the squirming, electric sounds of Chicago acid house.
Jody Breeze: “The Way I Move”
“The Way I Move” was instrumental in introducing international audiences to the world of Chicago footwork in the late 2000s, and Jody was still a teenager when he cut and customized this Sade sample. Like so many talented young Chicago producers, Jody was in and then quickly out of the footwork game, but “The Way I Move” was promiscuous, slipping into DJ sets and top ten lists of trendsetting artists from London to NYC, laying groundwork for footwork’s current global circulation and popularity.
DJ Clent: “3rd World”
DJ Clent—who recently released the EP Hyper Feet on Planet Mu—changed the history of footwork with this battle anthem. The trumpets echo RP Boo’s horns—they sound dissident, inside-out. Like RP’s “Baby C’mon,” “3rd World” is considered one of the first footwork tracks—it fed the competitive vibe on the dance-floor, and emphasized half-time rhythms that gave space for dancers to circle up and battle.
DJ Rashad and DJ Manny: “R House”
Chuck Robert’s “My House” provided the house community with perhaps its most enduring scripture, and Rashad and Manny tear it to pieces in “R House”, tone-poeming the much-remixed sermon into just a few bars: “I am the creator,” they re-iterate, wrecking the manifesto by proving the inclusiveness of its thesis: “This is our house.”
DJ Nate: "Below Zero"
DJ Nate made an impact in the footwork scene in the late 2000s, then quickly exited the game. Today, he puts out casio-toned hip-hop anthems that soundtrack bop dancing. But when Nate made footwork tracks, his cuts were among the most exciting—a youthful, sample-happy black experimentalism that channeled older Chicago track-makers and challenged the idea of what dance music—or any music—should sound like.
DJ Spinn: “Don’t Shoot”
This outlier opens a window into Spinn’s worldview as a kind of footwork filmmaker capable of mixing humor and horror, horses neighing and human screams. Spinn, like other producers on this list, is difficult to pin down because many of his best tracks have not yet been released internationally, including the juke anthem “Bounce and Break Your Back”.
DJ Rashad: “Feelin’ (2012 release)”
“I just had a brand new feeling… it came to me in the night,” this Roy Ayers/Sylvia Cox sample testifies. Hearing certain footwork tracks or sequences of tracks (like the excellently arranged opening songs on Welcome to the Chi, which begins with this version of “Feelin’”) can give you the exhilarating shock of the new—“a new feeling,” indeed.
RP Boo: “Heavy Heat”
“Heavy Heat” is a quintessential battle track. RP Boo told me about debuting it in Chicago: “It created an instant battle due to the energy the track held. It made footworkers do what they do best—release heat!” “Heavy Heat” followed on the heels of RP’s infamous “Godzilla track”—both sample the film’s menacing noir horn stabs—and the monstrous and the maniacal have played their part in the footwork story, especially in RP’s music. This type of track enhances the tension of the circle, elevating the performance so that it becomes more improvised and vicious. “You belong to me,” the sample intones, as if RP is simultaneously both the DJ behind the tables and the footworker provoking his opponent on the floor.