Bangs & Works: Tracing the Steps of Chicago House
A footwork battle in progress
Whatever your grasp of music may be, there are moments when you have to concede that there are some music scenes that you could never fully grasp or wholly appreciate. Not to say there is any harm in trying, but after hours of YouTubing the musical hydra that is the genre house, you still won’t have even made a dent in it. Sure internet goes some way, but in the end as a humble resident of the British Isles, you can only know so much about the DJs and producers in Chicago that dedicate a lifetime to it. DJ Nate is one such figure in the Chicago footwork scene, although at the ripe age of twenty he hasn’t quite devoted a life time, just his formative years, in the space of which he has made over 200 tracks.
Footwork (or sometimes Footwerk or even Footwurk) is a House sub-genre that is slowly beginning to clutch its fingers around the UK. Trying to trace its lineage is like following a particularly adulterous ancestor in episode of ‘Who Do You Think You Are’. Appropriate given that footwork is the bastard of a somewhat seedier genre, ghetto house, known for its use of dirty samples. You could, if so inclined, follow these House variants in a cross-state trek from Miami bass, to Detroit techno via Baltimore club. Those genres had their halcyon days in the 90s, and yet still remain staunchly localised; footwork is but the latest native strain of Chicago house in this legacy.
Any cursory search for footwork will uncover thousands of shaky camera phone videos of school kids on basketball courts and classrooms furiously shuffling their feet encircled by onlookers. You might call it the dance equivalent of a street fist fight, a crowd and two men taking turns to out footwork the other. Some of tracks reflective this aggro-dance vibe, with titles such as “Footwork Homocide”, “Kill Da Circle” and “Take His Ass Out”. This is what it boils down to: dance. And footwork is even more conscious of its urbanised Riverdance accompaniment by the fact that most of its producers have at least briefly flirted with footwork dancing themselves.
DJ Nate (full name Nathan Clark) confesses he was somewhat lacking on the dance side: “I really couldn’t dance that much, honestly. I always said I entertain people, because I made the mixes and the videos. Being on the side, recording, you get a look at the basics for what makes footwork.” As someone too young to experience the heyday of his native House scene, Nathan grew up listening to hip-hop and R&B. “I use to listen to footwork when I was younger but at first I didn’t really understand it. At high school I started going to more parties, saw and heard how everybody was reacting to the music, so that kinda made me a fan. When I was a sophomore I started producing, everybody loved it in High School, we were in the hallways dancing, recording videos all the time, soon people were beating on tables in the lunch room shouting ‘DJ NATE, DJ NATE’.”
How Nathan gained his popularity is not difficult to fathom, having prolifically made hundreds of tracks in his high school years alone. Footwork is as raw a form of electronic music as you can get, a sample catchphrase cut from anywhere, repeated ad nauseum to blistering Casio drum patterns and intermittent cymbal claps. Admittedly it will probably drive most people nuts at first, but it becomes oddly hypnotic from repeated exposure. Even Nathan finds himself succumbing to the same mesmeric repetitions through his fast paced production. “All it really takes me is twenty minutes. I’ve been doing it for so long I know exactly where to go to get sounds, I know it like the back of my hand. So anything I want make, I can just go and make it. Sometimes I race myself in my head, “Just rush through the beat, 15 minutes”. So when people ask “How you make that track?” I never know, I’m rushing adding stuff and melodies come to my head.”
“Most of these were lost in archives,” says Nathan. So Da Trak Genious, his debut release, is more of a compilation of survived tracks, “when [Planet Mu] sent me a message, talking about how they want to release an album, and was like ‘Seriously?’ I didn’t really think to go that far with it. Most of it I did at high school, so I was like ‘Man I didn’t even know it was that good’. It was a pleasure to be able to do it though.” Planet Mu, who released Da Trak Genious are a UK based electronic music label, run by Mike Paradinas, home to many already well-established UK artists such as Benga, FaltyDL and Ikonika. With his interests piqued by the footwork scene, Paradinas has been busy sweeping up its central players and amassing them into a compilation entitled Bangs & Works Vol. 1.
What quickly becomes apparent from Bangs & Works is how schizophrenic footwork can be for apparently definable genre. Less than five minutes in and you find yourself utterly bemused by a pitched and screwed sample of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by someone styling themselves as Tha Pope. Anything goes from Star Wars theme tunes, to horror movie scenes and even a sample of Paul McCartney & Wings over unsettling bass. DJ Nate is testament to this underlying experimentalism in footwork, probably deserving of his self-declared titled Da Trak Genious for the feat of sampling ‘Sexual Healing’ and salvaging dreadful-as-fuck vocals from Amy Lee of Evanescence. “Yeah a lot of my tracks have also got me singing on them, like maybe someday I get a phrase caught in my head, so I just switch the pitch of my voice and put them on there. Other than I’ll be doing something else and stuff will pop into my head and I’ll rush to a computer and listen to some old song, maybe like Evanscence, I try and cross-over as much as possible.”
That is what is most astounding about footwork, it might have its roots in the House music of yore, but it imperceptibly reimagines so many musical influences that despite its lineage, there is nothing you could quite compare it too. If you wanted you could make some grandiose statement about it being post-modern or symptomatic of an internet-based culture, but whatever; Footwork is intended for dancing not theoretical discussions. Already producers in the UK are reconstituting its style in slightly watered down imitations such as Addison Grooves’ ‘Footcrab’. Who can say if it’ll have the same effect in a nation whether urban dancing is synonymous with slightly laughable X-Factor winners. But if you can stomach it, can you honestly say you’ve heard anything like it before?
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