After all, this music isn’t about fucking this is battle music: violent, propulsive, and visceral, and it’s internalized brilliantly within “Ghost,” the intro track to DJ Rashad’s Just A Taste. But as with non-Western musics - say, Shangaan music (new wave dance music from South Africa) - my relationship with footwork is conflicted: Any enjoyment I get out of listening to it hinges on attaching my own values to music that otherwise resists, detracts, or is simply indifferent to such readings.īut given the confrontational style of footwork dance, it seems like any conflict, physical or not, is welcome. I don’t live far away from Chicago, the city where 90s ghetto house transfigured into juke and (due largely to tracks like “11-47-99” and “Baby Come On” by RP Boo) subsequently birthed its disfigured mutant child, footwork. If footwork’s original meaning was established in these underground dance circles in Chicago, then its currency to everyone else now rests somewhat heavily on those too busy rationalizing the noise/music cleavage or politely tracing dance music’s trajectory to actually do any footworking themselves. But while this signifyin’ form of dance has yet to be shrinkwrapped and sold, the jagged shrapnel from the actual music has crossed geographical borders and social cliques so incisively that, from the perspective of everyone outside the circles, its origins are beside the point.
At least that’s what it is in Chicago’s converted warehouses and rec centers where combatant footworkers form circles and take turns battling, dozens-style, with dazzlingly complex foot patterns. Footwork is, first and foremost, dance music.
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