About Chicago Footwork
What is Chicago Footwork?
Chicago Footwork, also known as juke in its earlier development, is a dance culture and electronic music genre, first appearing in Chicago in the mid-1980s to ghetto house music and also beat music and dancing. By the early 1990s, Chicago Footwork had evolved into dance being performed and practiced at 160 beats per minute, a speed that is maintained in present day.
Chicago Footwork Dance History
In the 80s, dancers performed these individual moves in choreographed routines for performances or battles within local dance troupe culture. By 1988-1989, "Dance Group Footwork" was developed by Calvin, Goose, Michael Stamps, and others from "House-O-Matic's," one of the most legendary dance groups from the Southside of Chicago, led by Ronnie Sloan. House-O-Matic's members were influenced from dancers on the Westside. They created variations of the Ghost alongside fraternity-like step movements for the Southside of Chicago, and these variations spread to the dance group communities in the inner city and south suburbs.
In the early 1990s, Anthony "Ant" Brown, member of the dance group "U-PHI-U," created the most recognizable foundational step in Chicago Footwork called the "Erk N Jerkz." Ant added this to his version of the Ghost and other popular moves from group battle settings. Revered as one of the top dancers of footwork's first generation, Ant Brown left the dance group community in the mid-'90s and began teaching/training with other teens from his neighborhood in the Auburn Gresham area. Their training ground, in the basement of a three-story apartment complex, became widely known as the "The Dungeon."
Ant Brown, alongside Jerry, Aaron, Cornell, Denise, and other "Dungeon Boys," took each of the moves created from the 1980s to the mid-'90s and began putting them together to form "combinations." With these combinations, footwork evolved into the dance form we know today and gave birth to the idea of battle groups that focused on competitive footwork, such as Wolfpak and The Phirm (noted battle cliques from the inner city and the South suburbs).
Chicago Footwork Music History
Footwork/juke music first appeared in the late 1990s to early 2000s as a faster and increasingly abstract variant of ghetto house, derived from pioneers like the late DJ Deeon and DJ Milton, incorporating elements of various music genres. The music genre continued to evolve to match the energy of the growing footwork dance movement. RP Boo, a former footwork dancer, released songs such as "Baby Come On" in 1997, but these tracks were still considered ghetto house at 145 beats per minute.
According to RP Boo, the first emergence of the footwork/juke music genre was when Traxman and other DJs from the Chicago West Side began to play ghetto house records at 45 RPM instead of the standard 33 RPM. The term juke, as applied to particular styles of ghetto house music, was used by DJ Puncho and Gant-Man in the late 1990s in tracks such as "Juke It" in 1997. Some originators of the footwork/juke genre — most notably, DJ Clent — initially disregarded the term, preferring to call footwork music "project house." However, the term "juke" came to dominate the whole ghetto house scene, often used as a blanket term to denote any style derived from ghetto house music, and even its progenitor, ghetto house, was sometimes called "juke," too.
DJ Rashad (with his 1998 track, "Child Abuse," with DJ Thadz), DJ Spinn, Traxxman, and DJ Clent (with his 1996 track, "Hail Mary," with DJ Slugo and 1998 track "3rd Wurle") began pioneering the genre's new sound. During the 2000s, footwork relied heavily on its distribution on a peer-to-peer mixtape exchange in Chicago public schools and local shopping malls throughout the city. Digitally, footwork producers shared music on MySpace and YouTube, among other free-to-use media-sharing platforms.
Some of the earliest tracks of footwork/juke music only gained exposure after European labels started re-releasing them throughout the 2010s, with DJ Rashad's "Double Cup" Album leading the way as the top footwork album of the decade. "Double Cup" featured leading producers DJ Spinn and DJ Manny, and is a direct representation of where footwork music is today.