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| Pitchfork |
 Let's be clear: footwork, or footwurk, or footwerk is not blowing up. Not like dubstep or electroclash or hyphy blew up. Footwork is really more of a lit fuse at this point, and one of those painfully slow, Wile E. Coyote-style fuses at that. Roughly, footwork pits sharp, repetitive samples of soul, hip-hop, and reggae against limping, junkyard-dog 808s. It is music composed, at least theoretically, to encourage a specific kind of dancing, but the strangeness of the tracks suggests the producers have ulterior motives. (The dancing looks a bit like breakdancing, but using your arms is discouraged.) Bangs & Works, Vol. 1 is the first widely available compilation of footwork music, released by London-based Planet Mu, whose founder, Mike Paradinas, is relentless in his quest for new sounds.There is little question why footwork evolved in Chicago: House music birthed the raunchier, uptempo ghetto house (or "juke"), which in turn led to the stripped-for-parts footwork sound. Like ghetto house, tracks usually settle in around 160 bpm; at 140 you've found yourself a ballad. There are hip-hop roots too: the sound's genesis is rooted in RP Boo's "Baby Come On", a track that prominently features an Ol' Dirty Bastard sample (sadly not included here). Other tracks owe a debt to hip-hop's vulgar confidence. Kanye West is said to have been influenced by the scene's early progenitors. Chicago-based journalist and DJ Dave Quam called footwork "more or less the gum under the shoe of mainstream electronic music," which is a fantastic visual that also speaks to the tuff pliability of the sound. Footwork is not expansive. Unlike, say, house music, which has been refracted into a million directions, Bangs & Works will sound homogenous and alien on first listen (remember back to your first listen to Run the Road or Favela Booty Beats; shit's going to start off a little annoying). Repeated listens will parcel the tracks into three or so basic categories: short, styled dance numbers; novelty tracks; and slyly artful tracks....full text |
| Guardian |
| It doesn't take long for some fairly pressing questions to start presenting themselves to the listener confronted with Bangs and Works Vol 1. In fact, it takes exactly five minutes and 32 seconds, by which point it has become apparent that track three, Jungle Juke by Tha Pope – a producer and DJ who styles himself as "Chicago's Youngest CelebrityTM" – is going to consist, in its entirety, of a sample from Tight Fit's 1982 novelty version of The Lion Sleeps Tonight, sped up and slowed down, over a weird, disjointed beat. The queries it raises are various. Have I actually put on a compilation of music popular with bloggers and hipsters, apparently a crucial influence on the equally hip genre labelled witch house or drag, and ended up listening to Tight Fit? Does this kind of thing really, as Tha Pope's biography in Bangs and Works sleeve notes claim, have such an overwhelming effect on the opposite sex that "girls all the way to Gary, Indiana, throw their panties at this man"? But chief among them is perhaps the most straightforward of all: what the bloody hell is this about? Various Artists Bangs and Works Vol 1: A Chicago Footwork Compilation Planet Mu, CD 2010 Even within the labyrinth world of dance music sub-genres, the saga of the music contained on Bangs and Works is a Byzantine one. Everyone knows about house music's journey from Chicago's gay clubs to Europe, largely because said journey changed the face of pop music for ever. But it appears there was a parallel story, unknown outside of Chicago until recently, in which a version of house music became popular in the ghettos of the city's south and west: faster, more lo-fi, its affiliations to disco and gay culture stripped and replaced with the influence of the 2 Live Crew's sexually explicit Miami hip-hop, called either booty or ghetto house. It begat first a style of competitive dancing, called juking, then a Detroit-based variant called ghettotech, which sounds almost identical but has its own style of dance called jit, then a variant called either footwork or – I hope you're keeping up here – juke. To confuse matters further, the dancing now no longer appears to be called juking but footwork, or footwerk, or indeed footwurk. Somewhere along the way, the music's tempo got faster and its sound stripped down even further. House music's four-to-the-floor thud was removed in favour of stuttering beats so scattered it's occasionally hard to work out what the rhythm actually is, a state of affairs further muddied by immense basslines that appear, then disappear, then reappear again, apparently at random, and by the looped bursts of lo-fi sampled, distorted vocals. Usually, the producers isolate a line from an R&B diva, but occasionally they venture further afield: RP Boo's Eraser offers the listener the fairly improbable image of a dance contest in a Chicago ghetto soundtracked by a burst of Paul McCartney and Wings....full text |
| Bbc |
| Arising from mutant, Chicago-based house scenes from the mid-90s known variously as ghetto house and juke, the current footwork scene is a new, competitive strain of dance set around the 160bpm mark and involving some staggeringly fleet dance moves, shown off in gyms, abandoned warehouses and so forth. Bangs & Works Vol. 1 is a compilation of cuts by the DJs who provide the soundtrack for these moves, including DJ Nate and DJ Roc. Typically, footwork is a collage of irregular and halting drum patterns, snaking sub-bass, film samples and vocal phrases cut-up, looped or subject to vari-speed. From an editing viewpoint, it's not sophisticated, but the overall effect is startling and mesmeric in its deceptive simplicity. To those used to house settling into an easy, predictable 4/4 groove, it might be difficult to grasp how anyone could possibly dance to this sort of music at all. However, for those who don't fancy pitting themselves against the local kids you'll see battling it out at frenetic pace on YouTube if you key the words "Chicago Footwork" into the search engine, these tracks can be marvelled at as you might mobiles in a gallery. Titles like F*** Dat (DJ Roc), Yo S*** F***ed Up (DJ Trouble) and Ready Mother F**** (DJ Diamond) might suggest a strong, thuggish element to this music, but fortunately that aggression is sublimated into the artfulness of the genre. Among the best examples are DJ Elmoe's Whea Yo Ghost At, Whea Yo Dead Man, whose tweaked female harmonies hang pendulously in the mix, just off-kilter with the clipped rap and sporadic beat. It works, strangely. Tha Pope's All the Things features a backbeat that falls somewhere between Shangaan electro and the patter of gunfire exchange. DJ Nate's Ima Dog and He Ain't About It feature almost gothically haunting backdrops of decelerated vocals, film samples against brutal rap repetition and beats raining at you from all sides....full text |
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