Do It Again Dj Rashad Whosampled
The aim had ever been to forge a welcoming space: somewhere of familial belonging, no matter your creed, colour, or who you lot love. The late Rashad Harden lived passionately, and unwaveringly, past this motto. Better known by his producer moniker, DJ Rashad, he spearheaded a move – Teklife – and brought an avant-garde hyperlocal sound to the globe.
After the release of his seminal 'Double Cup' album on London'due south Hyperdub, in 2013, his start fully-formed studio work, a tension in Rashad's hometown of Chicago arose amidst the glowing worldwide praise information technology was seeing; this is not us, this is not Chicago, said the detractors, firmly in the hush-hush. Despite existence seen as one of the pioneers of a genre barely out of its teens, some scene absolutists baulked at the sight of the album. It felt, to them, untethered to footwork's cutting-throat breakbeat foundations. A foreign entity, unworthy of dance-battling your nemesis to.
RP Boo, another towering figure of the scene, spoke candidly of the negative reception he had witnessed the LP's reception firsthand on the streets and in the clubs of Chicago. Asked why Rashad was seen by some as a sell-out, he retorted brusquely in a Passion of the Weiss interview, saying the animosity was, "Because his sound excelled. His way excelled. He thought when y'all grow, y'all excel, that's what they don't know in Chicago. Rashad was on a whole 'nother level."
The beauty of Rashad's brand of footwork, equally Boo would concur, was that it was at once parochial and global, sequestered notwithstanding social, artistic notwithstanding commonsensical. He sought to enrapture the globe, not only his neighbours. In the same fashion that he opened up the local scene to the world, touring Europe, cobbling together fans through MySpace, YouTube and Bandcamp, he crashed downward the austere barriers of sound. Not to make information technology more palatable, just to prioritise musicality and family unit over everything else. "My goal is now, that you lot don't accept to footwork or trip the light fantastic toe. Every bit long as you get into it and enjoy it, that'due south cool…It's for everybody, not just footworkers," Rashad told The Quietus in 2013.
In that location'south no confusion as to why footwork start evolved in Chicago: House music, ubiquitous in the city in the tardily '80s and 90s, birthed the libidinous, uptempo ghetto house, which in turn led to the even barer audio of footwork. It is composed, theoretically speaking anyway, to encourage a specific kind of dancing, where arms and legs are less limbs and more extensions of the computer-programmed rhythms. But the hanging melancholic incongruity of the tracks, all syncopated and wiry, suggests the producers take motives across trip the light fantastic.
Listening to footwork is a weird, fantastical paradox: you try to wrap your brain around calculating the samples – they hypnotise; you lot hear the drums zap around without seemingly without reason – your head jolts. But it's also strangely magnetic and uncomplicated. The transition into footwork saw the tempos speed up stratospherically. House music ordinarily sabbatum at 120 BPM; with its ghetto house and booty firm form, this rose to something hovering close to 145 BPM. Footwork, on the other hand, rammed the beats-per-minute to between 145 and 160: Chicago trip the light fantastic groups, in other words, e'er wanted more than. Footwork's best mode, it would seem, a hyperventilating maelstrom of melody, skittering howdy-hats, pummelling 160 BPM drums and hypnotic song loops.
To understand footwork's attain, y'all have to understand Planet Mu. "Does a musician have to know why it is that he likes something? Sometimes it's better not to," Planet Mu founder Mike Paradinas once said of the mystique of the sound's snag. Paradinas was positively flummoxed past – and relentlessly pulled towards – footwork for what he saw equally a raw, unvarnished artform without all of the pretentiousness. The label, which had become seen, in the eyes of many, to be as forwards-thinking and artistically organic equally whatever imprint around, brought footwork to the masses in the form of 2010 compilation album, 'Bangs & Works Vol. i'. Anthologised past Planet Mu for the earth outside Chicago's trip the light fantastic battles, Rashad featured twice on the 25-track project, a mesh of footwork circuit veterans and sleeping accommodation producers trying to make a splash.
The frenzied specificity of the genre – drum and bass gymnastics, double-time clave triplets, syncopated drums, the abandon of jungle – created an air of exoticism around its producers, and Planet Mu helped turn this enchantment into a genuine appetite for more outside of Chicago. DJ Tre, DJ Manny, Gant-Man, Spinn and Rashad were all original members of Ghettoteknitianz – the footwork coiffure that would subsequently dissolve into Teklife in 2010.
A producer is taught that the nucleus of a pervasive track must elicit something inherently tangible that crews can 2-step, 5-step, crossover or valdez to. Information technology's a bona fide freedom of movement and expression. Rashad, the ever-willing technician, toiled away with the sound for years. His early on works, however, were skeletal, inelastic, and lacking a pulse, which, more often than not, contributed to still, cold, mechanical and militant interplay. It wasn't intrinsically bad, it only felt unripened. If projects such as 'Something 2 Dance 2' (2008), 'Just A Gustation Vol. One' (2011) and 'Teklife Book 1: Welcome to the Chi' were structured clay pieces with detailed but unemotional latticework, 'Double Cup' is the riveting claymation epic that floors Cannes audiences. It's larger than life, and hybridises a glut of very vibrant subgenres: acid house, ghetto house, hip-hop, jungle, drum and bass, R&B and soul. Where dance music is generally near letting become, 'Double Cup' is about letting in.
Whether they were intended as teasers or not, the EPs he released in quick succession upon signing a deal with Hyperdub – 'I Don't Give a Fuck' followed by 'Rollin'' – serve as the righteous precursors to what was to come up; soul-drenched footwork that is far too expressive to be consumed simply as a complement to dance. Much like ballet, the music progressed, fundamentally, from being a buttress for the master human activity; from acting equally a symbiotic constructional backdrop for the fleet-footed. Rashad helped the audio transcend into a physical compositional form that, in its ain beautifully austere style, could soundtrack anything.
Rashad was the starting time producer of his ilk to contort samples into song, not unrelenting noise, or roiling chant: for this reason, the name of J Dilla is frequently spouted when discussing Rashad. Without ever truly having to lay a verse, or sing a hook, his songs emanated a cult of relatability. He mined samples for their aesthetic worth but massaged them into meaning. Ecstasy, kaleidoscopic color, hedonism, blackness and unerring love all flow out of how he deftly assembled together drums, song loops and bass.
There's an unsaid yearning in the samples he selected, a wish to sing without singing. Like on the the wild vocal loop of Commencement Pick's 'Let No Man Put Disconnected' on 'Everyday of My Life' which cuts through the haze like a scythe over wild grass: "Everyday of my life," are the words sampled, suggesting regular solar day anguish. There had always been a vivid-eyed playfulness to Rashad'southward music, but there's also a despair clamouring beneath the joyous samples, a certain air of resignation and dejection. "I guess some of my sample choices are kind of emotional," a self-effacing Rashad once conceded. "They say 'Rollin' is kind of – maybe non emotional – but you can kind of feel the sample talking to you, or y'all can relate to information technology… Information technology's touching."
Rashad might, like most in this increasingly continued but simultaneously disconnecting globe, take had some personal demons that he kept guarded. The tracks themselves don't merely hint at emotional depth – something Rashad himself, clearly, was coy about – instead, their seams take chances unravelling as lust, beloved, pain, inebriated stupor and joy flow in fast. Higher up all else, though, the songs are bound to movement, physically and conceptually, which is something undeniably and biologically thrilling. Face muscles contract to project smiles or frowns, blood gushes through arteries, serotonin in turn courses through the bloodstream; the carnality of the act of sex itself is welded to motion. Considering its dance-oriented ancestry, these subtle emotional cues now make sense.
The thread that runs through is one of connection and family. The three or four-minute-long beats on 'Double Cup', from top to bottom, and side to side, are adorned with the aforementioned kind of thoughtfulness, warmth and rigorous precision as the care of a local GP that you lot've been visiting when unwell since a child – professional obligation is patiently cast aside for a genuine love. Bonds naturally exist, but every bit with everything family-related, they become strengthened and frayed every bit they run their course; at that place's celebrations ('Drank, Kush and Barz'); the meting out of punishment as comeuppance ('Leavin'); personal reckoning and cocky-expression ('I Don't Give a Fuck', 'Reggie'); guardianship and teaching ('Show U How'), outright anarchy ('Acid Bit') and the tenets of unconditional dear ('Simply One', 'Let U No'). Unsurprisingly, Rashad continues the collaborative streak as a ways of asserting the family platonic, too. DJ Earl, DJ Taye, DJ Manny, DJ Phil, and Taso all characteristic heavily, dotted throughout. Spinn has fingerprints on viii of the record's 14 tracks. A Rashad anthology, but a Teklife anthology.
Fidgety synths, aqueous and immediately Rashad, are the first thing y'all hear on 'Double Cup'. A trumpet is then introduced, followed past stagger-rhythm snares that are spliced into a seamless blueprint of difficult-hitting drums that invite you into Rashad at his most melodic. Ane of Double Cup'due south loftier points comes two songs in; an interpolation of Cheryl Lynn's funky '80s R&B cut 'Show You How' is warped until everything feels hypnagogic and disorientating.
At times, the blistering double-time drums and wildly micro-edited samples split atoms, a multi-sensory set on, where anarchy washes over your encephalon. Soul and hip-hop samples – familiar voices, sparse lyrics, breezy hip-hop melody – humanise everything that seems untethered to reality. 'Let U No' defies gravity: an irrepressible song is vaporised atop stacked jabs of colourful, syrupy instrumentation.
'Double Cup'due south nadir is its sheer magnitude. Packed into over 50 minutes, a caveat might be the length and brutish knottiness: a slog for some, footwork projects are comparable to the headiness of heavy-duty techno – hyperspeed drum assaults, incessantly warped vocal-samples, with little room to exhale – and so listening in spurts is well-advised. Just that's a frivolous complaint, i which presumes that art should be consumed in ginormous, gluttonous gulps and non advisedly considered micro-dosages.
In 2014, in an interview but months prior to his passing, Rashad gushed virtually the broader touch on that the genre was having, the shape-shifting it was undergoing overseas into newer forms thrilled him. "My proudest moment has been the intake on everybody else outside of Teklife that's been doing footwork…," he said."To meet that happen and to see it grow is a feeling that I can't even explain."
His death came as a surprise. A mail service-mortem ruled that his decease, having previously being speculated most, was tragically the outcome of an accidental drugs overdose. His family, Teklife, and the wider musical community mourned, still his untimely expiry never seemed like the end. The official Teklife Twitter bio yet reads, all capitalised, "RIP DJ RASHAD". DJ Taye, his wide-eyed and prophetic torch-bearer, regularly tweets and eulogises Rashad in idolatry terms. "The void is there, but it just feels timeless," RP Boo has said of his passing, ensuring to refer to Rashad in the present tense. "I just experience like he will merely be here forever, his soul will be here forever."
DJ Earl, another member of Teklife, still hears his south Chicago drawl when playing live: "Sometimes at shows, I just hear his voice in my head, like, Ay dog, you meliorate kill!". Teklife seemed to have the unenviable position of trying to reinvent itself without its slap-up inventor; a bird trying to accept-off with its flock after having its wings clipped. The commonage huddled together, resolutely, with admirable poise, and sought to recalibrate. Posthumous projects, drawn from the troves of Rashad's unreleased music that Spinn and others hoard, were partly unveiled; namely the 'Afterlife' LP and the '6613' EP.
As the second decade of the 20th Century nears its end, footwork has ascended, powerfully, from its nascent days of earnestly soundtracking a localised confrontational dance. Information technology's has crept into the blast-bap raps of Chicagoan upstart Joey Purp ('AW SHIT!' from his latest project 'QUARTERTHING' was, coincidentally, co-produced by DJ Taye); information technology tin be heard amongst all of the maximalist and referential layerings of Hyperdub'south Proc Fiskal debut from this twelvemonth; in Iglooghost'due south hyper-realistic, frantically textured, digital netherworlds as drums and hullo-hats spray like automatic gunfire and sped-up voices skitter; fifty-fifty Chance The Rapper'southward explicit and coded homages to juking and still give the sound relative popular credence.
Without Rashad, footwork might have remained a footnote on the Chicago club music Wikipedia page; an obscure, more often than not unused Bandcamp genre tag. Jlin, and so, the Gary, Indiana auteur, has taken everything footwork-adjacent into liminality; its mail-footwork, sample-less music whose oxygen is the absence of structure. In her career's early stages, she messaged back-and-forth with Rashad and his squad on MySpace; Teklife's impact is irrefutable. What Rashad's curt-lived only indelible career succeeded in a higher place all was capturing the spirit of familial connectedness and harnessing the experimentation flair which became integral to Teklife. The group has always been a family affair, and they continue to practise then: Not a unmarried release from the collective has existed without collaboration. Teamwork, for Rashad, was shorthand for creation.
Everything on 'Double Loving cup' suggests that DJ Rashad had the popular intelligence and sweeping ambition to have footwork – and the artist himself – further into the cultural conversation. A Danny Brown collaboration album here, an ethereal DJ-Kicks mix album there, intermittently pushing out radical solo projects: Rashad had limitless potential that was still unlocked. What we saw was, in truth, just a slither of lite poking its style through the keyhole.
Earlier this year, DJ Taye – who was 16 at the time he joined the Teklife crew – released his Hyperdub debut in 'Still Trippin'. It felt similar a reawakening, a rebirth, but it was purely a continuation. The traditional vocal structures were in that location on the rap-imbued tracks – verse, bridge, chorus, repeat – yet the hyper-technical drums strived to say the most. Without buckling to imitation, or without deviating too far away from what made Rashad then special, DJ Taye shattered all precepts. It felt truly revelatory on the fifth twelvemonth of 'Double Cup's anniversary.
It would exist naive, though, to herald 'Double Cup' equally the definitive certificate of a genre whose entrails are yet spreading, leaking and morphing. Rashad, truthfully, wouldn't desire people to consecrate any one anthology, even if it is proudly his own, every bit the Magna Carta of the sound he helped birth; he wanted it to grow, for feedback loops to disintegrate and for the very sounds, ideas and producers themselves to move forrad towards everlasting fertility, not backward towards ghetto firm. Rashad's touch was less a question of musical dexterity but of an apolitical vision of unity.
What informed footwork's evolution, every bit its proper name suggests, was a iii-style system of feedback between DJ, producer and dancer, but it goes deeper, much deeper. The album embrace – an aeroplane-view of Chicago – explains a lot nearly Rashad. The gridded lights gleam equally intricately one of his beats. From this vantage indicate, he observes not but his metropolis from on high, but everywhere else the eye and heed can see, as well: Never too far from home, just always looking out into the ether for more than.
Buy 'Double Loving cup' on Bandcamp here
Stream 'Double Loving cup':
Read Dummy's interview with DJ Rashad from 2013.
Source: https://www.dummymag.com/features/five-years-on-the-enduring-brilliance-of-dj-rashads-double-cup/
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