Juke has been bubbling up in the Chicago area for the better part of the past decade, but its roots are deeper in the past. The combination of repetitious pop and hip-hop samples, jackhammering polyrhythmic beats, and faster-than-fast BPMs owes something to Miami bass and ghetto house, which emerged in Chicago and Detroit in the early 1990s. The accompanying dance is derived from jit, which itself owes debts to both traditional African dancing and the jitterbug. The legacy is obscure, but it's there.
Juke is starting to establish roots in the present, too. Salem frequently feature thudding footwork figures in their tracks, as does London's label-of-the-moment Night Slugs, who just released Girl Unit's footwork-indebted single "Wut". UK dubstep artist Addison Groove offered a sparser, cleaner take on the sound with his "Footcrab" single-- and, hell, even the relentless slam of Kanye West's "All of the Lights" carries a trace of footwork's genetics.
The growing fascination with footwork's compositional tics has also brought an equal interest in its raw materials, which is where UK electronic label Planet Mu comes in. In the past few months, they've put out a scene-spanning footwork compilation, Bangs and Works, as well as full-lengths from 20-year-old rising talent DJ Nate and comparative veteran DJ Roc, Da Trak Genious and The Crack Capone, respectively. Despite their difference in age, Nate and Roc's full-lengths share a few similarities: Both excel when working in juke's sonic braggadocio (Nate's "Footwurk Homicide", Roc's "They Can't Fuck Wit Me") and downtempo mood-setters (Roc's mesmerizing rework of Robin Thicke's "Lost Without U"). Both records are of a slightly patience-testing length (Da Trak Genious is a psychosis-inducing 70 minutes long). And, in a quality that applies to the scene as a whole, the tracks succeed in proportion to the quality of their samples.
Roc's The Crack Capone is the more enjoyable full-length. Roc favors cohesive musicality above all else, [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| an attribute that ties into his background in the more colorful Chicago juke sound. The "Crack" in the album title refers not to the drug but to Roc's production style, which favors tightly edited rhythms and snapping track structures. That sense of tightness makes The Crack Capone a frequently invigorating, accessible listen, whether taking on percolating forms of UK bass (album closer "Break it Down") or vibrant blasts of melody (the one-two punch of the Willie Hutch-sampling "Get Buck Jones" and "Gun Smoke").
If Roc is fixated primarily on melody, then Nate's focus is more texture-based. Da Trak Genious is a tough front-to-back listen, and not just because it's so damn long; many of the tracks turn their pop-fixated samples into abstractions, repeating figures endlessly until they become hypnotically broken mantras. The result can be almost psychedelic at times; when he lets the source material breathe a little, as on the Dreamgirls-biting "You're Gonna Luv Me" or the Lil Wayne-sampling "Let Da Beat Build", the results are more immediate but ultimately less interesting. Still, it's heartening that Nate, Roc, and other artists working in the genre don't seem overly invested in any one template, and it'll be interesting to see where the scene's talents take their sound next.
