As footwork’s gained a certain cachet of “cool” over the past handful of years—swelling gradually from regional curiosity to global movement—there’s been a refreshing lack of “cool” surrounding Traxman. It’s not the fact that he’s been in the game longer than just about anybody: he practically wrote the rulebook, DJing and producing over three sprawling decades of mutations that Chicago house’s DNA underwent, gradually percolating into juke and abstracting into footwork and blurring the lines between all of the above. There’s a cheeky-yet-deadly earnest wink to much of his work, the kind that sits parallel to irony but couldn’t be further from it; in a sphere that rewards overt humor—see DJ Rashad and Freshmoon’s doofily hysterical “Everybody”, built around a meme from the TV show "Intervention", or snarky DJ Slugo numbers like “Wouldn’t You Like To Be A Hoe Too”—Traxman’s sense of humor has persistently tended towards kitsch. He’s not into the long sell, since people are supposed to stay dancing while listening to this stuff, remember?
The first volume of Da Mind Of Traxman, his 2012 Planet Mu debut and arguably the first great solo footwork full-length, reveled in these kinds of tenderly shlocky moves, forgoing esotericism for pointedly ham-fisted and ultimately democratic gestures—ideologically, the precocious lovechild of Dilla’s samplemania and 2 Chainz’ knee-slappy dad punchlines. For the owner of one of Chicago’s most renowned record collections, encyclopedic and meticulously organized, Traxman’s never been one for going over his audience’s heads, even when shit gets weird. That would be inefficient, and besides, he can do weird all by himself; that album’s most surreal moment, “Let There Be Rockkkkk”, was built from a cock-in-hand AC/DC sample.
Da Mind Of Traxman Vol. 2 is trimmer and more muscular, even as it maintains his signature playfulness. Where its predecessor threw the whole fridge in the blender and delighted in making his friends drink it, here Traxman seems interested in doing more with less, probing the limits of each individual component, experimenting with song structure. Samples misbehave and are duly punished, though there’s an obvious tenderness with which they’re handled even as he brutalizes them. Sticky, honey-coated bursts of Rhodes and horns and xylophones over-eagerly trip on each other, threaten to fall out of sync, then jump back in line on opening track “Time Slip”. “Let It Roll Geto” is an ungodly mash of chopped “Sunglasses At Night”-y synth arpeggios and ghostly, gargled mermaid-soul, all of which gets shoved around by stuttering ghetto-house vocal tics, exponentially accelerating into barked orders like a long-lost Tae-Bo video where Billy Blanks tries PCP.
Footwork cuts typically end up either "garish" or "great", with very little room in between those two poles—and there’s certainly a bit of the former here too. “Bubbles” aims for restraint but grows mind-numbingly repetitive, and not in the transcendent, mantra-like sense of footwork and juke at its most effective (like, say, “15416”, hypnotizing in its deceptive simplicity). “Tha Edge Of Panic” starts off intriguingly enough, a gracefully gut-wrenching sequel of sorts to “Let There Be Rockkkkk”, but unravels into brutal hysteria, a nightmare of roid-rage grindcore. That’s the tax for taking these kinds of try-anything-once risks, one that’s fairly inevitable in an 18-track album of any sort, but especially with footwork. By their nature, footwork tracks tend to exist in and of themselves, specific tools in a set moreso than cogs in a unified machine; in heavy doses, they can overwhelm a casual listening session (namely, while multi-tasking and sober).
All the same, continuing to classify footwork as a primarily functional art form in 2014 presents something of a paradox. At its core, the claim rings true, and always will—above all else, this is music for dancers who want to be challenged and DJs eager to oblige—but it can also be limiting, particularly taking into account the past four or so years of full-length releases that have aimed not to alter the genre, but to let it transcend its intended context for a bit. It begs the question: what exactly does a great footwork album—a whole greater than the sum of its parts—entail, if it’s even possible? Double Cup, the late DJ Rashad’s 2013 magnum opus, is proof enough that it is; at the very least, it’s the closest a footwork full-length has gotten to perfection. Da Mind Of Traxman Vol. 2, for the most part, is a stellar collection of songs—playful, ballsy, informed by the past but living very much in the present—but they’re songs that relate more as cousins than as siblings.
