- Topping a triumphant year for footwork, RP Boo tells the story of his sprawling career with an ode to ghetto house, funk and, of course, the battle track.
- Established!, the new album from footwork originator RP Boo, AKA Kavain Space, comes during a progressive year for footwork. These developments track across a trio of albums released by the UK's longstanding advocate of the Chicago genre, Planet Mu. In August, the label put out Painful Enlightenment, on which Jana Rush channeled her struggles with depression into an experimental take on footwork. The month before, DJ Manny brought an unprecedented level of romance to the genre with Signals In My Head. RB Boo's new record lands three years after Planet Mu released his first album consisting of entirely new material, the minimalistic I'll Tell You What!. His latest, arriving more than two decades after he picked up his trusty Roland R-70 in the '90s, looks back at his storied career producing, DJing and dancing to music in Chicago, a musical journey that spanned from disco to ghetto house to laying the sonic foundation for footwork.
"Wherever I went and played, they loved 'em, no matter where I went," Space once said of his early DJing experiences. "I started in '91, and by '93 I was damn good, I wasn't making any tracks, I was just mixing Chicago styles, house, soon to be ghettotech, booty house. I was unstoppable." Yet, even as dancers happily latched onto the new sound, laying the groundwork for footwork didn't come without its challenges. Despite RP Boo being a member of the influential dance crew House-O-Matic since '93, he was unable to sign his music to affiliated labels like Ray Barney's massively influential Dance Mania. Now, over a decade has passed since Planet Mu's Bangs & Works Vol.1 compilation broadcast the genre, and effectively Space's music, to the world. There are no hard feelings, but once his work travelled outside of Chicago, RP Boo proudly claimed his rightful, and now established, position as the Godfather of footwork.
Producer and drummer Questlove once described anatomizing J Dilla's sampling methods as "the equivalent of solving a 10,000-piece puzzle in record time." The same could be said when it comes to decoding Space's music. Space is a sampler who isn't exclusively interested in digging for obscure records. Many of his samples are easily recognizable, spanning original source material from majorly influential musicians like Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and First Choice. Some even pull from relatively new records—on his last album, he samples a brief, but addictive Toro Y Moi refrain in Travis Scott's "Flying High." But for someone as nice with the sampler as Space, the popularity of his references are of little importance. It's what he does when he chops those records, often intertwining them with disparate samples or his own vocals to form a collage-like narrative, that makes him a masterful producer.
The tracks that represent battle footwork through and through see some of the most exciting chopping at play. On "Now You Know!" vocal samples land like a flurry of punches. The phrase "They got/The wrong" is a repeated rhythmic motif over a Gary Glitter-meets-footwork beat. Finally, late in the track, various vocal strands coalesce to satisfyingly complete the entire sentence, "They got/The wrong/N*****/to fuck with." In another chopping achievement, "Haters Increase The Heat," a simple line, "Haters gon' keep making my tracks get hot," is fragmented and then precisely spliced with fluttering speed in a number of configurations.
Nostalgia informs tracks like "Finally Here," which references ghetto house's heyday with a series of rowdy chants and affirmative lyrics about the ladies and fellas gracing the dance floor. Snippets of Class Action's "Weekend" make sunny cameos here as well. "Be Of It" reels forward with the kind of frantic strings found in '60s spy movie music. Here, shouting vocals pulled from the late '90s comedy, Don't Be A Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice In The Hood, sound like something that could be extracted from DJ Deeon's catalog. Elsewhere, a seductive slow-burn, "How 2 Get It Done," flips the Leon Haywood sample made famous from "Nuthin' But A 'G' Thang" into a battle track.
Cuts like "How 2 Get It Done" also demonstrate Space's skill in using contradicting styles and moods to his advantage. The somber synths taken from Phil Collins's classic "I Don't Care Anymore" on "All Over" cue the introspective summit of the album—an impassioned exchange of "Oh"s and "Yeah"s brings the track home with a resounding groove. An instance where that doesn't work as well, however, is on "Beauty Speak Of Sounds," which evokes the serenity of sitting in the backseat of an open-sided 4WD Safari Jeep, watching contently as the African savanna and its lively inhabitants drift away. The track is built on a sonic bass of hand drums, animal sounds and a vocal that goes "dancing on the grasslands of Africa." The valuable sentiment of celebrating the beauty of African music's roots is lost somewhat as the placid atmosphere is eventually joined by footwork's frenetic drums. The contrasting elements ultimately clash more than they support each other.
Established! opens with the proclamation: "All my life I love to dance." Its best moments draw you to the formative dance floors of Space's past, the parties where he watched dancers react to the thrilling amalgam of styles that would become footwork, and where he danced himself, absorbing the lessons that would feed into a genre based on movement. These lessons have been internalized in his productions—from his 1997 track "Baby Come On" to the innovations he continues to make on Established!. Dancers do make the best producers, after all.
Tracklist01. All My Life
02. How 2 Get It Done!
03. Haters Increase The Heat!
04. Oh!
05. Finally Here feat. Afiya
06. All Over
07. Just Like That!
08. Be Of It!
09. Now U Know!
10. Ivory Surface
11. Beauty Speak Of Sounds
12. Another Night To Party