Juke Is Now
After listening to Dj Tuco’s all-Juke mixtape about three times today, I’ve fallen in love again with the music I know so little about.
I mean, what’s not to like about “minimal use of analogue synths, and short, slightly dirty sounding (both sonically and lyrically) vocals samples, often repeated in various ways. Also common are 808 and 909 clap sounds, and full “rapped” verses and choruses.”
Reading DummyMag’s love letter to Chicago Juke didn’t help matters. Pure Juke lives in the bedroom production studios and gymnasium dance-offs of Chicago’s high school kids. It’s constantly changing, and while it might just be a cultural blip it’s one that I can’t get enough of right now. Being a white guy in Canada probably means that I won’t ever even get real juke, either - just the scraps that I can pick up off the interwebs. And nothing says juke scraps like that Die Antwoord track, a Dutch/South African electro jam re-worked by a Prague-based DJ.
Catch these juke tracks, and don’t ever confuse them with jook music: the latter is from Trigga City, the former from the Chi (am I allowed to refer to those cities like that?).
Die Antwoord - Beat Boy (DJ Tuco Juke Remix)
Props to Salacious Sounds for the Gant Man track.
[...] not everyday that a Chicago DJ emails you to tell you that your write-up on Juke was great and that he’s stoked that the music he loves has reached such a global [...]