Missed Connections

Gant Man - B2B Podcast 2009
DxFresh - Back it Up and Dump It 2009

The commonalities of Juke and Jerk have been on my mind lately, and my first example might be a little obvious and completely non-conscious, but nevertheless interesting. A loop of Weezy's Every Girl is not so out of place for Gant Man, the man responsible for the first Juke remix on a major label single. A Juke (or Reggaeton, Bmore, Kuduro, ect...) version of a current hit is sort of a method of staying current within the realm of music, and with the radio being such a force in Chicago there are no surprises within the first 3 minutes of this Back the Box mix. 10 minutes later Maluca pops up, but that's another story. As one of the ambassadors of Ghetto House to a lot of the younger world, and in many ways one of the more accessible DJs in the city (and by that I mean he plays A LOT, and on every side of the city) there is a definite possibility that the Southern California crowd has embraced Gant Man. Switch the E in Englewood for an I and buy smaller pants and you have DxFresh, not-yet-legal Nike fiend and real life jerk. Back it Up and Dump it is the same slice of Weezy as used above, with a few more cuts and an extra Autotuner. Lil Wayne samples are a dime-a-dozen (I'm up in little Haiti, I'm blowin' on Jamaica being an exception) but this little coincidence is a way for me to think about music without thinking about genres and rather the little missed connections in the spectrum. I mean, it's all Hip-Hop in the end right? Or is it all House music?

This is the beginning of Juke vs Jerk, and please feel free to run some tracks by me that you think might fit in.