"We made something we could dance to." The Chicago juke and footwork pioneer reflects on 40 years of Dance Mania and his longtime collaboration with the late DJ Rashad.

Anyone with a passing interest in footwork and juke will know of Traxman. Corky Strong has a long history in the world of Chicago dance music, first releasing on the legendary Dance Mania label—which is now celebrating 40 years—in the mid-'90s. He's since split his productions between ghetto house, juke and footwork, releasing alongside titans of Black American music like the late DJ Deeon and DJ Rashad. Strong went on to become a member of DJ Rashad's renowned Teklife crew, and he was one of the creators of the legendary mixtapes on coloured cassettes that became a prototype for juke and footwork's evolution. 

In this Exchange, Strong speaks with RA's Kiana Mickles in New York about how he first became introduced to this world through his cousins, with whom he'd listen to funk and slow jams, Parliament Funkadelic, Farley Jackmaster Funk, James Brown and a variety of hip-hop throughout the '80s. The pieces eventually fell into place, he recounts, when he met the "mysterious kid" DJ Rashad in 1997. Together, they helped shape the music scene in Chicago, and the rest, as they say, is history. 

Over the last few years, Strong has been celebrating footwork's past by putting out a series of albums called Da Mind of Traxman on Planet Mu. He's just released his third volume, and his first since 2014, which was crafted with the help of fellow Planet Mu artist Sinjin Hawke. Strong took on A&R duties to collate the best from hundreds of tracks dating back to 2005. The series is notable in part because it's a catalogue of footwork and its Chicago lineage—juke and house—as well as these genres' soul, funk and rock roots.  

Strong talks to Mickles about what Chicago's music scene was like in the '80s and '90s, why footwork was so rooted in dancing and where the genre is heading in the future. Listen to the episode in full. -Chloe Lula

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