DJ Rashad / DJ Spinn: "Dubby" [ft. Danny Brown]

There’s a track, “We Run It”, off the late DJ Rashad‘s 2011 Just a Taste album; for my money, it’s one of his most underrated ever, though there’s dozens of tracks you could say the same for. It’s a little rawer than what we’d hear on Double Cup, melding Rashad’s plainspoken, Chicago-centric chants with warm, blunted soul loops via Roy Ayers. It struck the perfect, fluid balance between Rashad’s two worlds: smooth but tough, inviting but challenging.

That feels like forever ago, but “Dubby”, from DJ Spinn’s new EP for Hyperdub, featuring Rashad and Danny Brown, brings me to the same headspace. Things have changed: Rashad is gone, the Teklife world has broadened tenfold, and UK influences in particular have been folded into the mix just as much as soul and hip-hop. You can hear them here, as eternal partners-in-crime Spinn and Rashad swerve from junglist breaks to hyper jazz riffs. Brown slips naturally into the role of the stutter-step MC, usually reserved for Rashad himself: “ION’T.KNOW.BOUT.WHERE.YA.FROM.BUT.THIS.IS.HOW.MY.HOOD.WORK.” That balance is the same, though—bringing Chicago to the world, and the world to Chicago. Oh, and Rashad footworks in the video.

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