“Become that track!”: Interview with RP Boo (2025)
We all know the story of electronic rave music; Detroit, New York, Frankie Knuckles, and so on. It is one of those legendary, pantheonic stories that is revered warmly by even those who were not even born at the time it was happening. When this story is usually told, it tends to tail off into a sense of dilution and dissipation, where raving and techno music becomes a part of the mainstream. Yet, while popular critics lament the loss of creativity or newness, there is also a subcurrent of discourse that argues that there has, in fact, been a lot of interesting stuff going on for years.
In the following interview, the philosophically-inclined artist, dancer, and musician Female Wizard, speaks with someone who she believes to be one of the most important and groundbreaking musical artists of the past twenty years: RP Boo, the internationally acclaimed pioneer of a style/form of dance/music called footwork.
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ROHAN: Hello, everyone. Thank you for being here today. Just before we start, we should say that this talk is taking place on stolen Aboriginal land, and sovereignty has not been ceded. Today we are super lucky to have two very special masters of sound culture in their respective scenes. We have our local legend Female Wizard, who is here to have a nice conversation with the pioneer of footwork from Chicago, RP Boo. I'll hand it over to you guys.
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FEMALE WIZARD: Okay, I'd also like to acknowledge that we're on the ancestral lands of the Wurundjeri tribe of the Koolin Nation tonight, and pay my respects to the elders, past and present. We are so lucky to have, not only someone who has not only mastered one of my favorite genres of music — (Chicago) footwork — but is an actual progenitor of the genre. You were there at the beginning.
RP BOO: Yes.
FEMALE WIZARD: I thought we'd begin with a bit of a history lesson, and I want to kind of trace where and how this genre developed. So I suggest that we start with Disco in New York in the 1970s. You were born in the ‘70s?
RP BOO: ‘72.
FEMALE WIZARD: Around the late ‘70s there was, for example, Paradise Garage; Larry Levan was playing disco, soul, funk, and R&B to a very eclectic, mixed crowd. Another example was Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy cutting their teeth as DJ's in gay saunas and gay clubs in New York. Frankie Knuckles eventually moved to Chicago, arriving at a club called The Warehouse, which was next to, or on top of, a record store. So people could go to the club on the weekend, hear all this music, and then come to the record shop during the week and find the records that Frankie Knuckles was playing; these fans would ask the store, “Where can I buy that ‘House Music?” — that's where we get the name ‘house music.’
At some point, Ron Hardy took over the Warehouse, and it was moved to a different location and renamed the Music Box. So this is where the story of house music begins, and Chicago is the birthplace of this music. During this time, dance music producers were competing to get those records to Ron Hardy so that he might play them at the club for everyone to hear. So, in a way, this culture of competition and innovation in dance music begins here. There are a lot more names that I haven’t mentioned, but most specific to you would be the Hot Mix Five, and when you were a teenager you were listening to one of this crew of five deejays in particular, Farley “Jackmaster” Funk.
RP BOO: That’s right.
FEMALE WIZARD: Was he your first introduction to dance music?
RP BOO: Yes, the Hot Mix Five, with Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, was my main introduction, and I can remember how I was introduced, too: I'm was at the age of 7 or 8 years old, and my uncle had just come babysit so that my mom and her sister can go out for the night. I was just in the habit of watching him listen to music; he liked a lot of disco, so I grew up listening to disco, as well as a lot of funk, rock, heavy metal, even country music. I had no bias towards any specific genres while I was growing up. So, one night he was just dancing nonstop, and my brother and I were laughing so much he always knew what station to turn to. One of the songs that got me started, or an example of a song that really stuck with me was Glad To Know You (1981) by Chaz Jankles, one of my favourites, and I just remember seeing the way my uncle would dance, with pure enjoyment. Nothing could stop him. Seeing him happy made me happy, and that was my introduction. 2–3 years later, however, and here comes the Hot Mix Five. I am too young to have known about Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles in the time you were mentioning, because these parties were underground. Yet, the way Farley mixed seemed different to everyone else at that time.
So every time he played, we tuned in, and throughout the city of Chicago, wherever you would go, you would hear his music on the radio. You could go traveling down the streets, especially during the summertime, and if it's not live on the radio then it was being dubbed on tape the night before. I used to listen to the playback from the cassette tape player in somebody’s car; Chicago was just lit off of house music.
It took a little while to hear someone mixing live. While I was living on the West side, I had cousins that lived on the South side, and they moved over in 1984 and met some guys — some DJs — who actually lived on their block. They decided to throw one of the first house parties on the West side. That was the first time I ever saw a pair of Technics 1200s. The brothers had crates of records. At that time, in ‘84, Hip-Hop was everywhere: the breakdancing culture was strong, and the DJs would often import house music into their sets due to a similarity in BPM range (120–130BPM). As long as it fit the tempo, they would play it all, and as I’m watching this, I realise that nobody at that party was breakdancing; everyone was doing a different kind of move, a particular kind of futuristic movement that would evolve into what we call footwork. Seeing this, I was like “You know what? I want to be a DJ!” and so I asked the two brothers, “I want to learn how to DJ.”
The reason why they agreed to teach me is because I used to pop-lock real good, instead of breakdancing on the floor. They simply said, “we love to see you pop-lock.” It’s not like there weren’t other good dancers, but for some reason I stood out, and so they set up the turn tables for me. During the ‘80s — especially from ‘82–’85 — I was soaking it all up to become a DJ.
FEMALE WIZARD: Now, I’ve seen the Hot Mix Five interviewed in various documentaries. To give some context to the audience on what DJing was at that time: first of all, it's all on vinyl — that's the only way that anyone, at that time, can even imagine what DJing is. The Hot Mix Five — and I'm not sure if this was everyone at the time — said they had two of every record they wanted to play, so they weren’t just playing one track and then mixing into another track, they were creating new tracks out of the tracks that they had, through various techniques. Was everyone doing that? Is that how you like to play?
RP BOO: The only thing I learned from that way of playing was to always have an extra copy. That was it. I never got into scratching, and I never had the thought process to become the producer. That wasn’t on my list. I just enjoyed playing and blending records. I would say that blending was the major art at that time. If you could blend, you’re good.
FEMALE WIZARD: In terms of how we get from house music to footwork, there was, or is, this genre called ‘ghetto house,’ and it's an offshoot of house music that's a little bit faster, it's more raw, it's more minimal, and it's also extremely rude, I would say.
RP BOO: Yeah.
FEMALE WIZARD: This music was largely pioneered by DJ Deon, DJ Milton, DJ Slugo, and so on. Were you aware of them? Did you meet them? Were you around when ghetto house was happening?
RP BOO: Yes, I was around. I ended up getting into the ghetto house scene at that time because… I was not a producer then, but I was DJing, and I used to dance with a group called Mega Move. At some point, I had moved to the South side for a good four years, and I made a couple of friends in the neighborhood that I moved to. Winter passed by, and suddenly it’s Spring, 1989, and we were outside having a conversation. I was walking down the street and I see some of my buddies out on the sidewalk, dancing, and I said, “I didn’t know, you guys know how to dance?” To which they replied, “Yeah, we got a dance group” — “a dance group?” All right.
My next door neighbor finds out about this, and he sees me as I'm walking past. He started to come out all the time; he had two turntables and he would just play records for us — but he was, nonetheless, our DJ. It was about that time when Mike Dunn came out with Let’s Work That Motherfucker (1989), and then [Steve Pointdexter came out with] Computer Madness (1989), “Hey—here comes the ghetto house.” After that, we started hearing of DJ Deon and DJ Milton; Slugo, not so much, as he came some years later, and was anyway more on the South side. On the West side, it was all about Jammin’ Gerald and the guy named Houz’ Mon, as well as the iconic producer from the rap group Crucial Conflict, or Wildstyle. He was up on a different name, but he was in that era, he was playing at The Factory; that was the West Side. So, next thing you know, here comes the ghetto house saying I knew nothing of the “dance mania” at that time. One of the hottest tracks before that was when Cajmere did Percolator (2010). All of these DJs, like Milton and Slugo, were building their raunchiness off of what they experienced in the Robert Taylor Buildings—the Projects. That’s where I met the group House-O-Matic; they were the first group to start doing underground parties, and the DJ's of these parties were Deon & Milton.
FEMALE WIZARD: So that's the connection, because I know that you graduated high school, some years went by, and you joined House-O-Matic, and as you said, none of this was known as footwork at that time. Footwork (dancing) had come from breakdancing, but it was all these different kinds of dances coming together. People were throwing parties, house parties, but they were also kind of family friendly events as well, right?
RP BOO: It was more… I would say house parties because for us, our house parties were different from, say, what Dilla was doing with the pioneers at the Warehouse or the Music Box, that was a location, and the people that were going to those parties were adults. For us, our typical house party would literally just be at our house.
FEMALE WIZARD: How many people would come?
RP BOO: As many people that would fit in, and after that, if it was a good night, that meant the police didn't have to show up. But depending on where it was held… because there was a big difference between the neighborhoods and the projects. In the projects, people might have only had a three bedroom apartment, but if they got a nicely-sized basement in the building, then everybody is downstairs in the basement. So when Deon and Milton were doing their things for House-O-Matic, I wasn't in the group yet as I had just graduated from high school. I had done the Bud Billiken Day parade with the group I was in at the time, Mega Move, but the president of that group was a former member of House-O-Matic, and when I actually seen House-O-Matic perform on the stage for the first time, the report from the former member was like, “That wasn’t a good show” — “To you,” I said, “to you it wasn’t a good show, but to me, it was the best show I have ever seen” — you know how the kids scream for K-pop, people just go nuts — I'm a ‘man,’ and I did that.
That group was so cold; it was more body movement, but they already had footwork elements back then. At that same time, the West side was moving more towards pure footwork. They didn't associate themselves with dance groups; they were individuals. They might have had a clique, but it was more like “check this move out,” that's how the dance move ‘the Holy Ghost’ came out. And so with that, one day I ended up seeing House-O-Matic at the Bud Billiken Day parade and that's when I said like, “you know what, I want to join” and the president of the dance group I was with found out, and for some reason, he got mad.
Around three weeks later, I went to ask to join them. I had it in mind that I wanted to bring with me that day a mix tape that I had made, so when I arrived I asked the guys, “I got a mix tape, can you play it while everybody's practicing?” He said, “Yeah,” and so the first side was playing there… and as he flips the tape over to the second side, a young lady walks up and says, “Hey, Ronnie [Sloan], who made that tape? Was it Milton or Deon?” To which Ronnie replied, “No.” “So who made it?” “A guy that just joined today, he brought the tape.” — “He's good”. Later that day I was asked, “Do you have your own records?” “Yeah, I got records.” “Can you DJ for us next week?”
FEMALE WIZARD: That's how you became the DJ for House-O-Matic? So, when you say that footwork was beginning on the West side, I think — for people that don't know about this — one of the unique things about the genre we call footwork is that it developed in tandem with a dance style, and with dance battles; you can still watch footwork battles today on YouTube. It's one person vs. another person vs. another person, and that was very different to where people were doing dance routines before.
RP BOO: Definitely! It was especially, as you say, about the routines. That's when like for people that started seeing House-O-Matic, they would always want to do the dance routines. Back then, when we were growing up and getting into this, we lived on different sides of the neighborhood — different gangs — we couldn't cross a certain street without being chased back.
But for some reason, House-O-Matic could cross over, so people would come to our neighbourhood, just not the ‘main members.’ One time, we were there, dancing as individuals against another group who came from the West, and suddenly somebody said “...five, six, five, six, seven, eight,” and the dynamics just changed. That's when I first saw these group dance routines; everyone dancing in unison, and it looked so good. House-O-Matic was that group that I looked up to, and those that met House-O-Matic, they never had to battle. Never. They did bigger things outside the city of Chicago. They were able to do performances for movie stars. There’s a guy called Son of Baserk, and he did a song called Change of Style (1991). In that video are members of the House-O-Matic. We didn't know that until two years later. So House-O-Matic were not really ‘in Chicago’ because they were doing shows outside of Chicago, too. But while they were outside of Chicago, the West Side was still doing its thing; Ronnie Sloan started doing the parties.
Ronnie could go to different locations, but the West Side had one main location that was a permanent spot called The Factory, and in 1996, on January 1st, the whole building caught fire and now everybody was… The West Side knew nothing of what we were doing on the South side until somebody decided to do a dance battle.
FEMALE WIZARD: Between West Side and South Side?
RP BOO: Yes, a West Side group as the main attraction, and us, House-O-Matic. We go do this dance battle… We mopped the floor with them, but for some reason they were awarded the trophy. But in that same moment, we ended up collaborating and, well, we got together. That's how we built the bridge from the South Side to the West side. Now, for those that don't, and as you say… have you heard the track with Slugo, called The Coalition? (2016) with House-O-Matic, Phaze 2, K59, House Arrest — that's the connection, that's how the coalition track came to be.
FEMALE WIZARD: So at this point, say early 90s. You’re the DJ for House-O-Matic, these big parties, everyone loves you. DJ Rashad is becoming a friend, as well as DJ Spin, and you guys are starting to produce music together. The name footwork still doesn't exist yet, but I can imagine that when you first started playing, the dancers were dancing to, what, 140 BPM?
RP BOO: Yes.
FEMALE WIZARD: Footwork is almost exclusively running at 160 BPM. How does it get there?
RP BOO: Okay. First we just danced. We never put the name footwork on it the first time. But we could relate... But the first person that said anything about ‘footwork’ on a track was in Foot Work (Let Me See) (2010) by Wax Master, “Let me see you footwork. Let me see you footwork.” Until then, we were just moving our feet. So as the time went by, we started producing tracks, but before it became that signature speed, it was, I think, talent shows, where you’d have singers, comedians, people doing skits, and you could have 1 or 2 different dance groups in that same neighborhood.
And so it was a particular group from the West Side who were competing that year, and what they did, because we were still recording on cassette tapes — CDs were not even out yet, and everybody had to use vinyl records to make those recordings. So this one group just decided to basically change it up. What they did was simple, whoever the DJ was that made the tape for them, instead of running the vinyl record of 33 rpm, they ran it on 45.
So it was more of a fast song, but the group was able to keep up with the dance moves and it became a trend. So now you got the DJ's that were able to produce, they started making tracks at a faster speed. And what else helped is that now you have the main heavy hitters of dance mania, Paul Johnson, Deon, Milton, Wax Master, Slugo, Funk, Jammin Gerald. Paul Johnson was already traveling, but now you got Milton, Sluggo and Deon, and Funk, who were able to do shows as well, and more underground rave parties. So they left the space open. House-O-Matic were no longer doing little parties.
And what happened was that now you have myself — I'd only just learned how to make tracks, but as that transition was happening, I was the last of the ghetto house scene. I wasn't the producer for that scene, but I was the DJ, and that's when I met DJ Rashad, DJ Clip and so on. When we did start making tracks, we could sample things from the ghetto house days, but at a little bit faster pace. We looked at the previous generation and said “thank you for what you guys have done.” That's how I see sampling: “I'm not trying to take your track, I'm just trying to say thank you.” So here I come, armed with my Roland R-70 sampler; now, I'm going record shopping.
At some point, I remember that there was a record that I had been seeking for years, and one day I stumbled across it, and I finally got this record, and I go home and I make this track, which eventually came out as Try To Break (2015), but the only person that could probably recognize that sample, at that time, would have been Slugo. Nobody else had a clue of that sample, and I was afraid to play it. But when I played it, I saw the reaction on that dance floor… I blended it with Michael Jackson's They Don't Care About Us (1995), and I used a Deon track to help merge them together. When the crowd heard it, they went bananas.
Then everything started flooding back in from the days when I would be riding in the back seat of a car in the 70s. All the funk songs, the disco songs, the rock songs, everything started flowing. Even when I would use music from the operas, people were asking like, “Where do you get these ideas from?” These ideas had been sitting in my head since I was a kid, and now I'm a producer — why not use them? Every day, people would become more and more interested in the remix, or in sampling, it’s more of… what's the hottest song that's on the radio at that time. Y'all can have that. I stood out every time. That sampler only had 11 seconds of sample time, but the things I did with that sampler blew a lot of people away. “How did you do it?” Hey, just God's gift and creativity.
FEMALE WIZARD: It still does blow people away. 2010 was a huge year for footwork, seeming to find its way to the international stage compared to the period between the ‘90s and 2010 where footwork was mainly localized in Chicago. What was that like? 20 years of you being committed to this, to DJing and producing this incredible music. You used to work part-time all those years, but after 2010, this became your career.
RP BOO: Well, I graduated high school in 1991, but I started in 1990, and I worked that job for three years. After that, I had a year and a half off, and that's when I was doing a lot of DJing with House-O-Matic. I was making some money off of that. But then from 1995 until 2010, I had the same job for 15 years. From everybody else that I knew, even in the ghetto house scene, nobody had a job. So it was nice that I could miss a party — and I noticed a lot of times, as the years went by, the parties where I didn't show up, things were happening that made me glad to have skipped, as I am not the type of person that condones violence; I was hearing about some of the DJ buddies getting a slap at each other — that's not me.
And so I ended up transitioning in 2010 to another job, which I worked for another three years. I look back at this time, from the day I started working, until being released in 2013 — I never imagined being without a job. I never once looked at the music and thought it would be possible… but one day, I was there, getting ready to release Legacy (Planet Mu, 2013), scheduled for May 13th, 2013. DJ Rashad had already blown up the year prior, and while waiting for my own release, I saw Rashad, and he said, “You ready?” “Ready for what?” “To start our tour.”
I replied, “You know that I have a job, right?” He said, “Yeah, I know, but what you do is you let your job know at least 8 or 9 months prior to your first show.” “Do you think you could get some time doing that?” I said, yeah, so I ended up losing that job in March 2013. By mid-April, I got a text from a guy named Jay Kush that runs Lit City Records and he says, “I see you have a record coming out on Planet Mu. We would like to have you come to New York, but we know you work.” “We're going to do a release party.”
I said, “Hey dude, I'm not working anymore.” “So can you come to New York in two weeks?” “Yeah.” So I went to New York to play at 285 Kent in Brooklyn. And from that day, the report that came back was mind blowing. I learned that day, in my first show outside of Chicago, that there is always someone that's walking around in these parties that’s special. You can have agents walking around, you can have people that’re running record labels walking around. But I didn't have that mindset back then. And the next day, you know, the album dropped, and now I'm getting the press, the reviews and the write-ups. I didn't expect that. I remember thinking, and asking someone involved in this event, “So, I'm officially in the industry?” He said, simply, “Yes.” When I got back home to Chicago, I sat in my room for three days thinking “How did this just happen?” I thought of it when I was a kid, like maybe being a band member, or playing the trumpet, or something, but I didn’t expect it to happen this way
So I started getting all these emails saying “Can you do a tour?” I think I had at least 18 shows lined up the whole summer, but I didn't have a passport, so now I had to rapidly apply for a passport. The next available show was Unsound, who waited patiently as I applied for my passport, which took me a little bit over three weeks — but I was able to get it in time for Unsound. I didn’t have an agent back then, but two weeks after Unsound, I was back on a plane, this time heading to Japan.
When I came home and looked at everything… The press was still going… What is this? But the money was slowly coming in, too, and two years later — 2015 — is when I first got my first agent. But within that week, I ended up having two agents, one for the States, Canada and Central America, and one that was for the UK as Europe. To this day, since that week, I haven’t had to look back. I always thought, “Hey, this is not going to last forever,” but within the first ten years, all that I was doing was building the brand within that time. Due to me and my father having taught music all the time — he played for press for years — and the things that I learned from talking with him all these years… The stakes are harder when you are not tied to some kind of label, especially if you’re a DJ, but when you are producing, you really gotta know what you are doing, how to navigate the scene and how to invest.
A lot of people are not going to keep traveling continuously, but I was blessed to go to all these places over the first ten years. It's better now than it was the past ten years, but I still tell people I can't do this for the rest of my life, so I'm going to have fun while I'm doing it, while I can. I still kinda look at those people who work a 9 to 5; I clap my hands to them and hope that there will be a day when you might find something that you really enjoy doing but until that time, you have your health, your strength — do the job to pay your bills, take care of your family. I'm here to support you.
FEMALE WIZARD: I want to shift the conversation now and to read a quote of your own from an interview that you gave around ten years ago, because I think that you are a very unique artist, in that I think you want to transcend who you are as a person to make something that can speak beyond generations. This quote I have written down, you said, “I still love music because music is an art, and most people don't know the art in it.” I wonder what that means to you?
RP BOO: Things have changed, especially when dealing with technology, for the newer producers; it’s not their fault. Coming from rhythm, blues, funk, disco… live instruments, rhythm, a lot of rhythm. I don’t find a lot of rhythm in things today. Because of technology, the art of producing is gradually disappearing. Today you got a lot of people that are more interested in being seen to do it, to DJ or produce for the purpose of just wanting to be seen. This is different to a love of creativity. It’s not the fault of these producers, the industry knew what they were doing because a person that can still display groove — especially in electronic dance music — is dangerous. A lot of people have heard things that I have done, and I could play a track and just say, let me take this sample out, and it will not sound like the typical footwork track that the average person makes, because, as my father would say, “Look what time you were born, you are putting it in there and people recognize the difference.”
This is why this sounds different, especially when I like to make them subs shake. I don’t just put a regular kick in there, I want to have that woo woo woo woo pattern. But if you just sit there, and gravitate to it, you can feel the soul. It makes you move, like “What the fuck just happened?” “What is this?” It was something that I never saw outside of the States, and it's gone now in the States. Especially with footwork, because we used to do this thing where if the track was that mean, we called it the screw face like, “oh damn” — that's gone. I’m not sure that it ever left Chicago. From everybody I have heard produce — and there are some damn good producers in different countries — nobody ever gave us that screw face because everything has become so damn commercial.
One of the most disappointing things I have seen… I was in Lisbon, Portugal. I know of DJ Marfox, and I think their sound was called ‘Batida’ (or ‘Batucada’) — that shit was nasty. But the following two years, I came back to Lisbon, and there were a bunch of newcomers, and I was listening to their production, and it just wasn’t what it used to be. It was what they were adding into it, they were adding more commercial songs into the blends. I felt that they had killed or destroyed one of the best things I had ever heard outside of footwork. You don't hear too much being done about this situation, either, because the only thing people care about now, especially after COVID-19, is being seen. I don't know as much about what is going on outside of the States, but here it’s all about being seen and recognised. People don't care what it takes to get that recognition.
But I will say, the accolades of things like originality have gone. A lot of the shows I have been getting in Chicago, they’re telling me that they’re bringing me for the specific purpose of showing you to the new producers, so that they hear how I play. We want them to understand the music. If they can figure out what it is, they could even take it further and light it up some more. We don’t want to just be playing.
FEMALE WIZARD: I would say that there are a lot of recent footwork producers who are really innovative and outstanding. Are you optimistic about the future of footwork? Do you think it is still growing, after 30 years?
RP BOO: Yes. The good thing is that footwork is still growing, but the way it's going to grow is… Okay, look, for instance, during my second time in Krakow, Poland, I was doing an interview, and the question was, “What is the best thing you could tell us about Chicago footwork music?” I said, “You really wanna hear the answer to that?” He says, yes, I said “You're going to have to outlive me to get that answer.”
That was my answer, and this is why. If I'm ‘the Godfather’ of this music; who am I to tell the story while it’s still being written? The story is only meant to be read when it's finished. That means I have nothing else to do, and nothing else to say, and that will come when I can no longer move my limbs, to get up and press the button again.
And he asked, “Do you have a protege?” “No, not right now” I said, but I explained that, if and when that day comes, the best part about it is that it doesn't have to be somebody from Chicago. It could be somebody from Africa. New Zealand. It if they have music in the fucking North Pole, then they could come for the North Pole. But I will be able to teach them, and guide them. Footwork is the most live/alive thing that came into existence alongside social media. Every other genre that was well-known at that time, was well-known before footwork was. When all this happened, when Myspace came up, so much attention came upon footwork: “What’s that thing they’re doing?” “That's from Chicago; Chicago footwork.” “Okay, but what is that music? We need that!” We did that, and that's where Planet Mu came in. That's how we made it happen, and it felt like the freshest and hottest thing ever. But everything has its ups and downs, and with the production, the production that I'm hearing, and the creativity from outside of Chicago, especially when I first heard Queen Shirl’E from Auckland, New Zealand — mind blowing. When I heard SHERELLE from the UK playing — mind blowing. When I heard their productions, their ideas, especially if they were using samplers — mind blowing creativity.
So there is a great future, but still, in Chicago, the DJ's who are producing, who are focused on footwork, are aiming for fame. And, again, “Y'all can have that.” Everywhere else that I go, I find a lot of people who aren’t aiming for fame. They're just having a good time, and having a good time is what keeps it alive. I have seen those who fall to destruction, those who don't have a cushion to land on, but it's all because we come from an era, or a city, that didn't offer much, but we want to get out and take care of our families. But due to who I am and my connections with lawyers and the ‘inside information’ that I do get, I am at the point of, as you say, as long as you work hard, as long as you get tours, as long as you get gigs, that's the last of the real money of this music industry; streaming? What's that? Everybody knows what you gotta do in order to see just some money for streams.
Yet the producers and DJ who I look at, who are loving what they do — they will forever have something to do. I don't care if it's a gig that’s paying $600–700. At least that's for an hour of work. Instead of trying to pour it all over into the streams, and how long it's going to take to get that. Because everybody's following each other — what's going on? What's next? Let's just have fun. Let's have a party. One of the greatest things I learned is to have a good heart. Don't try to compete. And when you do what you do, in time, you will discover what it is that you do best. Because it took me almost 15 years to figure it out. In the end, I think it was my smile — or my pop-lock — and a lot of people say your smile is gravitational — I thought “I just like to smile?” but people tell me, “No, you don't understand. Your smile is gravity and it makes people dance and have a good time.” It’s funny, I tell people like, “if that helps you, fine. But I also want you to pay attention to the music; you might miss something.”
Over the years, I have a encouraged a lot of people, and the stories I have heard about people that said they were on the edge of, say, committing suicide, ‘Until they run into one of my sets,” and how much I have encouraged them to… You know what? That's my job. Yeah! That's my job. To make sure you uplift yourself because if I see that you're not happy, I got a problem, because I can feel it, and I do not like to be sad. We don't know what people are going through at any moment. We don't know what trauma they've been through. If they could talk to people to really have an understanding with them, and I have seen some stuff — especially at home in Chicago — where I really wish I could have talked to these people. Maybe they weren’t my closest friends, but sometimes, when I put the two together, I realise they didn't have anybody to talk to.
The last thing I can say here is that I don't like to see anyone being bullied. I don't like to see anyone being talked over. I don’t like to see anybody being kicked while they’re down, and I don't like people to make fun of those who are less fortunate. If I see it — I got a problem. You want to see me mad? Do any of these things, and we will have a problem.
FEMALE WIZARD: Well I've got one last question to finish this. I just want to talk about footwork, in general. I play a lot of footwork myself as a DJ, and I noticed that when I go from one genre, let’s say, techno, to footwork, the way people respond — what I, as the DJ, as well as the crowd, what we're listening to, in terms of sound, completely changes. Relating to this, I think that there was an interview that you did with DJ Marcel, a couple of years ago, where she said she doesn't play for escapism. You're saying you want to lift people up, you want to make people feel alive — I don't think that that's escapism, either. If anything, people are brought back, I don't think there's a genre that can match this compared to footwork. So my question is really about your opinion on how you think footwork achieves its special, unspeakable, unexplainable quality that changes your body and your mind.
RP BOO: Well, especially for me. The genre — footwork — is one thing, but I think that I could take certain tracks, and the way I would run these tracks, a lot of people will think they were footwork tracks, but they aren’t. It’s one thing for a track to gravitate you, to get you dancing when you first hear it… but I want people to go back and listen to these tracks, to really listen, and to become the track. That’s my mission: “Becoming that track.” No matter how you feel. If you think that you can’t ‘become the track’ the way I did, well, it’s not about how I did it — put yourself in the track like it’s your theme song. Every time you listen to it or play it, change the way you move to it. There is so much space within a track, and you can create a world in that space. You can create your own movie scene within it, especially with footwork,and there are very few in Chicago doing this now, I would say… We got this guy called Curtis — we call him Kurt Kobangz — we got Prince JRon, King Charles, Boodilla, but out of all these guys, it’s the things that they are yet to do that are exciting to me.
King Charles and JRon, when they teach their classes and courses, they have ‘levels.’ First they teach the people how to do the basics, and you get to hear some ghetto house. At the second level, you get to hear a lot of Teklife LLC, and some other DJ's. But if you could make it to that last level, there is only one person that gets played, and they say “this is RP Boo.” “You think you good? You gotta graduate through RP Boo.” If you graduate through this level, you will then understand what you have done, and therefore understand how to take it to the next level — to become one with that track.
One of the things that changed the game for me, I remember I had just come off a tour and I was finishing up… What track was it? It was called U-Don’t No (2018), on an album called ‘I’ll Tell You What’ (Planet Mu, 2018).
FEMALE WIZARD: One of my favorites!
RP BOO: What you don't know is… that track was supposed to be a diss track, a diss battle track. And I was working on it, and I was like, “Yeah, I’ma get ‘em.” And so I had just come home and I found out that my Mother-in-Law was sick. One night she was crying as I was making this track, so I went to take her to the hospital and, well, I found out that night that she had cancer, for three years already, and had told nobody. There was something about her seeing me as I was making it that made me want to switch it up. That's why I turned it into this beautiful jazz, and people love that track. It was jazz, in a unique way, but also footwork, and I thought, “You know what? This is how I want the tracks to be.” I want people to be able to survive and be happy in these tracks. Even if the music is fast, I still want to tell good stories — That’s it.
FEMALE WIZARD: That's an incredibly beautiful story about one of your most beautiful tracks. You guys should all go listen to it if you don’t know it already. Thank you so much, Kavain, for tonight, and thanks for coming to Melbourne.
RP BOO: Yay!
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