DJ Rashad

DJ Rashad is the rare artist whose work is as rewarding to experts as to the uninitiated. Dance-music aficionados can marvel at the way he ingested existing genres and spit out a new one with his pioneering contributions to footwork; native Chicagoans can see how he cut up that city’s cultural fabric and stitched it into something previously unseen. But even those who have never set foot in a nightclub can grasp the radical rhythmic play, or lose themselves in the warped samples and found sounds that make the familiar alien and the alien familiar. Born Rashad Harden in Hammond, Indiana, and raised in Calumet City, he began dancing and DJing as an adolescent. Through the mid-2000s, a string of singles and independent releases placed him among footwork’s emerging vanguard, which would soon come to include Teklife, the collective he cofounded. With the release of his 2013 full-length debut, Double Cup, he became synonymous with footwork’s awesome technical dexterity and rich textural interplay. Just six months after that breakthrough, Rashad passed away at the age of 34, but his influence over modern dance music remains inescapable.