Worst Behavior Recs

Juke is a fast, sample-driven club style from Chicago that runs around 150–160 BPM, built on jagged 808/909 drum programming, booming sub‑bass, and looped vocal chants. It keeps the raw, minimal, party‑starting energy of ghetto house but pushes the tempo and rhythmic syncopation much further. Tracks often rely on short, repetitive hooks and call‑and‑response phrases, claps on the backbeat, and tom/snare rolls that stutter and pivot around a steady 4/4 grid. Harmonic content is sparse—brief chord stabs, simple bass riffs, and plenty of negative space—so that dancers can lock into the drums. Juke is closely related to, and historically precedes, Chicago footwork; where juke is the more club‑aligned, chant‑heavy form, footwork became more abstract and battle‑oriented.

Club is an umbrella style of mainstream dance music crafted primarily for nightclub sound systems and DJ-centric environments. It emphasizes steady four-on-the-floor rhythms, prominent basslines, repetitive hooks, and builds/drops designed to energize a dance floor. While it borrows from house, techno, disco, italo-disco, freestyle, and electro, Club prioritizes immediacy and crowd response over subcultural purity. Tracks are arranged for mixing, extended grooves, and vocal refrains that translate well to peak-time moments. In radio or chart contexts, "club" often denotes dance-forward pop or DJ-led productions tailored for mass club play.

Drum and bass (DnB) is a fast, rhythmically intricate form of electronic dance music centered on breakbeats at roughly 160–180 BPM and powerful, sub‑heavy basslines. It grew out of the UK’s early ’90s rave and jungle scenes, combining chopped funk breaks (most famously the Amen break), dub and reggae sound‑system aesthetics, hip‑hop sampling, and techno’s futurist sound design. Across its many substyles—liquid funk’s soulful harmonies, techstep and neurofunk’s cold, machine‑like bass engineering, jump‑up’s hooky bass riffs, atmospheric DnB’s pads and space—drum and bass remains a DJ‑oriented, dancefloor‑driven genre that prizes tight drum programming, deep low end, and precise arrangement for mixing.

Electronic is a broad umbrella genre defined by the primary use of electronically generated or electronically processed sound. It encompasses music made with synthesizers, drum machines, samplers, computers, and studio/tape techniques, as well as electroacoustic manipulation of recorded or synthetic sources. The genre ranges from academic and experimental traditions to popular and dance-oriented forms. While its sonic palette is rooted in electricity and circuitry, its aesthetics span minimal and textural explorations, structured song forms, and beat-driven club permutations. Electronic emphasizes sound design, timbre, and studio-as-instrument practices as much as melody and harmony.

Experimental music is an umbrella term for practices that prioritize exploration, process, and discovery over adherence to established genre norms. It embraces new sound sources, nonstandard tuning systems, indeterminacy and chance operations, graphic and open-form scores, extended techniques, and technology-led sound design (tape, electronics, computers, and live processing). Rather than a single style, it is a methodology and ethos: testing hypotheses about sound, structure, and performance, often blurring boundaries between composition, improvisation, sound art, and performance art. Listeners can expect unfamiliar timbres, unusual forms, and an emphasis on how music is made as much as the resulting sound.

Footwork is a high‑tempo Chicago dance music style centered around ~160 BPM, sparse drum programming, and chopped, mantra‑like vocal samples. It is designed for competitive dance battles, so its rhythms emphasize off‑grid syncopation, rapid switch‑ups, and negative space that challenges and energizes dancers. Musically it sits between house and hip hop traditions: sub‑heavy 808/909 drums, jittery snares and claps, booming kicks, and looped fragments of soul, rap, or R&B are arranged into tense, angular patterns. Compared to juke, footwork tends to be more abstract and polyrhythmic, with fewer straight four‑on‑the‑floor passages and more broken, stuttered grooves.

Footwork jungle is a hybrid of Chicago footwork’s 160 BPM battle-ready minimalism and the UK’s early-’90s jungle breakbeat science. It marries chopped Amen/Think breaks, sub-heavy 808 bass, and halftime/duple-feel syncopation with footwork-style vocal chops, call‑and‑response samples, and spacious, rave‑born atmospherics. The result is music that can flex between heads‑down listening and high‑intensity dance movement, retaining jungle’s rolling momentum while adopting footwork’s off‑grid micro‑rhythm and negative space.

Halftime is a bass‑music subgenre built around drum and bass’ 170 BPM engine but written with a hip‑hop/trap‑like half‑time groove. Producers either write at 160–174 BPM with the snare landing on beat 3, or at 80–90 BPM and double-time the sound design and phrasing. The style emphasizes subweight, sparse but heavy drums, and intricate, neuro‑influenced sound design. It borrows the swing, swagger, and negative space of hip hop while retaining the sound-design complexity of drum and bass and dubstep. The result is a head‑nod, low‑slung feel that still translates powerfully on big systems.

Bass music is an umbrella term for a family of UK-born electronic styles that foreground powerful low-end frequencies and broken, syncopated rhythms. Emerging in the late 2000s as the borders between dubstep, UK garage, grime, and drum & bass blurred, it emphasizes sub-bass design, percussive swing, and sound-system impact. Rather than a single formula, bass music describes a fluid scene where producers pull from 2-step shuffle, jungle breakbeats, dub space, and house tempos to create tracks that are equally at home on underground dance floors and on headphones. Hallmarks include heavy mono sub at 40–60 Hz, half-time/ off-kilter grooves, skeletal arrangements, and judicious use of delay, reverb, and modulation.

Halftime DnB is a bass-focused offshoot of drum and bass that retains DnB’s tempo (typically 170–174 BPM) but places the drums in a half-time grid, creating the feel of 85–87 BPM. The result is a spacious, head‑nod swing that blends the sound design intensity of DnB with the groove logic of hip hop and trap. Producers emphasize heavyweight sub lines, neuro-influenced bass design, and skeletal, syncopated drum patterns (kicks and 808s up front, snares landing hard on beat three). Texture and negative space are integral, with percussion details, foley, and minimal melodic fragments carrying the narrative. The style sits naturally between club systems and headphone listening, often occupying the same ecosystems as UK bass, the autonomic/leftfield DnB continuum, and the LA beat scene.