The music that has driven Chicago's club scene is coming to hip-hop's rescue

Juke music, born out of inner-city pockets of Chicago, is the new ferociously hyperactive and electro sound. Now the music has made its way to the UK, thanks to the crossover success of the eccentric Chi-town (or Chicago) duo Dude 'N Nem, whose single "Watch My Feet" has launched the sound into the mainstream. Along with band members Upmost and Trygic's simple rhymes and chant-a-long chorus, the video shows crews doing hip-hop's answer to Irish step-dancing in the dance called Footworkin', whose vigorous leg moves have inspired dozens of self-made YouTube stars to urge us to watch their feet too.

"If you're from Chicago, or anywhere near Chicago, and you haven't heard of Dude 'N Nem by now, you're deaf," declares Trygic. "We're actually getting a lot of love everywhere we go. The song is something new, it's something fresh. It's like every time someone sees it, they're amazed by it."

DJ Nehpets, a long-standing member of the movement, and who hosts a prime-time juke show on Chicago's Power 92 radio station, agrees that the song and its associated dances have gone down a storm, while also giving the city a new musical identity.

"Everyone else has a piece of the action as far as regional things that you can do, [like] snap in the south or krumping and hyphy on the West Coast," he explains. "But now it's time for Chicago to have its own identity with our own type of music and that is juke music. We combine it with other genres [like hip-hop], and, with 'Watch My Feet', we take dirty south stuff and juke it, so everybody can get into it, not just people who juke or just listen to rap."

But while juke might be the latest buzzword in clubland, its roots can be traced to ghetto-house music and a contingent of DJs who have been spinning it since the late Eighties. Nehpets credits the likes of DJs Puncho, Gant-Man and Tone for coining the phrase.

Gant-Man defines the genre on his MySpace blog. "When we say: 'Play some juke music' [or jukin' music] it's really saying the same thing as ghetto house or booty house tracks," he writes. "Bottom line it came from Chicago house music... It's just faster and ghetto."

However, it's hard to establish what the first juke track was. It depends on whether you're loyal to its ghetto-house foundation which dates back to rare songs such as the crass "There's Some Ho's In This House" or are happier to ride along with its reincarnation.

While some producers like The Violator Juke Squad's DJ Slugo maintain that juke was around long before the term existed, it's now widely agreed that the first song to mention it was called "Juke It", released in the late Nineties.

A series of juke tracks emerged soon after and, at the height of its popularity, scores of venues would host parties dedicated purely to the music. But a crackdown followed in 2003 after a stampede in a Southside club left 12 people dead. It meant that the music lost an outlet and it wouldn't get much prominence again until 2005, when Gant-Man was commissioned to remix Beyonc and Slim Thug's "Check On It" by Columbia Records. Since then, producers have been cranking up the beats per minute to move away from the traditional 145 and give Juke a new lease of life at 160bpm, starting with Dude 'N Nem.

"We've had songs that were out before 'Watch My Feet' that maybe didn't have rap lyrics on them, that were better and catchy as far as the hook," argues DJ Slugo. "But it's a groundbreaking song. Anything that's groundbreaking that opens up the doors to a music that we pioneered back in the days, I'm all for it."

What's interesting now is the fast-growing relationship between hip-hop and juke, and the way they've been able to help each other out. Hip-hop has given the new genre the ability to widen its audience, which in turn is becoming more receptive to dance music.

"You don't necessarily see the same sort of openness to faster-pace, electronic-like dance music with African-Americans," says Hillary Crosley, a hip-hop writer for Billboard magazine. "We're a little less adventurous when it comes to those types of things, except for certain places like Philly, where you have a lot of people that look like rappers like Beanie Sigel that love house music. But juke music is really sort of getting the hipster vibe now. It's been the movement in Chicago for a while, but I think now the rest of America might actually care."

Nehpets adds: "With the whole 'Watch My Feet' thing, I believe it caught a more national attention based off of that formula of taking both of the sounds and putting them into one. I think this will be good for juke music in general, just because it's giving it more of the mass appeal."

Meanwhile, juke has offered rappers a new outlet that radio is taking more kindly to. "I think the dancing thing is really hot for hip-hop, because [that] music is becoming just too violent," says Nehpets. "With rap, you have to ask, 'Are we in the movies? Are we training people how to kill people?' It's crazy. So I think the dancing part is good. More dancing, please! I don't want people to get punched in the eye because of a record."

Slugo agrees. "I think a lot of rappers are paying attention now; they want their songs juked, some of them want to work on songs from scratch. It's able to get played on radio quicker than rap because it's simply uptempo dance music."

Commercial rappers such as Twista have also jumped on board, he with his track "Pimp Like Me", while artists such as Rhymefest, Krucial Konflict and even the boho-rapper Mos Def are now said to be calling in juke favours. In terms of strictly juke acts, a Chicago crew called Flosstradamus are acknowledging the sound, while the female club-rapper Kid Sister has teamed up with Kanye West to deliver her own interpretation of juke with the song "Pro Nails", produced by West's DJ, A-Trak.

As for the UK, the Kiss FM DJ Sinden has been championing the music on his radio show, and his next monthly residency at Fabric in London will have juke on rotation. Sinden reckons the sound won't have a problem fitting in on these shores. "I think what juke brings to urban music is an energy that's kind of missing," he says. "I think people will be able to get into it over here, because it's like drum'*'bass, and people really accepted that."

New juke heroes like Dude 'N Nem are not aiming to be one-hitters. "The reason I think it's going to have its longevity is because it's the same as house music," says Slugo.

"People actually have different dances to the songs that also give it an edge. I don't think it's going to be like hyphy, where it's there one minute, and gone the next, because there's so many DJs involved in it."

Upmost is also optimistic about his group's long-term future. They're getting set to release a full album called Tinted Incubators. "Well, we definitely plan on being in the music game for a long time," he says. "Longevity is our goal, and in the future we want to continue to make great music, phenomenal music, life-changing music. Juke music is really feel-good music and house music is universal. It's like a soul in the music that everyone can feel, so that's the reason why it has the legs to move out of the US and beyond. So everywhere you go, if you have good music like juke, everybody can relate to that in the long run."

Dude 'N Nem's 'Watch My Feet' is out on TVT Records