If you ask footwork dancers and DJs to pick their favorite track, DJ Rashad’s “Ghost” will top many lists. The song’s title and lyric refer to “the ghost,” a footwork move developed in late ‘80s Chicago on the West Side. That move and the idea of that move—an emphasis on gliding, on ghosting, on dance that defies the eye—still defines footwork. “Ghost” hinges on a sample of a sample—Rashad sampling Kanye sampling Diana Ross. “I’m still dreaming,” she sings, an echo of an echo that Rashad grounds with a sample of his own voice: “ghost, ghost, ghost, ghost.” The meaning of “ghost” dissolves into the word’s texture, into the way it hits your body. Later in the track, Rashad recognizes four crucial Chicago dancers: “Poo, AG, Q, Litebulb,” he repeats. “That was everything to me,” Litebulb told me. “To get your name on a Rashad track and to be listed with those guys, that changed my life and helped me launch my career as a dancer.”

In Chicago’s footwork inner circles, it’s a rather indisputable fact that DJ Manny—who is among the best footwork dancers in the city—also makes the coldest tracks, and he does it by the dozen. “All I Do Is Smoke Trees” is one sign of Manny’s genius, but most of his tracks—hundreds of them—have not been released. (This is one of many Lil Wayne flips from the footwork scene circa 2010, check Traxman’s “A Milli” for another.)

Traxman, a DJ for three decades in Chicago, has been through multiple generations of house music and he’s known for his deep crates—and especially what he finds in them. Here, he samples and elongates an mbira solo played live by Maurice White from Earth, Wind and Fire. In the mid-‘70s, White’s mbira symbolized his connection to Africa. On “Footworkin on Air”, Traxman takes the connection further, interlacing the mbira with the squirming, electric sounds of Chicago acid house.

“The Way I Move” was instrumental in introducing international audiences to the world of Chicago footwork in the late 2000s, and Jody was still a teenager when he cut and customized this Sade sample. Like so many talented young Chicago producers, Jody was in and then quickly out of the footwork game, but “The Way I Move” was promiscuous, slipping into DJ sets and top ten lists of trendsetting artists from London to NYC, laying groundwork for footwork’s current global circulation and popularity.

DJ Clent—who recently released the EP Hyper Feet on Planet Mu—changed the history of footwork with this battle anthem. The trumpets echo RP Boo’s horns—they sound dissident, inside-out. Like RP’s “Baby C’mon,” “3rd World” is considered one of the first footwork tracks—it fed the competitive vibe on the dance-floor, and emphasized half-time rhythms that gave space for dancers to circle up and battle.

Chuck Robert’s “My House” provided the house community with perhaps its most enduring scripture, and Rashad and Manny tear it to pieces in “R House”, tone-poeming the much-remixed sermon into just a few bars: “I am the creator,” they re-iterate, wrecking the manifesto by proving the inclusiveness of its thesis: “This is our house.”

DJ Nate made an impact in the footwork scene in the late 2000s, then quickly exited the game. Today, he puts out casio-toned hip-hop anthems that soundtrack bop dancing. But when Nate made footwork tracks, his cuts were among the most exciting—a youthful, sample-happy black experimentalism that channeled older Chicago track-makers and challenged the idea of what dance music—or any music—should sound like.

This outlier opens a window into Spinn’s worldview as a kind of footwork filmmaker capable of mixing humor and horror, horses neighing and human screams. Spinn, like other producers on this list, is difficult to pin down because many of his best tracks have not yet been released internationally, including the juke anthem “Bounce and Break Your Back”.

“I just had a brand new feeling… it came to me in the night,” this Roy Ayers/Sylvia Cox sample testifies. Hearing certain footwork tracks or sequences of tracks (like the excellently arranged opening songs on Welcome to the Chi, which begins with this version of “Feelin’”) can give you the exhilarating shock of the new—“a new feeling,” indeed.

“Heavy Heat” is a quintessential battle track. RP Boo told me about debuting it in Chicago: “It created an instant battle due to the energy the track held. It made footworkers do what they do best—release heat!” “Heavy Heat” followed on the heels of RP’s infamous “Godzilla track”—both sample the film’s menacing noir horn stabs—and the monstrous and the maniacal have played their part in the footwork story, especially in RP’s music. This type of track enhances the tension of the circle, elevating the performance so that it becomes more improvised and vicious. “You belong to me,” the sample intones, as if RP is simultaneously both the DJ behind the tables and the footworker provoking his opponent on the floor.