Double Cup at 10: DJ Rashad’s family and friends on his enduring legacy

DJ Rashad never seemed like one of electronic music’s enigmas. Although he signed to Hyperdub, home of dubstep’s quasi-mythical golden boy Burial, Rashad wasn’t bothered about mystique. While greats like Burial, Aphex Twin and Daft Punk obscured their identities and avoided press or public appearances like the plague, Rashad was by all accounts a people person, a lover of parties, and a prolific collaborator who gave interviews generously. 

Then, at the height of his powers, between tours for his acclaimed album Double Cup, he died from an overdose. When he passed in April 2014 at the age of 34, the Chicago footwork scene he helped pioneer had fans all over the world. He left behind a mountain of unreleased tunes and an adoring global community of fans. But he also left a close circle of family, friends and acolytes who were stunned by his passing, caused by an ambiguous combination of heroin, cocaine, Xanax, blood clots and cardiovascular disease.

His tragic death led many fans to reexamine the persistent melancholy that lurks in his music. Double Cup made footwork accessible to more people than ever before, flirting with trap, R&B and pop as well as classic hip-hop, soul, jungle and jazz. But when Rashad died just six months after its release, songs began to take on new meanings. “I know you’re leaving… me behind,” sing the Isley Brothers, again and again, on DJs Rashad and Manny’s “Leavin”. Suddenly his whole catalogue was full of messages. 

“The music that we make always comes from a deeper place,” says DJ Spinn, Rashad’s closest friend and collaborator. “We don’t just sample because it sounds good. It’ll be an inside joke, or, you know, something that you’re going through, internally. You don’t want to say it on the mic, so you’ll let the sample talk for you. You let the music know something.” 

On its 10th anniversary, Double Cup is being reissued. It comes with “Last Winter”, a track only previously available on out-of-print CD versions of the album, on which Stevie Wonder’s voice asks “Where were you when I needed you… last winter?”. It’s a chance for the people closest to Rashad to reflect on his life, his death, and how they’ve coped without him for the last decade.

Rashad Harden was born in Hammond, Indiana in 1979, but grew up just across the state border in Calumet City, a suburb on the south side of Chicago. Music was important to him from the beginning. “He might have been three or four years old,” his father, Anthony, tells me. “And he had an ear for music. We had a little guitar around the house, and there were a couple songs where we would be in another room, and we could hear him picking the guitar to the exact sound of the record.” After a year or two of guitar, Rashad switched his interest to drums, and soon started drumming in the school band. “In school, he wasn’t interested in any other subjects,” Anthony remembers. “But the band teacher made it clear that, for all the concerts, he needed to be there. He made him almost like a junior band leader.”

Rashad was Anthony and Gloria Harden’s only child and keeping him safe was their priority. When Rashad asked his dad if he would take him to a local college to try out for a DJ position, Anthony saw it as a chance to keep his son off the streets, as gang culture continued to intensify in Chicago. Aged 11, Rashad got his first DJing gig. “I really feel the music kind of safeguarded him,” Anthony says. “It was a safety net, to keep him out of too much trouble.”

Spinn first saw Rashad DJing at an underage club called Jubilation, then at a nearby rollerskating rink. Then when he turned up for freshman year of high school he found that, although Rashad was two years above, they sat for registration in the same classroom every morning as their surnames both began with H. They became fast friends and soon started trying to emulate the ghettohouse sounds that dominated Chicago dancefloors in the 90s. They DJ’d for dance crews like House-O-Matics and, as the dancers demanded faster tracks, the sound of the day evolved from ghetto house into juke, then from juke into footwork — a sound made expressly for the dance style of the same name. 

“I really feel the music kind of safeguarded him. It was a safety net, to keep him out of too much trouble” – Anthony Harden

Three producers – RP Boo, DJ Clent and Traxman – are credited with inventing footwork music, a sound defined by claps on the off-beats, distorted bass and a half-time rhythm, plus a penchant for manipulating and looping vocal samples. Nobody could do this better than Rashad – whether he was making his samples sing about falling in love, getting high, or getting freaked on the floor. “I didn’t like it,” says Gloria. “I thought it was obscene, that it didn’t make sense, and it kept us up all night.” Anthony agrees: “Matter of fact, I used to criticise him. I thought I had a pretty good ear for music, and I would hear him skip beats. I’d say ‘You know, you need to go back over that. That timing ain’t right.’ And he would laugh. Later I found out the beat that they were using, it was on time.” 

They weren’t the only ones. After placing a track each on a Dance Mania record in 1998, Spinn and Rashad’s early juke productions caught the ear of DJ Godfather, cofounder of the Detroit label Twilight76. But Godfather wasn’t sure about the new footwork stuff they were making. “He didn’t understand, like, why are the claps off and shit?” Rashad later remembered. Even so, he and Spinn put out several records on Godfather’s Juke Trax imprint, and around the same time formed a crew: the Ghettoteknicianz, later known as Teklife. 

Then, in 2010, footwork arrived in Europe, and the pair made their first trip to London, where they happened upon a Kode9 and Spaceape show at Corsica Studios. Not long afterwards, Kode9 invited them to play at a Hyperdub event at Koko. Spinn says Paradinas was most interested in hard, fast tunes – footwork in its least palatable form. But Rashad wanted to bring footwork to a global audience. “I think he was aware of how dubstep had emerged in the UK and what happened to it when it became Americanised, and so we were both aware of the pitfalls of the industry,” says Kode9. “I think he respected how we’d managed something loosely approaching a mainstream artist, i.e. Burial, without the usual circus of bullshit.”

Rashad signed to Hyperdub and soon fell into the work patterns of his most famous labelmate. “I worked with Rashad as I work with Burial,” Kode9 adds. “He sent me loads of tunes and I told him which ones I like and we narrowed it down like that. I always felt that ‘Let It Go’ was him digesting both jungle and Burial into a new sound. But I don’t know if that was the case, and didn’t get a chance to ask him.”

With the seeds of Double Cup planted, Spinn and Rashad went to San Francisco where their new friend Taso was offering up his then-girlfriend’s 42nd-floor penthouse apartment for recording sessions. According to Spinn, weed and psychedelics provided inspiration between sessions. “It was the first time I did acid,” he says. “After we was done working, we was like, ‘Let’s play them tracks! Ah we high as fuck!’ I can just remember looking out the window, holding my arms out and looking at the cars. It felt like I was flying over the city.” 

Gloria says one of the first times she found herself enjoying her son’s music was when she heard the Double Cup track “Drank, Kush, Barz.” “I didn’t know they was talking about pills, or Xanax, or whatever they called. And ‘We got drank’ – I thought they were talking about alcohol!” In fact, both “drank” and Double Cup itself were actually references to lean – a mix of codeine, promethazine, cough syrup and sprite, traditionally quaffed through two styrofoam cups, popular with the king of slow-motion music DJ Screw. “Double Cup has always been a metaphor,” says Wes Harden, Rashad’s manager. “Substances are a big part of Teklife and that world. Or at least they were. But also, a double-cup of lean, it slowed things down and just made things more accessible.” 

Wes joined Rashad’s team shortly after Double Cup came out; his having the same last name as the artist is a coincidence. He’d managed acts like Animal Collective, Pantha du Prince and Cass McCombs, and describes Rashad as a “pretty relaxed guy” with a “great sense of humour,” but concedes that “substance abuse was definitely a thing… It’s not like it overshadowed him, but it was definitely present.” 

“He seemed to be in touch with his more spiritual side. He would call and say things that he hadn’t said in a long time, how grateful he was for his career, for us supporting him. And you know, that kind of scares you, when your kids start thanking you” – Anthony

“It came to a point where I knew something was going on,” adds Spinn. “I used to just ask him what was going on with him. He wouldn’t tell me at first, but over time he opened up, like, ‘Man, I’m doing this and that’… I never asked him necessarily why, but…” Spinn mentions another friend who died from an overdose around 2007: Rashad was the first to find him, leaving him with the job of telling their friend’s mum. He says he often noticed Rashad acting differently after that. 

“We did a lot of experimental [stuff],” Spinn says. “A little ecstasy, a little this, little that. But he’d do different stuff, like kind of nod off … I just thought it was Xanax-type shit.” The penny really dropped when Rashad turned up at Spinn’s house with a friend, who he then caught taking heroin in his bathroom. It didn’t take long to join the dots as to why Rashad was hanging out with him, though the pair never spoke about it again. “I think Rashad kind of kept [that side of him] away from a lot of people,” says Spinn. 

Double Cup came out in October 2013 to rave reviews (Pitchfork later named it the 20th-best album of the 2010s), and Rashad started playing even more shows, everywhere from Ukraine to Brazil. Anthony says that on the rare occasions that his son would call, he “seemed to be in touch with his more spiritual side. He would call and say things that he hadn’t said in a long time, how grateful he was for his career, for us supporting him. And you know, that kind of scares you, when your kids start thanking you…”

In spring 2014, Rashad and Spinn were due to play in Canada. “It’s been going really good, wonderful, wonderful,” Rashad told Crack on March 19. “Finally got the day off, and tomorrow back in Canada. Everything’s been great.”

But Rashad was refused entry to the country – though even today, nobody seems sure why. “They’re very tough on people at the border in Canada,” says Wes. “If you’ve had a DUI, sometimes they won’t let you through.” Spinn thinks it could have been due to a record of “some stupid stuff, like mob action or something”, as Chicago police would often penalise groups of more than three kids for hanging out on the street. Anthony suggests it might have been because Rashad’s middle name – Hanif – was Muslim, while Gloria says it was probably because Rashad got caught with a BB gun when he was 12. Rashad’s parents also mention that, for some reason, Rashad was reluctant for the next bit of the tour – to go to either Canada or the next stop, Detroit. “The guys from Detroit, I think he might have had some beef with some of them,” says Anthony. “He was coming back from being overseas and he just didn’t want the static.”

Spinn ended up doing Canada without his partner. The following month, he boarded a train to Detroit, where he and Rashad were due to meet for another show. But by the time Spinn arrived, news had reached him that Rashad was dead. Conflicting reports emerged, first listing drugs, then a blood clot as the cause of death. Three months later an autopsy concluded that he’d died from an overdose, but Wes tells me the death certificate officially puts it down to “hypertensive cardiovascular disease”. 

Eventually, Rashad’s parents came to terms with it, even if the exact circumstances remain unclear. “I think I made peace with it because it was controversial,” says Anthony. “During that time, we wanted to get through losing a son, and see him in the light that we best knew him in, and not be caught in between a drug overdose, if that had been it, or whether it was a medical issue. We really didn’t know.”

Both Anthony and Gloria now listen to Rashad’s music all the time and even say they’ve seen him since he died. “I don’t want to sound spooky,” says Anthony. “But I had experiences, dreams of Rashad returning, and almost like saying goodbye to me.” 

“There are some real tear-jerkers in Rashad’s catalogue. We are lucky he left us those tracks as they’ve helped a lot of people mourn him” – Kode9

After his death, Rashad’s parents were inundated with messages from people around the world explaining how much their son had impacted their lives – not just as a musician, but as a person. Until shortly before Double Cup was released Rashad worked with Inner Voice, a non-profit organisation that helps homeless people in Chicago. “We got tons of emails and letters telling us how warm of a person he was, stories of what he’d done for people that we didn’t know,” says Anthony. “We always taught him to be giving and sharing. But he was such a joker, he didn’t let you know a lot of things that he did. He kept to himself.”

Rashad also had a son, who is now 18 and making music of his own under the name DJ Chad, though he never settled down with his mother. “That was the first girl he ever brought around,” Gloria remembers. “But she didn’t want him doing music. She wanted him to get a 9-to-5. So that didn’t work out.” Anthony says Rashad only had eyes for one true love: “Music was his mistress.”

Footwork has since spread around the globe, but Teklife’s fortunes have been up and down. “As a record label, we good,” Spinn says. “But we not really a DJ crew no more. Some of us, we cool. Some of us, we don’t talk like that.” After Double Cup, Spinn was slated for an album of his own on Hyperdub, but his laptop was stolen while he was on tour in Peru, then his house in Chicago got broken into; both times he lost the music he’d been working on. 

Kode9 has continued to release footwork on Hyperdub, and still plays Rashad songs when he’s DJing. “There are some real tear-jerkers in Rashad’s catalogue,” says Kode9, mentioning “I’m Gone”, “Ghost” and “Last Winter”. “We are lucky he left us those tracks as they’ve helped a lot of people mourn him.” There could be more on the way, as Wes continues to work with Rashad’s parents on further posthumous releases. He also says a DJ Rashad documentary is in the works.

Would he have been happy at his enduring mystique? Perhaps. But his mum and dad are content about the time he had. “I know he was becoming very popular and in demand,” says Anthony. “I think he was even a little leery about the business, and what the next phase of that may be. So that brings some peace, knowing that he went out making hits.”

DJ Rashad’s Double Cup reissue is out now on Partisan Records