You'll Instantly Be Good at Dancing if You Listen to New York Litefeet Maestros Hann's "Mastah MC"

Chris Designs, left, and Lil' Live, right, of Hann / Photo by Julian Master

Last week, I wrote a feature for Noisey on litefeet, the music best known for soundtracking the “it’s showtime!” subway dancers in New York City. It garnered exactly one comment: “I always wait for the train to stop hard when they are dancing, that I woud [sic] enjoy.” It should be noted that this rather mean-spirited remark also received four likes. To add to that, over the weekend, when I told my close friends about the story, it incited no fewer than five heated arguments concerning the legitimacy of the dancers and their right to perform on the subway—including a nasty one between a brother and a sister, whom I’m pretty sure haven’t bitched at each other that hard since they were in diapers.

So, people have passionate views on the dancers. I get that. But the story is about more than the dancing. It’s about a true-to-the-bone NYC culture that’s generated some very unique and dope music. For a taste, check out this new track by litefeet production duo Hann, made up of 18 year olds Chris Designs and Lil’ Live. I spent a lot of time last month with both guys, who make music for three dancing crews in the city and are as talented as they are silly and fun. They’re releasing an EP this week titled Unknown Genre (which makes my focus on the genre of litefeet seem a bit trivial but oh well). This is the first single.

The hard-hitting percussion and racing vocal sample that “Mastah MC” is built upon are typical of Hann’s production style, as well the current sound of litefeet. What Designs and Live do perhaps differently here is change the beat up quite a bit throughout its three-minute runtime, adding and removing layers at different times to ensure that you never stop moving—or at the very least that your knee never really stops bouncing furiously under your desk at work. At one point last month when we were talking about the guys performing live, their manager half-jokingly said it would be a good idea to stretch their tracks out to 15 or even 20 minutes in length by slowly bringing in layers and building momentum. While listening to “Mastah” I couldn’t help but get giddy at the idea of them doing that with its thunderous synth build-ups and sparse drum breakdowns.

Another cool thing about Hann is that the mixing of all of their tracks is done in-house—literally. The engineer, Cabo Blanco, is the roommate of Brandon Robinson, the manager, who often lets Designs and Live crash at his Bed-Stuy apartment. Quite a few times over the summer, Hann would go late into the night making a beat on their laptops, displayed largely on the apartment’s big screen TV, and then send it over to Cabo down the hall to perfect. The process is demonstrative of the organic and grassroots nature of litefeet, which I like to compare to the early progressions of hip-hop. Only time will tell if the genre can have a similar impact. What we do know is that some heaters are coming out of it. For proof, listen below:

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