Yesterday hip-hop collective Treated Crew and footwork outfit Teklife released Live From Your Mama’s House, a collaborative EP helmed by Treated Crew rapper Mic Terror. The MC got the idea for the collaboration after his collective performed with the late Teklife leader DJ Rashad during a Pitchfork Music Festival set in 2013. “I was sitting there listenin’ to Rashad’s whole set, and I was listenin’ to it like how he was flippin’ ‘C.R.E.A.M.,’” Mic Terror says. “It was like juke and still hip-hop. Then I was freestyling in my head to a lot of stuff, and I was like, ‘Man, that’s so dope.’”
Mic Terror and his friends would go to juke parties at Markham Roller Rink and at neighborhood house parties—the EP’s title, Live From Your Mama’s House is a reference to those basement parties where Mic Terror witnessed house evolve into juke and footwork. “My thing with the juke parties was really about dry humping girls, cause that’s juking too,” he says. “I was trying to count how many girls I could dry hump. I was like, ‘Yeah, OK, I dry humped with like five girls tonight, that’s pretty good!’”
For Live From Your Mama’s House Mic Terror wrote at a relaxed pace, soaking in a range of tracks he received and drawing lyrical inspiration from the footwork greats he’s worked with. “I always liked Spinn—I like his hooks,” Mic Terror says. “Like those chants—like, Gant-Man, he has dope chants too, like, ‘Hit it from the back, hit it from the back.’ I just wanted to take some of those flows and kind of expand on ’em and just make ’em more complex.” The end result captures Mic Terror’s ideal: he harnesses the blunt, lively bounce of the footwork and juke chants that inspired him, heightening the euphoric repetition of the best of those hooks while drawing out his rapping into dense verses.
