About an hour down the Dan Ryan from Power 92’s studios, a juke mix of “Lean With It, Rock With It” is making the crowd foam like a shook-up Old Milwaukee. Except the venue isn’t a juke spot, or even a hip-hop club at all, but the tiny, wood-paneled Town Hall Pub, the only straight bar in Chicago’s Boystown section. Onstage, Josh Young and Curt Camerucci—young indie party DJs who perform under the cheeky nom de club Flosstradamus—are rocking a sweltering room of art school girls humping speakers to stuff like “Lean With It” and DJ Deeon’s “Let Me Bang” as ultraskinny kids in bandanas and flat-brimmed caps lift each other up and crowd surf to a beatmatched gumbo of juke, Le Tigre, Three 6 Mafia, and the surf guitars of “Wipeout.”

Later, Young explains how the duo wants to branch out into more production (the Franchize Boyz remix was their first attempt at crafting juke tracks of their own), and his eyes light up while talking about listening to poorly-dubbed juke cassettes at his old Markham home in Chicago’s South Suburbs. “When you’re six and seven and eight-years-old you’re not paying too much attention to music besides what’s naturally around you,” he says. “The stuff me and my sister listened to in the house has had a big influence on my DJing.” Yet in spite of this, Young is still wary of getting attention as a “juke DJ” while being a complete non-entity to Chicago’s existing juke network, admitting, “I have this horrible feeling we might get hated on super hard.”

Despite being juke outsiders, Flosstradamus are helping to cross the sound over, garnering local and national accolades for their Town Hall parties and playing juke-heavy sets to rock-leaning crowds in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta and the SXSW festival in Austin. And crossing over is the one goal all Chicago’s selectors can agree on. Even Gantman, a vehement defender of his ’90s juke heyday (“If you ever hear somebody say they started juke they lying! Tell them to pull out a colored tape with that word on it, they don’t make colored tapes no more! Nobody has cassettes no more!”) has created the Ghetto Teknitianz crew with a handful of other juke DJs, for the express purpose of pushing the sound further with new productions and remixes of everything from Mary J Blige to the Ella Fitzgerald cover of “My Funny Valentine” that Kanye West used on Late Registration. “I feel juke is definitely on its way to being commercial nationwide,” Boolu Master. “Even if you never heard it before, it’s made for people who love dance music, period.”

Flosstradamus’s Young puts that same concept a little more allegorically. “I went to an all-black high school, so at the pep rallies, the cheerleaders would play all juke in their routines,” he says. “The teachers didn’t really know the slang was obscene, so you’d have all these hot cheerleaders doing juke call and responses: Bang bang bang! Skeet skeet skeet! I had a lot of white friends because of skateboarding, and they were always like, ‘Damn, I hate assemblies.’ And I was like, ‘You gotta come to my high school, our assemblies are awesome.’”