I wanted to use where we come from, and it just went.”īandmanrill credits the recent spike in Jersey Club’s popularity to people discovering how much fun the music is to dance and party to. “Everybody always used to say ‘Jersey ain’t got no sound’ and ‘Jersey wants to sound like New York or Philly,’ but I really wanted to show that we have our own sound. “I only started rapping over Jersey Club beats because I wanted to be different,” Bandmanrill tells Complex over the phone. Rapping over Jersey Club beats is challenging because they lend themselves to dancing and speeding up previously released slower-paced songs, but artists like Bandmanrill, a talented rapper from Newark, have built their growing careers off of being able to find pockets of the quick production to rap over. He doesn’t need to say much, though, because the song is meant to be danced to first and foremost. On the track, Uzi repeats “I just wanna rock” several times and delivers a short verse. Then he danced to one of my songs in April, I sent him a couple more Jersey club beats, and he hit me back and said he went crazy and asked me to share it everywhere.” “Just Wanna Rock” now has over 70 million streams on Spotify and the music video has 17 million views.

“Last November, he hit me back and told me I’m his favorite and told me to pull up to the studio. “I used to DM Uzi all the time, never thinking he would respond,” Vertt recalls. Then, one day in late November of last year, everything changed. Vertt told Complex that he has always been a massive fan of Uzi’s and used to message him on social media, never expecting to get a response. Vertt is part of a collective of producers, dancers, and artists out of Jersey called Project X. Nineteen-year-old Newark-raised producer MCVertt is responsible for the viral track. “Just Wanna Rock” features an electric beat and earworm of a hook that has enough replay value for it to be run back multiple times in a row (Uzi even performed it three times straight at ComplexCon). Now, the originally niche scene has branched out to places far beyond the confines of Jersey’s borders. Think Ciara’s popular 2019 track “Level Up,” which interlopes Kyle Edward and DJ Smallz’s Jersey Club remix to “We Are Young,” or Drake’s song “Massive” which uses the staple Lil Jon bed squeak that’s included on every club record (which Jon later revealed was actually a squeaky chair sound effect) and five-count kick pattern. Now, club music has migrated to TikTok, and Lil Uzi Vert’s viral track highlights how much Jersey Club has been ingrained in many of the songs and dances that dominate the trends on the app. But if you ask anyone from Jersey, they’ll tell you it already has.įor over a decade, Jersey Club has been a mainstay in the tri-state area thanks to its contagious beats, popular remixes, and energetic DJs and producers. Jersey Club has taken over TikTok thanks to viral dance trends and song remixes, and with the release of Lil Uzi’s “Just Wanna Rock” in October, it may just take over the world.

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