Ballroom

Ballroom is the dance music of New York's Black and Latino queer ball culture, built for voguing and runway categories. Its raw material is house music stripped to its hardest elements: a four-on-the-floor kick, chopped disco and funk samples, shouted commands and commentary, and above all the crash-and-snare break of *Masters at Work*'s "The Ha Dance", which functions as the scene's rhythmic signature. Tracks are functional tools for DJs and commentators, traded within houses and ball circuits for decades before wider release; producers such as *MikeQ* later codified the sound's faster, sharper modern form for labels including #Fade to Mind#.