Right now they market hip-hop as a thug thing. Like, yeah, I bust the cap and I push keys and me and my legs and my tech line. So, you know, the B-boys left out.
The heads will not understand if I told them the importance of breaking culturally. They ain't over their head. No doubt, because you got a lot of new kids in there.
They don't know nothing about old school, or they claim to be old school. They be fronting, you know what I mean? I can't really say I invented it, because there was a couple of us that really invented it in school.
Sixth and seventh grade. And because it's a real-life one, it lives through the bad times of it. It's almost like the Bible, you know, eventually, man, you gotta go back to the original scripture and the original language it was written in. I think that everybody in the East and the West Coast needs to redefine our dance and then take control of it again.
And the intensity of b-boying, and then just the intensity of our situation in the ghetto. All of that piled into one. When you look at b-boying, it makes sense.
It's like, okay, I can see where this is coming from. It's a lot deeper than just, well, this is fun and I think I'll... It may start out as that. And getting noticed for the culture of it, not because it's a street dance and it's gonna always stay in the streets.
I think people need this. There's no way you cannot need this in society right now. Coming from the ghetto where everyone thinks it's so negative and we're doing something positive.
You know what I'm saying? How can that not become big? Or how can that not become respected in society? We did the first shows and set the foundation what has become an industry now and we ain't getting no love.
Why is that? We were known as B-Boys. B-Born is like the ultimate body manifestation of hip-hop.
Hands move in. Every single part of your body, your head, your neck, your intellect, and also your character. It's like a charge that I get.
It's kind of equivalent to the excitement you get from watching a basketball player coming down. He's about to do an incredible move, and you just, ah, it's like you create this tension and you release it. And visually, it's exciting. It's an incredible dance.
I mean who in a million years would have thought like wow spinning on your head Or you know doing windmills having your feet kick up and propel. Who would have thought that a person could spin on one hand? It's not a trend you cannot say it's a trend anymore It's a legitimate art form. You can't just do it two hours a day and okay, I'll do it when I go to the gym.
We used to eat, piss, shit, drink, think, be boring. Whenever you heard such a machine, just be done, okay? For any real b-boy, they would fill it in their body and it would just make you dance, even if you didn't feel like dancing. To me it's about music and it's about what music does to people. Music is what makes me develop my styles and my moves.
The record that comes on makes me feel a certain way and that's the way I feel when I dance. And as always, it's hip-hop, straight up. Hip-hop is the name of our creative intelligence.
Hip-hop is a culture that started in the boogie down Bronx. Hip-hop's a different element dealing with music. rap graffiti art b-boys what you call break boys or b-girls what you call break girls and also dealing with culture And a whole movement dealing with knowledge, wisdom, and understanding as well as peace, unity, love, and fun.
Hip-hop is beautiful to me because it always challenges America's notion of what they believe. Infranchise people to be like these people Us who are supposed to be like just the bottom of society not know anything not have like one good idea Come up with like breaking I think it really started out of a few brothers or sisters that just didn't care what people thought You know just responded to these breaks kids with no money living in the ghetto Living in urban environments, living in the projects, creating a multi-billion dollar industry. Hip-hop has progressed from when it was just B-boys and B-girls and DJs and rappers to now an international phenomenon.
All these other... Rap artists started coming around and started making money. I'm thinking, wait a minute, what about Kool Herc? He was the one who started this whole thing.
Kool Herc is the godfather of hip-hop. When we say of hip-hop, we mean the whole rim of things, because he did graffiti, he brought the music, and his crew did the dancing. So when they say he's the godfather of hip-hop, they actually mean he's the godfather of hip-hop. He definitely is. When Kool Herc gave a party, Thank you.
Everybody be there. If you search the history, anybody would know that the first big DJ was Kool Herc. We used to all go to Herc's parties.
We used to dance at Herc's parties. When I was five or six years old, I used to listen to Herc play. He used to play at Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. I lived in 1600 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, the building right next door.
But I could never go. But I would always just keep in the back of my mind this obscure kind of... scene that I wanted to be involved in and wanted to be that way. He was starting hip hop. We followed Herc every fucking where Herc went.
Herc was the man, you know, because Herc had the shit. And Herc had the atmosphere. I mean, really, there was nothing like a tour party. We heard the music from way down the block. You know, Herc had the big speakers.
We walked down the block. Closer we got, the louder the bass got. And all we could hear is this tall, life-giving guy going...
This is DJ Kool Herc and you always come back for more. I used to rent this for $25. Half the party was inside and half was outside.
That's how packed it got. Till one day, till one summer, I gave up the first block party right here between the buildings. And that told me where my career was heading, where the clientele was heading. We couldn't come back here.
That was it. That was the birth of hip-hop, man. Herc used to play a part of a record that had a breakdown in it.
And that's why they call the records breakbeats. Now, it was a part of any record that had a breakdown where all the music dropped out and it was just a beat. And these beats were so hype and so frantic that when the music dropped out and it was just a beat, everybody would go off. And I noticed people used to just wait for those particular parts of the record.
And I started by two records. I started prolonging the record, the break. For instance, James Brown's Covington.
Clap your hands, start to fit. Clap your hands, start to fit. I get another one to extend that part. Clap your hands, clap, clap your hands.
We used to always, always, always, when we were in a circle, wait for the break of the record. That was it. We would get down to the break of the record. I call that particular part of the music the merry-go-round. I'm gonna take you to the merry-go-round, back and forth, giving you no slack.
The break of the record. Beat. Break.
We are the B-Boys. We're a B-Boy originated from Cool Hurt. B-Boys really stood for Bronx, or really breaking boys, because, you know, when people would be breaking at the party, you know, start in trouble.
B-Boys and B-Girls break beats. Break boys, break girls. I can tell you straight up, the terminology breaking comes from a street terminology.
People used to say, why you breaking on me? Why my mom's breaking on me? Why you acting crazy?
It really just meant doing shit above normal. The DJs used to cut breaks. And the B-Boys would break to what? The breaks. So, you know, it's just common sense, man.
You know, when somebody get mad, yo, he's breaking. Stop breaking, man. And if he cool her, he says it.
It's official. Get down. B-Boy.
Boy, that break. It didn't come from breaks on the record. It come from this man, he broke.
He went to a point, a breaking point. You understand? So we just use that exaggeration of that term. To the dancing, the B-Boys, Break Boys. Breaking goes back, as far as I know, talking to founders of the dance, no later than 73. And these are breakers who used to break mainly on top.
It was like a whole new movement, like a spontaneous thing that just happened in the party. Certain styles of dances came out that you knew. was the new dance and you did it. But with breaking, burning, and going off, other people that liked it would adapt it, and that became, like, that agenda.
You knew how to do it. You just come in, you know, you do your little posturing and posing, and, you know, and then you go down, and then, like, if you're doing a good move, then people would gather around, so then you got a little circle, and somebody might get in there and challenge you. All back here was lit up, lit up with music.
And this is where a lot of them started dancing at. Put a speaker right out here. Everybody having fun?
Heh, heh, heh, heh, ha! All that old crazy stuff. Because you see all this shit come together. Then you got people like the Niggas Twins, all of a sudden they going down to the floor. It was one of the brothers that used to be down with Kool Herc.
And he had like a little spin move where he would like do that little spin move. And that was actually the first time I ever seen somebody, you know, go down on the floor. We saw people dancing and we wanted to dance.
You know, and it's just that our style of dancing was not like anybody else's. Funny thing was the Nigger Twins used to always have straws in their mouth. The Nigger Twins used to come in with cigars and trench coats.
And they used to come in and split the place up and act like Groucho Marx. And they used to walk in with the cigars and then meet up in the middle. When we used to go down on the floor, we didn't get dirty. And we didn't dance on linoleum. We didn't dance on cardboard.
We danced on the cement. What was the real B-Boys from back in the days, you know what I'm saying? Original Top Rock isn't the Top Rock that they do now.
It goes like this. That was the original Top Rock. It wasn't like this. You know what I mean? And there was the Indian Step that looked like this.
Our Up Rock, our Up Rock was straight up B-Boy Up Rock. Like, yeah, yeah, like straight up. Bring up b-boying.
B-boying on the floor didn't come out until like maybe the ending of 74, 75. When people actually started going down and breaking on the floor. I don't know who did it, but eventually somebody went down and stayed down. So from up rocking, I brung it to the floor.
You know? That's why I was so good, because I was... From there on it just kept going and kept going.
Bruce and I brung it out to the Bronx. Before you know it, there was a new kid. It was really a combination of sweeps, CCs, which is the side-to-side movements when you're facing front, and steps like the Russian, which look exactly like a Russian. You cross your arms and you kick front. Steps were a lot more basic, and it looked a lot more...
If there's a b-boy out there that I would compare old style to... The real old style is Frosty Freeze. When you see Frosty in like Flashdance and old footage of him, and sometimes he still does it today.
When you see his footwork, it doesn't look complete. That looked more like what the original B-Boys looked like back in the day. They used to do a style that I hardly see anyone do, which is more like jerky type of, it wasn't like a six-step, you know, this is how it goes.
It was a little more sporadic. and wild spirit, like boom, wet, freezing, you know what I'm saying? And then with the Godfather hip-hop, myself, Africa Bambaataa, you had what you called the Zulu Kings.
I grew up watching more like the Zulu Kings, Beaver. Beaver was like the biggest name in Beaver, period. I mean, you couldn't find nobody better than Beaver until Spy came along and blasted them with Track 2 and the brothers.
Everything, all the breaking and stuff like that was considered underground. And so Kool Herc brought everything out into the open. And that was like, say, 74, 75. All the underground stuff, all the in-house, all the hallway dances, and all the house party dances were brought out to the street.
And the more they took it to the street, the more nationalities got involved in it. You know, it was no longer an Afro-American thing. The Hispanic took to the dance. I know for a fact that when I went to some parts, it was ready to see a Puerto Rican dancer breaking. And when they did, it was like, oh shit, check out the Puerto Rican b-boy, you know?
A lot of people used to call it like, yo, you know, like the Latinos, you know, moreno means black. You know, they'd be like, yo, that's that moreno style, you know, and that's the original style. V-Borne.
Though black kids invented breaking as we know it, as we understand it, it was the Puerto Rican kids that put breakers on their backs. Batch is one of the first Hispanic breakers ever. South Soul was the crew where basically we all came out of. The first all-Hispanic breaking crew. After South Soul, Batch started up the TBB crew, and they were a big crew.
We was one of the best breakdancing crews out there. And I believe that, you know, up to today's day, if I would not have kept going to jail, you know, and a lot of my people getting killed and going to jail as well, we could have probably been one of the biggest industries today out here making money. Swipes in the air that you see legs do, that was originated by my partner, Spine.
Who I consider the best breaker I have ever seen break. That's undisputable. I mean, whoever knows breaking, that name has to come up.
He's one of the first B-Boys ever. And he was known as the man with a thousand moves. And his name is Spy. So I want to bring him up here so y'all can see. Come on, come on, Cam, man.
Spy was a legend to me, because he was already called the man with a thousand moves. I used to always go to Mom and Pop's social club, or nightclub, whatever you want to call it. It was a basement, really, on Katona Avenue, and I used to go there a lot to try to see Spy.
And then one day I saw Spy there, and I saw him, I'll never forget, he had this red hat on, and his afro was just like poofing right out the side, his hat was to the side, just like this. And that's why whenever I go down right now, whenever I start breaking, I got a hat on, you know, this is just like straight spy. This is the spy in me, you know what I mean?
When they would tell me stories about spy, I would look in the sky and be like, trying to picture myself with it, trying to put myself there, you know, like in the gymnasium in the church. And when I saw him break, I was like, wow, you know? He was just, he just, it's just like this energy around a person, you know what I'm saying? There's an energy around people that, you know, the stories, all the stories, there's a reason why they're being said. There was an energy around him, he was mad clean and mad smooth.
It was just like, he didn't have to do anything really incredible. He did, whatever he did, it looked sweet. Track 2 was like a little ladies' man back then. You know, Track 2, at one point, they said he was the best.
JoJo and them used to be off the hook, for real. They used to be like traveling. They was like gypsies in a way, because they used to find out wherever they jamming at, go there, and whoever was dancing over there, they would knock them off, for real. Them boys were just so incredible.
They were like stars coming out. These brothers would come out dressed, you know, not like bums like a B-boy was. Usually, you're all bummy dressed.
These guys would be dressed nice, but boom, they'd come out, and they were like stars. Yo, there goes JoJo, there goes Spy, there goes Jimmy D. There goes all of this track too right there, with his big old track nameplate. Those are the brothers that made up the moves.
All the moves that you see nowadays come from the root of those people. It's like 79, late 78. By then, a lot of black brothers weren't really dancing anymore. The disco scene killed breakdancing. In the disco scene, the DJ couldn't throw in no beats. He had to keep that.
Then he had to keep that. So for him to throw in a patch, he would disrupt the dance floor and he'd get fired. You couldn't really ask a girl to dance and she'd be like, yeah, and then you'd be like... You know what I'm saying? She ain't trying to feel that.
When I started doing my shit in 77, by the time 79 came around, I had brothers looking at me like, yo, why you doing that? That's played out. I used to hustle and I used to practice by myself because I didn't dare cut in with the girls. Thinking that a girl might be, ooh, who's you, you know? So I used to just take to the floor and I took all my aggression.
They didn't notice me for my hustling abilities. They were going to notice me for my breaking abilities. Rocksteady crew started in 77. A lot of its members were like all-star b-boys from the Bronx. The guys that started Jimmy D and JoJo, they hung out on at 115 Park in the Bronx. We came up with the word Rocksteady, we started thinking because we want to continue dancing, we want to keep it at a steady pace.
You know when they started doing it, a lot of people called it rocking going off. And what they wanted to do, you know, they noticed that a lot of people were stopping around 76, 77. and you know they wanted to keep it going on, you know what I'm saying? They wanted to keep the rock steady.
And when they started getting too old for it and it started dying down with them, they passed it along to Legs. In 79, I moved to Manhattan. 1979, a lot of b-boys were locked down. They're doing stick-ups, whatever, murders, or went away to job court, or just got regular jobs. Retirement age for a b-boy back then was like 16, 17 years old.
When I moved to Manhattan, I used to always try to come back to the Bronx and go to the jams, do whatever I can to get back on the weekends, stay over on Katona Avenue. Between the summer of 76 and 77, me and my friends, we had a crew called the Rock City Crew. And then like around 79, the dance started fading out. I still kept on, but the only time I would go down is if I seen somebody else.
And then, oh, my cousin Ty Fly. He introduced me to Ken Swift and his crew called the Young City Boys. My crew was just like mischievous. We used to do things like go and throw... Down the alley there's a precinct, right straight there.
We used to throw eggs at the police and run. They were like, you know, three or four years younger than me, so I looked like the big kid of them. But, you know, I told them, anytime y'all have any battles coming up, you know, I'll take your side. I got down Rocksteady when I battled Lex and then a lot of my crew got down Rocksteady. And Mr. Freeze was part of Rocksteady in the Bronx already.
The only white boy I knew that was a B-boy was Mr. Freeze. He was the only white boy, the first white boy in the Bronx. With Juice, he could go in any black Puerto Rican neighborhood and walk through and say, I'm Mr. Freeze, Rocksteady crew. He was like, oh, yo, you're cool, man.
Me and my cousin Lenny Len, we were traveling all over the place, battling people, and then just like start hanging out with them. When you hang out with those people, they might. know someone that might be breaking in another area, like, all right, cool, let's go over there. I want to battle them. It's like the martial arts films where it's like, I heard your style is good, but mine is better.
And you go there and you test their style. That was my way of recruiting. Our crew was called the Rock City Rockers, man, from the 173rd Street area. We were battling. We would do it for fun because there were really no...
Nobody in our area that we, you know what I mean, that were really involved until we met up with a guy called Crazy Legs. I was like, oh man, I want to adapt that style. That's why my name is Little Crazy Legs. That's basically how I met everyone else that ended up being in Rocksteady. I met up with Frosty Freeze.
He knew people. Take One knew people. Ken Swift, Mr. Wiggles. Then you had my peeps around Katona. Toxic A1.
We just had like 500 members of Rocksteady. Shout out to Johnny J. Johnny J is my name. Thank you.
Busty Preezy, please. Skeet. Duelism. First times I met Rocksteady and we did something together, Henry Chalfant, legendary graffiti photographer, documentarian, got together with the Rocksteady crew.
Because so many graffiti artists used to come to Henry's studio to look at his photos of the trains, that he began to realize that a lot of these guys were also break dancers. Hence, they were the Rocksteady crew. He knew a bunch of other heads and he said, listen, I wanted to have us put together like a show.
And they projected the slides up of the graffiti while a Rocksteady crew danced and I rapped and the DJ was cutting it up. And that was reviewed in the Village Voice. The Village Voice wrote a big article on that. And from then, like it seemed like it was on.
We started doing that, Henry Chalfant put us on. And what we were doing is we were breaking up Rocksteady crew into two groups. It was Rocksteady and Breakmasters for shows.
We battled each other, but it got to a point where I was like, yo, let's make it interesting. And we were hooked up with a show at Lincoln Center. Henry Chow fought again, hooked us up with that show.
It was like, yo, let's battle dynamic in a neutral ground now. Lincoln Center, Manhattan, boom. That event was covered by National Geographic.
It came out in the front page of Metro Sessions in the New York Times. It was also on 20-20. And they showed it on Channel 7, ABC News.
I just remember seeing Legs on the news, and I was like, oh, shit, you know, like, that's Legs. And at the end of the battle they were like, Who won the battle? All you heard was Rock Steady, Rock Steady Like in the middle of Lincoln Center One day I was watching TV and I saw Rocksteady on TV and I was like, whoa, if they can do it, we can do it.
So I got a group back together, I went and recruited Chino and we started from there. To make a long story short, we met Michael Holman who was some type of manager to Rocksteady and in 1982 they offered us a battle. I had a nightclub called Negril, the first hip-hop club in downtown New York. And I invited down a Rocksteady crew to perform every Thursday night. Believe me, everybody was there.
Rene Ricard, Francesco Clemente. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Harry. And so here's where Negril comes in to exposing hip-hop to the rest of the world. Because New York is a media capital. Every important magazine, every important newspaper has representation in New York City.
on the wheels of the hill. Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Amazing, amazing!
Baby, yeah! After a while, I started getting a little bit bored with just Rocksteady Crew doing a dance performance. And I said, Legs, you know, what's up with this battle I keep hearing?
I didn't really know. And after a couple of weeks, he found a crew. called Floor Masters.
Well actually they needed a crew to battle so they can look good on film. And they wanted a crew that wasn't as good as them so they could look real good on film. And what they didn't know is that the Floor Masters were real good. And when Floor Masters came down to perform, a light turned on in my head. Because what I saw was breakers who may not have been as good as Rocksteady Crew in the finesse and style into breaking.
What they lacked in that, they more than made up for in the athleticism of breaking. They spun longer, faster, and harder. And I thought, that's what I want to do. I want a crew that's athletic-like crew.
That's a crew that would eventually find its way into the Olympics. Michael Holman saw something that he felt like, wow, this is a real good thing. And, you know, they changed the name from Floor Masters to New York City Breakers.
A lot of people think that if you're from New York and you're from the Bronx, that you know good. But we're from the Bronx, and we out here to show everybody that we're good. That the Bronx doesn't just got bums and ghettos, but it got something good too.
Because we're the freshest kids out there. I had embarked with Charlie Ahern to make the first hip-hop movie, Wildstyle. My main intent with Wildstyle was to show that breakdancing, graffiti, and rap were one. It was connected. Nobody had seen these forms as being a part of each other.
I sought to make this film to bring all these forms together in one format so people could see how they interrelated. We happy most after the Lisa to the voice of my mother about to see And I hear KK Wildstyle, that was the one movie that captured more of the true essence of hip-hop Wearing the socks with the rhythm, Rocksteady crew With the path of my baby, try to make it move Groovin' in the park one Saturday night Yeah, the kids in it, when it's ready for a fight On the clouds in the house, shocker with a plane Lookin' on the gym, some of the join up say Rocksteady crew Around that time, we was just doin' the Just to have fun and gain recognition. We never think we would turn out to be famous or, you know, take it worldwide. This park right here, we basically named it Rocksteady Park because it was a central meeting place for all the chapters of Rocksteady in the early 80s.
We used to come around here to Sacked Up, you know, and we kind of like shared the park with everybody. Everybody knew each other. You had Rocksteady on one side of the park, then you had all the drug dealers on this side, like people selling mescaline, loose joints.
It's a carpet store now, but that's where we used to get our cardboard and bring it to the bank. Prior to that, it was just basically roughing it up concrete style, just doing our thing. And, you know, scratching fuses, cutting up the back, getting all the what we call B-boy burns on the shoulders and things like that. So many things have gone down here.
I mean, you've had like the Buffalo Gals video was filmed here. Buffalo Gals go around the outside, around the outside, around the outside. Buffalo Gals go around the outside and go see Doe, your partner.
The lady that was our manager at the time, Cool Lady Blue, told us that these people saw the show and they wanted us in the movie Flashdance. And that was it right there. But do you remember what we said? What did we say?
When she said, I'd like you to be in a movie, we were all like, no, we don't want to do a movie like that. Then everyone's going to start doing our moves or the way we thought back then was biting. They were going to bite. and I Remember like it was yesterday, it was in the dance studio, she, we did not want to do it. And then she said, you'll get paid, the pay is $1,038.
And we were like, okay. You gotta do your thing, you gotta do your thing Jennifer Beals didn't really talk to us there, but after the premiere on Broadway in New York, when they saw the response to the public and the press on how crazy they were when the world first saw B-Boying. was through us. I mean, during the scene, the actual scene, people were going out of their minds because besides chills going through our bodies, you know, we couldn't believe it.
We were like, holy shit, we're on this screen. When we came out, the press was all over us. All of a sudden, Jennifer Beals is like, hey, hi.
You know what? Got in the middle with us with pictures and we were like, yeah, exactly. We were like, whatever, getting the pictures. So, you know, she took pictures with us and when, and it just, that's when it kind of escalated for us. Breakin' hit the West Coast with a fury in 82. When it came out here, it originated really from Flashdance.
When that came out, it just spreaded right from that little scene, just that one scene. And everyone started doing it. Maybe 13, 14 years old, I picked up on it quick like everyone else. They saw it for the first time. You know, people just knew it was part of them.
So, you know, I found a couple of other brothers that felt the same way. Started up a crew, a crew called Shake City Rockers, which were influenced by New York style breakers and were more like into the air moves, you know what I'm saying? I used to look up to the guys out here in the West Coast, you know. I used to look up to the Shake City Rockers, you know, Pony Express. You know, I wanted to earn it so bad and they used to just make fun of me back then, you know, because I was like, I was so small that they wouldn't even pay attention to me.
And then when I saw New York City Breakers, it was like, oh shit. There was a lot of breakers everywhere and we had this youth center called the Radiotron. A lot of the roughest kids from Los Angeles were kicking back at that center.
Everyone would know the Radiotron, everyone would know Caesar, Max was big, Orko was very big. Like everyone would be here, I mean you would see everyone from everywhere. LA was behind New York terribly at the beginning. What it was was we were just finding spinning moves and that's what we adopted. Because that's what we saw.
New York had so much style but their spinning wasn't up to par as far as LA. LA started just rising. I mean I'm proud to say I'm from the West Coast.
We're proud of our West Coast roots. You know, we're proud of poppin' and lockin'. Los Angeles was a real hotbed for new dance and new hot things going on. Locking is the very first professional street dance.
Locking was created by Don Camelot Campbell sometime in the late 60s. He was trying to learn how to do the funky chicken. He was like a real wallflower, right?
He couldn't do it. And he stumbled onto this style of locking. I didn't meet Don until 69. I snuck away from an all-night prayer meeting.
Went to school. club called Mavericks Flats. And I looked across the dance floor, this guy doing something that was just awesome.
I've never seen anything like this in my life. What is this? Locking comes from, that's locking. This is Uncle Sam points. Everything in locking has a name.
Knee drops, Uncle Sam points, locking, wrist rolls, playing with the hat, all of that has a name. Locking was a lifestyle. You wore certain type of clothes. You walked a certain way.
You didn't look in locking. You looked. You didn't point in locking.
I'll start off locking. I was watching Rerun, Michael Jackson when he was doing the robot, Jackson 5. I was watching Jeffrey Daniels, Pop Alone Kid on Soul Train, and I started trying it. You know what I'm saying? I just started jumping off chairs, trying to do the dive.
The popping movement was a combination of locking and the robot. Breaking came from the east, but popping came from south-central to west. Talking to Pete who was the first one to start hit me or popping, the actual pop part of it was Fresno, California.
Popping is really, really minute. It's like this. See, that's...
Pop it is like, like, like, this is pop it. This is pop it, so you know. This is pop it.
Strutting, strutting is continuous movement in the same direction. And then it's ticking. And then hitting is this. When I hit, it reminds me of like a gangster perspective from where I come from.
So when I'm hitting, I'm hitting like I'm getting ready to fire on you. You know what I'm saying? My hits come from the hood, you know?
It didn't come from me, it came from the hood because I had that gangster vibe, you know? Real niggas wanted to see real niggas hit. Poppin and Boogalooin two different styles.
Boogalooin was like really loose. So if I'm poppin here, if I'm poppin, then I'm hittin, I can hit, and then I can Boogaloo at the same time and move, you know what I'm sayin? So Boogalooin is like, you're movin the body, you're turnin, your head goin, your body goin another way. Pete told me that his influence is now, besides seeing his brother, was from San Francisco, there was a group called Demons of the Mind. Close Encounters of the Funkiest Kind.
Two different groups in these to perform at San Francisco Pier. We didn't realize until later on that, yes, we were a part of the hip-hop culture. The culture blended a long time ago.
The brothers that represented the most in New York always had respect for the West Coast. Always. We were obviously inspired by the styles from over there.
I mean, we were really far apart, man. And to have both of these dancers come from two distant places like that, and they come together, man, that was like, man, incredible. This is called breakdancing, or breaking. Like rapping, it's a competitive display of style.
Dance as a form of ritual warfare. After the initial splash of breakdancing, it became a phenomenon. And it was all about breakdancing, at least as far as the media was concerned. As soon as the man with the money said, hey, we can make money off of this here, that's when it blew up.
That's when it really blew up. When they came out with those books, place your right foot perfectly and your left ankle. This guy was selling cardboard.
He had a company making cardboard boxes that you carry with you and open up that says the Oz Rock. When you got on the train, there would be kids breaking. When you went to the city, you'd be just...
People breaking, and it was all over the place. I'd fall out of the closets, coming from the cars, looking around. I'd be hanging from the ceiling, popping in.
I mean, it was everywhere. I was like, damn! Oh, damn!
That's when the Olympics came. What, four billion people saw the Olympics? We are the pioneers of taking breakdancing mainstream.
Ladies and gentlemen, homeboys, homegirls. The New York City Breaker. We, the New York City Breakers, we certainly commercialized it more than any other crew did.
We got it on to big shows and in advertisement. Probably culminating with this big television show that Ronald Reagan was at. It was some big presidential performance, and they had breakdancers perform on national TV.
And it was like... What is going on? And breakdancing just spread so wide, I mean, they had cardboard on every street corner. It was like, I think it even hit more bigger than it hit in New York. And it went in every mall.
Malls had to close down sometimes. They had things where kids were doing windmills, falling down stairs and getting up and hitting customers when they were shopping. It was so packed that the police would go undercover and wear undercover uniforms and just arrest kids for breakdancing.
The media just fed into it and grabbed whatever breaker they can get. They were like, well, hey, you know, if you can just do anything, we'll take you. Make this election different. This year, vote with the break. And make it count more and more and more and more.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is not to be believed. You're a Ken Swift, right? Yeah.
Rock steady, travel all over the world, and then next you don't boom, B-Ski came out. Yo, what's up? Yo, man, you're biting. All your homeboys are biting.
You're a wax, so what's up with that? Yo, what are you talking about, man? I never stole no moves from you. All your moves ain't worth a bit.
So what's up with that, punk? Punk? Who you calling a punk? And boom, Rocksteady, New York City Breakers, and Man Force chilling in Cannes, France. We was bugging.
We was bugging. We were like the young kids of the 80s, you know what I mean? The exploitation era, boy.
It took us all over the world. We were bumping into each other's cross-continent, you know what I'm saying? We thought we were rich and shit. Crazy Legs and those guys were managed by a chick named Lady Blue.
She had engineered them to make a record that became a number one hit in London. Hey, you the Rocksteady Crew. It was not a B-Boy record.
It was a pop record, but it was a number one song. And I don't think the Rocksteady Crew ever really loved the record because they were like, you know, this ain't about B-Boying, but it was about putting some money in their pockets for a minute. I started breakdancing with my friend Donovan and Mike, and we actually had a lot of those black people in Samoan, and we used to all come to my house, and my mom would wake up in the morning, and there would be a gang of Samoans from Carson City, hardcore, and she'd be like, what the fuck is going on here?
Like mom, they teach me how to spin on my head. A lot of people, unfortunately, took it as a fad, you know? I guess what was going on was the breakdancers themselves weren't in control of it.
It was just a media frenzy as often times happens in this here crazy pop culture that we live in. So you just get chewed up and spit out by the media machine. I don't know why, but the police and other people in the city and officials wanted to ban breakdancing because they felt it was a nuisance.
They shut down the streets. They shut down Venice Beach before. I saw a guy just do an arm wave and go to jail.
But what they did was just, you know, they put it out there and then, you know, everybody was into it like as far as just the end thing. Then when the next thing came through, they kind of like kicked it to the curb. A lot of the mainstream kids, you know, the media said, OK, it's dead. It's time to move on. So, you know, everybody on the industry tried to get all their mileage out of it and milk it for what it's worth, rape it like they do and move on.
B-Boying did eventually die. There's a number of reasons why. And there are people out there who kind of blame me in a way because they see myself and the New York City Breakers as being the people who took breaking from being underground and taking it and making it really huge and making it a big splash out of it, putting it out there in television and in films.
And we commercialized it. And I'm not ashamed of that. Here we were at one minute, we were in the limelight, everything was straight, traveling all around the world, walk up to a club, hey, come on in club, you help build as far as reputation, you know, and next thing you know, it's like, go to the back of the line, boom.
You know, how do you really nurture someone for this industry, you know, and prepare them for what can happen, especially someone coming from the back of the line? and the ghetto, and all you see is like money. From that to having loot in your pocket, renting OJs out, getting all your boys high, and having honeys, and to next thing, just like having the rug pulled under you.
Yeah, I went through the ill identity crisis. When we were dancing and one of the guys, Matt, he got killed in a motor cycle accident. It's like from then, it's like everything just started falling apart.
Yeah, that kind of That kind of brought us bad luck. Yeah, it kind of brought us bad luck. We didn't get any gigs, and we just kind of lost it from there.
We stopped dancing. Toward the end of 84, like, a lot of crews broke up, you know, including Rocksteady and New York City Breakers and Dynamics. I think it should have never went above ground. I don't think it was made for commercialism. I think it was designed by God to spread love between the communities.
You know, there's a lot of kids that have so much energy, creative energy, You don't know what to do with it. You know, we were doing wild things, man, but as long as I was on the cardboard, it just kept me occupied. You were too tired of fighting, because you've been popping and breaking all night.
You were too busy learning how to windmill, then to rob and steal. Because the idle hand is the devil's workshop. So if you had so much to do, you ain't never had time to go out and do the wrong.
Imagine somebody took me and showed me how to wear a bandana, a rag or something to claim a color. I would have put the same energy into gang banging as I did into b-boying. point aggression was breakdancing, was b-boying towards another crew.
You know, because before that came, there was gangs. N.W.A., they came out with their versions of rap, and what they did was it actually influenced gangsterism. I seen the change from rap being rockin' parties to rap being gangster.
I was there when it changed. I was there, and I even became a part of it, trying to be a gangster, started getting tatted, started getting braids, cornrows, started sagging. You know, I was like so disappointed with just like everything that was going on in my life with, you know, Rocksteady Crew. I just started going back to school. I got a job.
You know, I was going to college for a minute. And I started hanging out with some of my old school friends before. And, you know, it was my best friend. and unfortunately they weren't into The greatest scene in the world.
I was in a different blow, smoking weed. I used to sell guns. I held over a million dollars for a friend of mine in my crib for about two years. Cash, cash.
And I was involved with some things that, you know, led to some of my closest friends getting killed. You look right now at like, Randy, he was from the LA Breakers, Kid Tuff, they're all in jail. And it's like even Float, one of the best breakers ever in New York City, which is in jail for murder right now.
before I got involved with hustling, doing this thing. Along with that game comes a lot of, you know, ridiculous beef. Sometimes there's beef, and then one person gets murdered, another person on the other side gets murdered.
And eventually it got to a point where they found out where Buck lived. They caught him in his garage, and they... Basically kind of like tortured him and murdered him execution style.
We like to have a moment of silence. A moment of silence for them. So everyone can be quiet for a few moments. Just to honor those that have passed away.
In the street you see moccasins killings and you say to yourself, hey I'm doing something for this world. I'm entertaining people. That's good.
That makes me feel good. Thank you. There are a lot of people from the old school that aren't here right now. My first moment of silence goes out to Ken Tuff from the Dominoes. Ken Tuff got to the point where he was one of the best on the West Coast.
I mean, one of the best. He got caught up. He ended up doing time. He got back out.
He was gonna start breaking. I talked to him two days right before it happened and he was killed. They took breaking away from us. Gangbanging and dump dealing came in.
I know everybody from here know what that means. Wanna be a gangster, wanna be a thug aspect. Don't get too caught up in that.
Always understand that this is entertainment, you know? You don't see Robert De Niro trying to kill Al Pacino, you know what I'm saying, or Joe Pesci. Them is actors, you dig it?
Just like all these rappers is basically actors. Let's be for real here, I know. If I lay low and let the day go, it'll slow my payroll. Ayo, I'ma travel rise tall to slay shows.
Rise safe flows, go as far as the Barbados. On the turntable sound like tornado. My topics perform like tropical storms. Yo, not to get on the whole spot, it gets on. I keep the metropolitan hollering and bring the dollars in.
Keep the models following. Wise as King Solomon. Come slow through the jungle like an animal. Invade any land, I go like General Hannibal. From Long Island to Queens.
Light up the New York scenes. All the way to New Orleans. Everything in between.
Let the gold bless the show in Mexico. Next thing I know, extra call. I see Eskimo.
Time to rock. get it hot soon as I get in there spit in the air flow stay frozen I disappear You can go up to a businessman and say, in 85, you ever heard of breakdancing? Yeah.
You ever heard of rapping? You mean rapping a gift? All of a sudden, it just died out. Rapping took over and shit.
The dancing was really what catapulted rap music into the media's eye. And it was really the media grabbing these B-boys and saying, hey, let's take these kids on tour, let's do shows. And hey, we want to bring these rap artists.
Rap had product. It had something that could sell. It had music, it had CDs, it had records, and it's something that one could take home. You can't take a breaker home with you. It lasted for a minute.
We used to have dances for your stage show, but then after a while, it became more pop, so a lot of that phased out. I think the MCs and the rappers out there have not really recognized how B-Boy opened doors for them. When they say, yeah, I do hip-hop, it's like, you know, but they're really trying to say, is that rap? The thing that Run The M-Team represents is the thing that's gonna not let people forget, us and KRS-One of course, not forget about that time or that era where the whole culture of hip-hop was. The music of hip-hop was just rap.
The dance of hip-hop was just breaking. And the art of hip-hop was just graffiti. Those things all were like three-in-one, hand-in-hand. Once rap became a money-dominated entity, those things fell off.
Breakdance really didn't play out, per se. It's just that, you know, motherfuckers over here is just too much of a bitch to understand what real hip-hop culture is. The music.
I tell a lot of b-boys, especially a lot of upcoming b-boys, they just see a circle when they just want to get down and just exploit their mood. But I always tell them, listen to a certain beat, because that's important that when you go down, what you go down to. I have videotapes of guys in Germany dancing to fucking Donna Summer's Bad Girls and Brooklyn rock into it. How do you Brooklyn rock to that?
Many of my b-boys around here, we always go down to the break beats. Like Apache was one of our favorite records around here. That's a B-Boy anthem.
This is it. Thawson James Bowne, some Just Begun. You can be dressed in a tuxedo if you're a real B-Boy, and I don't care if it's a little bit of top rock. You're going to do something.
All he had to do, man, was put that record on, man, that Just Begun joint. And that's when it was on, man. We got busy, man.
R.I.P. Funk is the music that we dance with. If it was funk, we dance. Although we can dance to walks, okay?
Planet Rock. That was the popping song. It wasn't exactly the breaking song, was it?
Because it didn't have that beat. It could be a day that you feel like, well, I don't feel like catching up today. But play one of those records and your mind will change really quick.
Damn, when I first learned about the dance in 77, it was called B-Boy. By the time the media got a hold of it in like 81, 82, it became breakdancing. And I even got caught up calling it breakdancing too.
Yeah, but you know what? That's our fault kind of. Of course.
When breakdancing went mainstream and we started dancing and breaking, going on tours and stuff like that, and people would say, oh, you guys are breakdancers. We never, we never, we never. We had to reinvent ourselves.
You see, we kept walking around calling ourselves breakdancers, they're like, ah, y'all them kids from the 80s, man, that shit is played out. But when we started calling ourselves B-Boys, it was like, what, this is some new shit. B-Boy is, that's what it is.
That's why when the public changed it to breakdancing, they was just giving a professional name to it. But B-Boy was the original name for it, and whoever wants to keep it real, with people calling. I used to watch Rocksteady in the park, you know, even when I had record soccer, he was still in the parks and in the clubs.
And in South Bronx, that's where I wrote. And the real Rocksteady taking out these tones. We would go to clubs. We would hear like South Bronx by KRS-One.
And we'd just start screaming, South Bronx, South, South Bronx. Rock Steady became the image of all breakers everywhere, all serious breakers. That record means so much to me. KRS-One gave us a place that no one can, you know, like historically.
Everything springboarded from the back. That got us more in tune, in touch with the hip-hop audience again. B-Boy is dope.
The original hip-hop is dope. Just when you think, like, you know, the dance is just fading away, kids somewhere else picks up on it. Every generation has its creativity and its energy to bring to the table.
It's all good. You talk to some of them OGs who first started dancing back in the day, and you show them clips of what's going on now, they'll be like, man, I never thought it would have went to that. This is who I am, this is what I do.
If I go in a circle and I automatically start tumbling, it may not be a dance to you, but it's my dance. Beautiful things, you know, a lot of creativity and I'll be like, oh my god, yo, you're nice. Like, you see them spinning in their hands like this, like, oh god, yo. Now these guys are like spinning up in the air, masturbating and like, you know, catching their semen in their air and then like going back down. Radio Tron, it's like the dopest shit around.
Radio Tron. The neighborhood. The Radio Tron, Cesar just went haywire with it.
He just blew up. I mean, he went all out. Cause you know he always was a strong b-boy, man.
So he went out there, he said he was gonna put it together. Me bringing Radiotron, I think I'm giving another outlet for the young generation to get down, you know what I'm saying? It's more like now you get creative with it.
We the OGs were the ones who came out with a lot of the moves. I think that now is our job. job as OGs to maintain the movement how it really was back in the days and let the new generation take it to another level. An idea, you know, Stallions came about around 1995 with two crews that kind of united together.
It was people from Stockton, Modesto, Sacramento, San Jose. We know the background to this dance. I mean, I go and do research with the originals. I've been on tour with a lot of the originals from New York, you know what I'm saying? From the Bronx, you know, Wiggles, Ken Swift, you know what I'm saying?
Fable. And I learn, because I'm a student, and I'm always going to be a student. It's been going on since 1991, Rocksteady anniversary. Buck 4 had passed away, right? Buck 4 is my best friend, so I wanted to keep his name alive.
As well as Rashaun, Lil' Agar, Chi-147, all the members of Rocksteady. Rock said I had passed away. When we had our first Rock City anniversary, you know, in the park, our first official outdoor, that really got me back into it.
You know, when I met people like EZ Rock, Gremlin, and the Japanese guys, you know, that really just got me hyped. Once again, we're on another mission from here to the end, New York City. We're on a subway right now. I feel like I'm in New Zealand.
Rockstar Anniversary, I just want to go pay respects to Mecca just to have it. fun. And then when I sat and listened to what they were saying, I understand more about myself, actually listening to what they were saying. Why I had my mentality the way I did. Why I was why my driving side was the way it was.
What brought me to New York? I like what's going on now and I hope that this can continue every year. I'll be here 90 years old. It's my turn.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Boom. battling hip-hop wouldn't be where it was today if it wasn't for battling the whole thing was to burn your opponent If you won the battle, the guy had to respect you.
The battle and aspect money, that's what makes it fun. It also helps the males to get off some of that testosterone. Because if not, somebody might be hitting somebody else upside their head. A person cannot handle themselves in a battle.
They don't deserve to call themselves a b-boy. The next guy better than the next and the next and the next and it became ridiculous. That's how the dancing got amazing.
Self-challenge really. Really look into it. It's a challenge of how well you're going to do under pressure. Break on the brick, break on the brick, break on the brick It was the competitive spirit of this whole culture that made it excel Everywhere, I'm at a jam, you won't be at a jam without seeing me. Okay, that's enough, stop!
Everybody's the next, what's next? Radiotron next, this, this event next, what's next? Hip-hop is...
Out of all things, it's very important to maintain your individuality. There's a lot of times you can see a bunch of heads dancing, but the ones that you will remember are the ones that may have bitten a move, but when they bite that move, they advance it and took it to a different level and made it there. Wrong move. The tradition of B-Boy Sound is that I have to be responsible, y'all. Please don't tag on the venue.
Out done. Out done. We got out of control once we were called.
We needed to move out or we would all be arrested. As soon as the cops came, we got out of control. Let's see what's going on.
We're dancing. All this over dancing. Even when I was doing my videos, the company was like, we don't need that. We don't want that in the video.
They wanted to put a bunch of girls behind me, and they were forgetting about the true essence of hip hop. So when I seen Karis 1 bringing it back back, I was like, yo, hip hop is back. The culture is back in full effect.
So what do I do? I say, okay, you know what? I'm not going to say fuck y'all. Let me give you a puppy. Let me give you the girl singing in the chorus.
Let me give you all this shit. Cause that's what y'all want. Then when I flash the video, let me show you these breakers. Let me show you these, but let me show you this graph real quick. Boom.
And when you show it, they go, oh, Oh shit! Oh that shit is hot! Oh that shit is hot! Then they go, how successful is it? Is it gold?
Does everyone else feel the way I feel? Yeah, Chris is gold! Oh shit, it's dope! Now all the videos got break in it, but we knew this, we all sat around it. around.
We said, yo, after we do this, everybody gonna want to put breakers in their videos again. I think Lex has done his part to keep that vibrant, even in big videos like Wyclef's video, Stayin' Alive, where we have the original members of Rocksteady, and you have kids who've been poppin' and b-boyin' for a long time in New York in the video. I incorporate b-boying parts like the music and shit. Anything that's b-boy that makes you just wear the hat, the old school book bags on the back of your your back, you know what I'm saying, sagging your shit, that's B-Boy all the way down from the breaking on the pop of the lock. B-Boying didn't disappear bigger than it ever was.
It's just that they're underground. It's kids doing this now, a whole new generation of kids that they ain't even supposed to be into this, an overseas suit. Yo, it's me, Speicher, and I'm having a lot of fun here at the Rocksteady Anniversary.
This is very cool, but it's very different to Europe. The circles, they are different to Germany. In Germany, there's still a lot of gymnastics. and gymnastics and here they do more crowd pleasing stuff.
And I love that. When I go back to Germany, I will practice a lot of that crowd pleasing stuff because it's so cool in the circle and people here go yeah, yeah all the time. I love it.
When we throw our rocksteady thing, it's not only for the neighborhood, it's international. We know you have Paris Breakers, people from London, Italy, even guys in Denmark. It just opens my eyes and like say, welcome to the family of B-Boys.
There was a meeting that happened in 1987. Bambaataa had a roundtable discussion. And he said to all of us, he said, you know, the humanism in hip-hop and how it shouldn't remain a black thing, a Latino thing. This was Bam.
He caught a lot of flack for saying that. And Bam was always from day one, Zulu Nation was always about, come on, everybody come on in this. And it's not about race or color, it's about skill and ideology.
Thus came the idea of starting a Zulu Nation that would start out first in the black and Latino community, but then become a worldwide community with many different nationalities, religions, and many truths. I'm glad that the rest of the world is enjoying and being a part of this. I like Europe in the way that they preserve the culture in its entirety with all the elements together. The Battle of the Year for instance, I mean that was like, it blew my mind going there and just, there was just writers and b-boys and mcs and everybody just mingling together and it was like so many people, it was really, it was crazy. Outro Music I met so many people.
I met people from Japan. I didn't know English. Respect them because I dance. I didn't know people from London, England. I didn't know people from Switzerland.
I don't know. I met everybody in Germany. From even Indiana. I travel, you know what I'm saying, catches. Yo, they breakin' in the streets, they got the linoleum.
You know, just like it was Wildstyle. You know, like it was 1982. You know, the last time I was in Japan, they had a breakdance competition. I mean, this shit was the real deal.
Just incredible shit. You know, just in England, in Folkestone, at a big hip-hop convention. Well, I was shocked when I saw there was two or three crews from Hungary alone.
There were crews from Croatia. We go over to Germany, we go over to Poland, we go over to Japan. They're here. During our show, they're breakdancing and they're doing it.
I meet people over there in Europe that say, I'm flying in September for the Rocksteady reunion. There's a hundred times more, a hundred times more. If there were 3,000 kids beatboying back in the early 80s, there are 300,000 kids doing it now. Breaking is an incredible dance that's valid, has foundation, has vocabulary.
There are names for all the moves. You know, it's not someone throwing themselves on the ground. The dance has branched out so much, you know? You got the original B-boy style and footwork.
You have the power moves. So sometimes you got brothers with B-boy moves, you know, real original techs going up against guys with power moves that hardly have no B-boy techs. How are you going to judge that?
The neutral people that don't know anything might go for the power moves because it's really dynamic. Five years ago, when I came here, everybody had backpacks with a helmet hanging from it and they were breaking without sneakers. or some of them were breaking with sneakers, but all they were doing were flare windmills in the 90s. Not many people had the foundation down.
Not many people did footwork. Not many people had freezes. It's like if you go to an audition, a jazz dancer coming to a B-boy audition, you know, just because he could do those continuous back spins, which the commercial public knows as windmills, you know, just because he could do that doesn't mean that he's a B-boy.
He's just an idiot that learned how to spin on his back. He has no style, no flavor, no feel for it. There is a beat and there is a rhythm to this music. It isn't about how dynamic your move is, but it's about the feeling that you can express with the dance. Dance is about expression, and a lot of people have seemed to have gotten that.
All the spinning is dope. I ain't knocking it, it's dope. But you need the style and the finesse.
And when they B-boy back in the days, it was whatever. You know, it was... You can see it in their bones, in their face. You can see it in their body. You got to get that charisma back in there.
Now, as a B-boy, I'm still trying to be competitive. I think B-boying represents you trying big deep to find something that you haven't seen done, which is very hard. I mean, there's no difference from life.
Ken Swift or like Baryshnikov, you know, some things that I've seen a lot of these breakers do is just like, that is nuts. True dancers, whether you're from tap or ballet or modern or jazz, they look at it as an off-home already. I mean, they see it and they're like, wow, I mean, that's incredible. I don't know one class nationwide in America that's not teaching street dance. At every formal dance studio, you read the list, and I have street dancing there.
I'm creating this brand new dance academy, the Debbie Allen Dance Academy, and I actually had a young man here teaching breakdancing, specifically that, because it is unique unto itself. It is a technique like ballet, like African, like hip-hop. Machine, get on, get up, get up, machine, get on up, get up, get on up, get on up, machine, get on up, get on up, machine, get on up, get on James Brown doesn't even know the effect that his music and style of dance had on people in the Bronx. He was probably inspired by people he saw, tap dancers. Them tapers back in the old, old days, them fools was like B-boys in a sense, you know what I mean?
I mean, them fools was dope, they didn't give a fuck. On a big technical, Sammy Davis Jr. was a B-boy. My favorites, no question, other than James Brown's was, they were brothers.
The Nicholas brothers. Some of it came from Lindy Hoppin. Look at Frosty with the backflips. You can see all the Kung Fu influence. Ken Swift told me that.
The Muggsy, I asked him where'd he get it from, and he said Bruce Lee. Curly from the Harlem Globetrotters put his one hand on the floor and used to run around bouncing a basketball. I was into gymnastics. I used all my creativity and tried to focus it into the dance. Moves that were invented years before that we never saw, like the capoeira moves, somehow ended up in breaking.
Capoeira is the art form of fight dance. Breakdance is fight dance is what it really is. We've never seen capoeira, just like they never saw us dance. It definitely didn't come from another country.
It was made up in the Bronx. Not nobody really know. It's some old, old, old human thing.
The feeling to want to get on the ground and spin and dance and really. Become one with the with the earth with the ground master before concrete you was breaking and spinning on earth More the top MCs out there in the world Coming together with the top graph writers, the top b-boys And the top DJs like it used to be Use graffiti writers to do their album covers Not these computer graph artists that don't know jack about graph Use real B-Boys as their dancers and don't put them in the background. Put them in the front. I think the B-Boys need to take it in their own hands.
Need to take it in their own hands and need to bum rush hip-hop. You know what I'm saying? Need to be like, you ain't rapping if you don't have B-Boys. Don't talk about hip-hop and then you got booty dancers behind you. What's that?
Where's your hip-hop at? I don't really want it to blow up on the mainstream. I don't want to be having people, you know, in suits coming over here telling us, okay, now you need to have form. If you can freeze and point your toe, it looks just a little bit better. Nah, man, it's got to be raw, you know what I'm saying?
Let's go team! When they grow older, they would learn to play with the e-ball. From the hoop, they would strike the 10. They could have made a good spot. To see them not as quick as they can. Snap to the bottom, swing to the top.
Along came a book of meaning And a world that's got Tail gingerbread And glasses glass And if you don't like it You can't show it Do you? It was recently a Wildstyle reunion in Los Angeles that a lot of the heads that starred in Wildstyle, Busy B, Cold Crush, you know, Waterbed, Kevvy Kev, and a bunch of the original heads from the movie came out and all, you know, did a little performance and the Rocksteady crew danced. And when the Rocksteady crew went into the audience, they were surrounded by a lot of West Coast break dancers, black, white, Latino kids from Los Angeles. is They started dropping down to the floor and doing their thing.
It was so incredible. I felt exactly the same way I did when I first saw Breakdance. They're the Rocksteady crew now.
They have organized themselves. They have their politics correct. They have their business in effect. And they know how to articulate, direct, and control this form, which is what has brought it back to the form that it is now.
It's what has made this form translate to so many different cultures and people. If you make a hip hop wall of fame, Rocksteady Laugh could be a good one. up in there.
I'd definitely get a mat on if I could do it myself. I think that we need to let people know what's up, man. I don't want people to take these dances into the next millennia, some different whole vibe and feel and origins. You know, I think that it's important.
to teach the people about where these dances came from and how people felt, you know, so they can take it on to the next level with the respect or the blood, sweat, and years that a lot of breakers have put into to develop this whole foundation for these people to live with. live off of now. All the b-boys all over the world keep doing what you're doing because we're the past you're the future and we put it all together it's the present. The cycle has begun styles always start once they go out of style and then all of a sudden people get back to the root of things.
Rock Steady is going to keep going. I think I'm going to be in the wheelchair saying yes I'm Rock Steady. Yeah crazy legs come on let's get busy.
Let's go right now, watch how he do it out there with us, ready? A lot of people say like, you know, what we do is played out, but you don't hear that about ballet and modern dancing. If that was the case, we wouldn't still be doing this.
Nobody would still be doing it. If it's recognized by the president and the National Grants Institution for Dance or whatever, they cannot recognize it for the rest of eternity. And as long as...
kids are still battling and still dancing to me that's what's important we have to eliminate all of these labels and titles and stuff and just see it for what it is man we're all creating art in the ghettos you know i'm saying everyone all over the world now it's up to us we're the younger generation because we right now we are part of a movement we are part of an underground young culture movement i mean it's not a fact something that you can't get rid I mean, it's always there and it's always gonna be be there. Off the top of the dome, just creating. B-Boy is B-Boy anywhere you go, any planet, any universe, any galaxy. I see it as such a part of the culture that those who want to really stay true to the culture, it's always going to be break dance. They don't stop the B-Boys are the big, they say whatever you throw at us, we gonna make it.
make our dance be known and we're gonna invade your club i knew it was gonna stay i i knew from from the way it just all blew up from the music you can never stop that that's something that's in our blood Thank you. God, I feel like we're in this ass thing, check it The fight is mine, it's mine, I can't give up, I can't, I'ma do it first