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When he performed to Breaks[?] at crowded venues, such as the Hervalo in the Bronx, he would shout loudly 'B-Boys go down!' and this was the cue for dancers to cut and jump their gymnastics. Even today nobody is quite clear what Kool Herc meant by his phrase. Some suggest B-Boys stands for 'Boogie Boy' while others insist it means 'Break Boy'. The later has become the favored choice. But who were the original B-Boys and where had they learned their skillz? Again the answer is fairly straight-forward. They had simply adapted what they had been doing on the ghetto streets.
The pioneers were members of New York and L.A. street gangs who had taught themselves martial arts - in particular a Brazilian style - to defend themselves from attacks by rivals. Because of this many dance moves appeared aggressive and extremely violent during the early years. For instance, 'Uprock', performed correctly, can look very much like a scene snatched from a old Kung-Fu movie. 'Uprock' was probably the first form of Breaking. From it springs many other moves to continue the dance on the floor as a single rhythmic activity. It was so convincing that many over-zealous night club managers and their bouncers interpreted the dance as a real fight in the making. The fact is that sometimes is was.
While many youngsters learned quickly that it was easier as B-Boys to receive approbation from their peers and often earn large amounts of money as well from their performances, others still preferred to risk their lives and limbs on the streets in the needless pursuit of becoming gangstas. As a consequence some dancers remained committed gang members, determined to settle old scores and so sometimes battles did erupt on the dance-floors. Understandably the media reported these incidents and very soon Hip-Hop came to mean violence, crime and general trouble-making in the public's eye, although these negative qualities were found in other entertainment areas as well.
Over on the West Coast, meanwhile, many L.A. gangs were dancing in the streets too, but each was trying to out-do the others by showing off more complex and dynamic performances, still influences by Kung-Fu. What 'Uprock' was to New Yorkers, 'Locking' had become to the Electro-Boogie-loving La-La youth. It had been started by Lockatron Jon and Shabba-Doo. Shabba was also responsible for introducing New Yorkers to 'Popping', which many claim to be the first, real hip-hop dance. They even go as far as to say they were performing it in 1969.
In New York local dancers added waves and smoother movements to the 'Popping', and that's the style which exists today. Soon it was very popular in discos and part of the 70's mainstream. At that time it was known as 'The Robot' and a early exponent was Charlie Robot who used to appear on American TV's 'Soul Train' program. He took his style and added the pops and lock we recognize today. 'Locking', too, became part of the broad disco culture and many dancers adopted Breaking moves to expand their dance-floor routines. We need to look no further than the movie musicals of the 70's to underline the point. Remember John Travolta's Saturday Night Fever, 'Roller Boogie' and even the anodyne Xanadu which starred the sweeter than sweet Olivia Newton John, an Australian export impossible to associate with Hip-Hop?
The Eighties
Everywhere new moves were being added to the form and to popularize them Broadway choreographers were sanding the raw edges and trying to format moves into a style which would not be out of place in 'Come Dancing'. Mainstream pop artists were blatantly stealing the B-Boy moves, claiming props for originality, and offering themselves to the suburban middle-classes as the ultimate in street cred. Sanitized and safe, of course. The ultimate 'lift' was probably used by Michael Jackson in the 80's when he did the 'Moonwalk', thrilling pre-teens and their parents, but the underground knew that the man owed a debt to veteran funksta James Brown. Brown had hatched the 'Goodfoot' dance-style which led to 'Floating' which led, yes, to the 'Moonwalk'.
'Popping', too, has been lost to its originator and become part of the credit list of Jeffrey Daniels, once with the hit-making group Shalamar, while countless others assume Tik & Tok invented 'Robotics'. Yet both moves had been performed brilliantly by street kids a decade earlier. Yet, without commerce kicking its resources into Breaking, would it have crossed the Atlantic and could it have survived? We'll never know the answer, but many underground crews earned a healthy crust from show-business during the early 80's. Record execs had found many of their artists incapable of mastering the B-Boys moves and decided instead to hire proper dance crews to front pop records, made by session singers and musicians to tease the public into believing it was receiving the Coke of Hip-Hop, the real thing. Rocksteady Crew, Breakmachine, Uprock and the Motor City Crew were some who sold their names and services for fronting these releases.
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