B-boying, often called "breakdancing", is a popular style of street dance that was created and developed as part of hip-hop culture among African Americans and Latino youths in New York City. The dance consists of four primary elements: toprock, downrock, power moves and freezes.
It is danced to both hip-hop and other genres of music that are often remixed to prolong the musical breaks. The musical selection for b-boying is not restricted to hip-hop music as long as the tempo and beat pattern conditions are met. A practitioner of this dance is called a b-boy, b-girl, or breaker. These dancers often participate in battles, formal or informal dance competitions between two individuals or two crews. Although the term "breakdance" is frequently used, "b-boying" and "breaking" are the original terms used to refer to the dance. These terms are preferred by the majority of the art form’s pioneers and most notable practitioners.
Terminology
Although widespread, the term "breakdancing" is looked down upon by those immersed in hip-hop culture. "Breakdancer" may even be used disparagingly to refer to those who learned the dance for personal gain rather than commitment to hip-hop culture. The terms 'b-boys' (or break-boy), 'b-girls', and 'breakers' are the preferred terms to use to describe the dancers. The "b-boys" and "b-girls" were the dancers to DJ Kool Herc's breaks, who were described as "breaking". The obvious connection is to the breakbeat, but Herc has noted that "breaking" was also street slang of the time meaning "getting excited", "acting energetically" or "causing a disturbance".B-boy London of New York City Breakers and filmmaker Michael Holman refer to these dancers as “breakers”.Frosty Freeze of Rock Steady Crew says, “we were known as b-boys”, and hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa says, “b-boys, what you call break boys... or b-girls, what you call break girls.” The term breaker is gender neutral. In addition, Santiago "Jo Jo" Torres (co-founder of Rock Steady Crew), Mr. Freeze of Rock Steady Crew and hip-hop historian Fab 5 Freddy use the term “b-boy”, as do rappers Big Daddy Kane and Tech N9ne.
The dance itself is properly called "breaking" according to rappers such as KRS-One, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, and Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC in the breaking documentary The Freshest Kids: A History of the B-Boy. Afrika Bambaataa, Fab 5 Freddy, Michael Holman, Frosty Freeze, and Jo Jo use the original term "b-boying".Purists consider "breakdancing" an ignorant term invented by the media that connotes exploitation of the art.
Source | Quote | |||
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Crazy Legs; Rock Steady Crew | "When I first learned about the dance in ’77 it was called b-boying... by the time the media got a hold of it in like ’81, ’82, it became ‘break-dancing’ and I even got caught up calling it break-dancing too." | |||
Action; New York City Breakers | "You know what, that’s our fault kind of... we started dancing and going on tours and all that and people would say, oh you guys are breakdancers - we never corrected them." | |||
Santiago "Jo Jo" Torres; Rock Steady Crew | "B-boy... that’s what it is, that’s why when the public changed it to ‘break-dancing’ they were just giving a professional name to it, but b-boy was the original name for it and whoever wants to keep it real would keep calling it b-boy." | |||
NPR | "Breakdancing may have died, but the b-boy, one of four original elements of hip hop (also included: the MC, the DJ, and the graffiti artist) lives on. To those who knew it before it was tagged with the name breakdancing, to those still involved in the scene that they will always know as b-boying, the tradition is alive and, well, spinning." | |||
The Boston Globe | "Lesson one: Don't call it breakdancing. Hip-hop's dance tradition, the kinetic counterpart to the sound scape of rap music and the visuals of graffiti art, is properly known as b-boying." | |||
The Electric Boogaloos | "In the 80's when streetdancing [sic] blew up, the media often incorrectly used the term 'breakdancing' as an umbrella term for most the streetdancing [sic] styles that they saw. What many people didn't know was [that] within these styles, other sub-cultures existed, each with their own identities. Breakdancing, or b-boying as it is more appropriately known as, is known to have its roots in the east coast and was heavily influenced by break beats and hip hop." | |||
Jorge "Popmaster Fabel" Pabon | "Break dancing is a term created by the media! Once hip-hop dancers gained the media’s attention, some journalists and reporters produced inaccurate terminology in an effort to present these urban dance forms to the masses. The term break dancing is a prime example of this misnomer. Most pioneers and architects of dance forms associated with hip-hop reject this term and hold fast to the original vernacular created in their places of origin. In the case of break dancing, it was initially called b-boying or b-girling." | |||
Benjamin "B-Tek" Chung;JabbaWockeeZ | "When someone says break dancing, we correct them and say it’s b-boying." | |||
Timothy "Popin' Pete" Solomon; Electric Boogaloos | "An important thing to clarify is that the term 'Break dancing' is wrong, I read that in many magazines but that is a media term. The correct term is 'Breakin', people who do it are B-Boys and B-Girls. The term 'Break dancing' has to be thrown out of the dance vocabulary." | Excerpt from the book New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone | "With the barrage of media attention [breaking] received, even terminology started changing. 'Breakdancing' became the catch-all term to describe what originally had been referred to as 'burning', 'going off', 'breaking', 'b-boying', and 'b-girling'... Even though many of hip hop's pioneers accepted the term for a while in the 1980s, they have since reclaimed the original terminology and rejected 'breakdance' as a media-fabricated word that symbolizes the bastardization and co-optation of the art form." | |
Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory | "Breaking of B-boying is generally misconstrued or incorrectly termed as 'breakdancing'. Breakdancing is a term spawned from the loins of the media'sphilistinism, sociolism, and naivete at that time. With no true knowledge of the hip-hop diaspora but with an ineradicable need to define it for the nescient masses, the term breakdancing was born. Most breakers take great offense to the term." | |||
Jeff Chang | "During the 1970s, an array of dances practiced by black and Latino kids sprang up in the inner cities of New York and California. The styles had a dizzying list of names: 'uprock' in Brooklyn, 'locking' in Los Angeles, 'boogaloo' and 'popping' in Fresno, and 'strutting' in San Francisco and Oakland. When these dances gained notice in the mid-'80s outside of their geographic contexts, the diverse styles were lumped together under the tag 'break dancing.' |