B-Boys are poppin’ and lockin’. Many in the Crobar crowd–decked out in colorful warm-up suits and unlaced sneakers–sing along to old-school rap tunes, bouncing and jerking while clutching the 40 ounces in brown paper bags they just bought at the bar.
It’s as if you’ve gone through some funky, hip-hop time machine, dropping you smack-dab in the middle of a 1982 vibe.
Now playing at a club near you: The rebirth of break dancing, fueled by a resurgence of old-school rap at clubs.
Lincoln Park’s Deja Vu invites “DJs, MCs and B-Boys” to its weekly Tuesday night “Breakbeat Lounge,” dedicated to all that is early hip-hop. Crobar morphs into a 1980s dance club on Wednesdays with its new “Supersize” party, a celebration of the break-dancing culture; it kicked off the weekly gatherings last month with a live performance by the original members of the Sugar Hill Gang, whose 1979 song “Rapper’s Delight” arguably is the first legitimate hip-hop hit.
And old-school dance crews are hitting other local clubs, including Big Wig and Zentra, in force, spinning on their heads and shoulders at the drop of a Kangol.
“There’s no real outlet for B-Boying except in the clubs,” says 21-year-old B-Boy Daniel “Bravemonk” Haywood of Chicago, who teaches breaking in Evanston and travels around the Chicago area performing for kids. “But a lot of people are doing it as a hobby and some people are even doing it for exercise.”
That’s how mainstream break dancing–or B-Boying as it’s known by the purists (“You don’t call ballet `toe dancing,’ ” says Haywood)–has become during this resurgence. Some Chicago-area health clubs offer a tamer variation of breakin’ (think Britney Spears’ dance moves) as part of their “Hip-Hop Funk” classes.
“It makes the workout more fun,” says Susan Johns of the Discovery Center, which also features “Hip-Hop Funk” classes. “Most of our clientele is young adults, 18 to 35, but we also get some senior citizens.”
Hip-hop and break dancing are offered with ballet body fitness at both of Chicago’s Gorilla Sports locations. A local hip-hop dance crew, Culture Shock, runs the workouts for Gorilla.
“We get a lot of requests for it,” says Randy Bichler, 43, group exercise director for Gorilla Sports. “We get a fairly young clientele here and they like to try to do different stuff. I think it appeals to that daredevil mentality. They like to fling their bodies across the floor and see where they end up. They’re fearless and uninhibited.”
But to those bringing break dancing back to local clubs, it’s all about revisiting an art form built on self-expression.
“We want to keep it alive,” says 23-year-old B-Boy Matt “Know One” Meeuwen of Chicago. “It’s like this underground mission.”
The act of breakin’–dancing to the break beats or percussive instrumental parts of hip-hop songs–began as part of New York City’s underground hip-hop culture in the late 1970s and caught on worldwide in the 1980s. Hollywood even jumped on the bandwagon in 1984 with the films “Breakin’ ” and “Breakin’ 2,” featuring B-Boys Adolfo “Shabba-Doo” Quinones and Michael “Boogaloo-Shrimp” Chambers.
When Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant featured B-Boys in a video for one of his solo projects, it was a sign that break dancing had definitely gained a wider audience. But by the 1990s, while the B-Boy culture was still being embraced overseas, breakin’ had run its course in the United States.
Or did it?
“Breaking never went anywhere,” says Haywood, who has been dancing since he was 10. “It’s a visual art form. The only people who thought breaking was dead were the people who treated it as a fad. It never really died.”
It simply evolved into something else. What you see in a Britney Spears or ‘N Sync video is a watered-down form of break dancing. What you see in a Janet Jackson video is closer to the original concept, Haywood says.
But if you really want to see how it’s done, get off your couch and check out the clubs. Peep the people jerking their bodies at Crobar’s “Supersize” shindig while deejay Jesse De La Pena spins old-school rap from groups such as Grandmaster Flash, Run-DMC and 3rd Bass. The crowd, mostly 25 and under, knew all the words to just about every song played on opening night. There were also a few older hip-hoppers. Future “Supersize” nights will feature old-school deejays and rappers such as Rob Base and Run-DMC’s Jam Master Jay.
“I’m really surprised by how many people my age are out here,” 38-year-old Joey Vartanian, Crobar’s operations director, said during the first “Supersize” party. “But this is where I come from, what I grew up on. It’s Sugar Hill and break dancing–from the roots of what yesterday was.”
The makeup of the crowd didn’t really surprise the Sugar Hill Gang’s Michael Wright, 45, who says the crew is on tour 200 times a year, playing before packed houses.
“And they’re mostly kids,” said Wright, who has four kids of his own, ages 13 to 21. “That’s good because anybody our age who’s break dancing might actually break something. Then it would be more like traction dancing.”
De La Pena, a former breaker before he got into deejaying (“It was a natural progression,” he says), noticed break dancing slowly coming back when established area clubs such as Sinibar and Funky Buddha began drawing crowds to their old-school hip-hop nights.
Eventually, the younger crowd got into it, too.
“There’s this whole resurgence of the ’80s thing, especially with hip-hop and punk music,” says the 33-year-old De La Pena, a fixture on Chicago’s club scene since 1985. “It’s about getting back to the basics. The fashion is coming back, the dancing is coming back. And some of the younger MCs are starting to give the older MCs props. The whole vibe–the atmosphere in hip-hop right now–is about getting back to the old-school way. It’s about the love of hip-hop instead of all that `bling-bling’ stuff.”
Haywood agrees.
“Hip-hop has become impure,” he says. “It’s time to take it back to its original form. And B-Boying never really died. I think our society is just hurting right now, looking for something deeper than what’s out there. It’s all about the way you dress, the style and the flava’–that’s the whole original B-Boy thing.”
Word.
Where to bust some moves
So you wanna see local B-Boys doing their thing? “We take it wherever we need to take it,” says 23-year-old B-Boy Matthew “Know One” Meeuwen. Here are a few places they’re taking it:
Big Wig, 1551 W. Division St., 773-235-9100: Uncle Milty spins house and hip-hop on Sundays until 2 a.m.
Crobar, 1543 N. Kingsbury St,, 312-413-7000: Deejays spin bold break beats for “Supersize” Wednesdays until 4 a.m., with special guests kicking an old-school hip-hop vibe.
Deja Vu, 2624 N. Lincoln Ave., 773-871-0205: Bamboo and siNCere host the “Breakbeat Lounge” until 4 a.m. Tuesdays, featuring the sounds of deejay Johnny Price.
Zentra, 923 W. Weed St., 312-787-0400: Just about any night of the week, after midnight, B-Boys start breakin’.
— Terry Armour
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For more information on learning break dancing and hip-hop funk dancing, contact Gorilla Sports (38 E. Grand Ave., 312-828-9777; 2727 N. Lincoln Ave., 773-477-8400) or the Discovery Center (2940 N. Lincoln Ave., 773-348-8120).
