The Origins of Popping and Locking in Hip-Hop DanceHip-hop dance has fascinating origins and most if not all hip-hop dance styles are still widely practiced and performed today. Below is an excerpt outlining how the locking and popping aspects of hip-hop dancing got started back in the 1960's. Popping and locking are distinctive forms of dance and still very popular in all kinds of dance settings, including TV, music videos, and film.
Title: Hip-hop Dance Author: Audrey DeAngelis, Gina DeAngelis Excerpt: |
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If You Can't Dance, Invent
Although the Funky Chicken was a popular dance for many years, in the late 1960s in Los Angeles, a young man named Don Campbell had some difficulty perfecting it. In fact, he wasn't a very good dancer at all. He would stop and start, trying to remember a move or think of what to do next. But he kept trying. In 1969, Campbell made the dance his own and began incorporating his jerks and locking joints intentionally. No longer was he doing the Funky Chicken. He wasn't even inventing a new dance move. He was inventing a brand-new style of dance.
The beat of the music is what gets dancers and audiences moving together. Campbell's style of locking, which included halting stops between moves, visually illustrated and emphasized the beat. And although it was initially something of an accident, this style quickly became popular. Some performers even added acrobatics to their dances. They used jumps, flips, and tucks. They dropped into half splits, butt drops, and knee drops. And, of course, they showed off their complex step patterns and fancy footwork.
Within three or four years, Don Campbell and others who had learned his style formed a dance group called the Lockers. The dancers had nicknames and named their dances after themselves. The Lockers dressed in brightly colored clothing, pushing fashion almost to the point of being silly. Jeff Chang's book Total Chaos explains how Campbell and his friends did "the lock, points, skeeters, scooby doos, stop 'n' go, which-away, and the fancies."
The beat of the music is what gets dancers and audiences moving together. Campbell's style of locking, which included halting stops between moves, visually illustrated and emphasized the beat. And although it was initially something of an accident, this style quickly became popular. Some performers even added acrobatics to their dances. They used jumps, flips, and tucks. They dropped into half splits, butt drops, and knee drops. And, of course, they showed off their complex step patterns and fancy footwork.
Within three or four years, Don Campbell and others who had learned his style formed a dance group called the Lockers. The dancers had nicknames and named their dances after themselves. The Lockers dressed in brightly colored clothing, pushing fashion almost to the point of being silly. Jeff Chang's book Total Chaos explains how Campbell and his friends did "the lock, points, skeeters, scooby doos, stop 'n' go, which-away, and the fancies."
If Your Dancing Has Glitches
Just a few years after locking developed, the dance scene would see its next new style in Fresno, California: popping. While locking includes repeated freezes, popping smooths over those freezes, minimizing them to a percussive jerk in one part of the body. When done well, popping can ake a dancer look like a video with glitches.
Inspired by the Jerk, Chubby Checker's Twist, and James Brown's Popcorn, "Boogaloo Sam" Solomon developed the new style he called popping around 1975. Within a year, Boogaloo Sam and his brother, Timothy "Popin' Pete" Solomon, formed a dance group called the Electronic Boogaloo Lockers (later, the Electric Boogaloos). The members of this group had learned how to dance from watching dance shows on television and admiring groups such as the Lockers. But they didn't just copy what they saw. They also added their own techniques, such as popping, and even some gymnastic flips. The Electric Boogaloo performed on Soul Train, a dance show similar to American Bandstand.
Popping is stylistically very similar to locking. The styles are so similar that many people call both dance forms "pop-locking" or "popping and locking," but dancers will tell you it's physically impossible to do both at the same time. In fact, popping is sometimes used to refer to a wide variety of dance styles from the West Coast. But according to Popin' Pete, "There are people who wave and there are people who tut. They're not popping."
- from "Hip-hop Dance," by Audrey DeAngelis and Gina DeAngelis
Inspired by the Jerk, Chubby Checker's Twist, and James Brown's Popcorn, "Boogaloo Sam" Solomon developed the new style he called popping around 1975. Within a year, Boogaloo Sam and his brother, Timothy "Popin' Pete" Solomon, formed a dance group called the Electronic Boogaloo Lockers (later, the Electric Boogaloos). The members of this group had learned how to dance from watching dance shows on television and admiring groups such as the Lockers. But they didn't just copy what they saw. They also added their own techniques, such as popping, and even some gymnastic flips. The Electric Boogaloo performed on Soul Train, a dance show similar to American Bandstand.
Popping is stylistically very similar to locking. The styles are so similar that many people call both dance forms "pop-locking" or "popping and locking," but dancers will tell you it's physically impossible to do both at the same time. In fact, popping is sometimes used to refer to a wide variety of dance styles from the West Coast. But according to Popin' Pete, "There are people who wave and there are people who tut. They're not popping."
- from "Hip-hop Dance," by Audrey DeAngelis and Gina DeAngelis