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12 To the Beat V'All: Breaking Is Hard to Do Chico and Tee and their friends from 175th Street in the High Times crew were breaking in the subway and the cops busted them for fighting. "We're not fighting. We're dancing!" they claimed. At the precinct station, one kid demonstrated certain moves: a head spin, ass spin, swipe, chin freeze, "the Helicopter," "the Baby." An officer called in the other members ofthe crew, one by one. "Do a head spin," he would command as he consulted a clipboard full of notes. "Do 'the Baby.''' As each kid complied, performing on cue as unhesitatingly as a ballet dancer might toss off an enchainement, the cops scratched their heads in bewildered defeat. Or so the story goes. But then, like ballet and like great battles (it shares elements of both), breaking is wreathed in legends. "This guy in Queens does a whole bunch ofhead spins in a row, more than ten, he spins, stops real quick, spins...." "Yeah, but he stops. Left just goes right into seven spins, he never stops." "There's a ten-year-old kid on my block learned to break in three days." "The best is Spy, Ronnie Ron, Drago, me [Crazy Legs), Freeze, Mongo, Mr. Freeze, Lace, Track Two, Weevil. ..." "Spy, he's called the man with the thousand moves, he had a girl and he taught her how to break. She did it good. She looked like a guy." "Spy, man, in '78 - he was breaking at Mom and Pop's on Crotona Avenue in the Bronx; he did his footwork so fast you could hardly see his feet." "I saw Spy doing something wild in a garage where all the old-timers used to break. They had a priest judging a contest, and Spy was doing some kind of Indian dance. All of a sudden, he threw himself in the air, his hat Village Voice, April 10, 1981. 121 122 The African-American Connection flew up, he spun on his back, and the hat landed right on his chest. And everyone said, 'That was luck.' So he did it once more for the priest, and the hat landed right on his chest. If I didn't see it, I would never have believed it." The heroes of these legends are the Break Kids, the B-Boys, the Latino and black teenagers who invent and endlessly elaborate this exquisite , heady blend of dancing, acrobatics, and martial spectacle. Like other forms ofghetto street culture - graffiti, verbal dueling, rapping - breaking is a public arena for the flamboyant triumph of virility, wit, and skill. In short, ofstyle. Breaking is a way of using your body to inscribe your identity on streets and trains, in parks and high school gyms. It is a physical version of two favorite modes of street rhetoric, the taunt and the boast. It is a celebration of the flexibility and budding sexuality of the gangly male adolescent body. It is a subjunctive expression ofbodily states, testing things that might be or are not, contrasting masculine vitality with its range of opposites: women, babies, animals; illness and death. It is a way ofclaiming territory and status, for yourselfand for your group, your crew. But most of all, breaking is a competitive display ofphysical and imaginative virtuosity, a codified dance form cum warfare that cracks open to flaunt personal inventiveness. For the current generation of B-Boys, it doesn't really matter that the Breakdown is an old name in Mro-American dance for both rapid, complex footwork and a competitive format. Or that a break in jazz means a soloist's improvised bridge between melodies. For the B-Boys, the history of breaking started six or seven years ago, maybe in the Bronx, maybe in Harlem. It started with the Zulus. Or with Charlie Rock. Or with Joe, from the Casanovas, from the Bronx, who taught it to Charlie Rock. "Breaking means going crazy on the floor. It means making a style for yourself." In Manhattan, kids call it rocking. A dancer in the center ofa ring ofonlookers drops to the floor, circles around his own axis with a flurry ofslashing steps, then spins, flips, gesticulates, and poses in a flood of rhythmic motion and fleeting imagery that prompts the next guy to top him. To burn him, as the B-Boys put it. Fab Five Freddy Love, a graffiti-based artist and rapper from Bedford Stuyvesant, remembers that breaking began around the...

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