Going Off! The Untold Story of Breaking's Birth

When breaking first emerged in The Bronx, New York, of the 1970s, it was a dance practiced almost exclusively by African American teenagers. Yet, most scholarly accounts of the dance have focused on Latino/a youth and media narratives from the 1980s onwards to contextualize the form. As a result, much like jazz, rock n roll, or disco dancing before it, one can refer to dominant discourse on breaking today and find almost no mention of the African Americans who ushered it in.

I address this invisibilization of breakings African American founders by analyzing the overlooked accounts and experiences of its earliest practitioners from the 1970s. Utilizing a wide array of non-traditional primary sources, untapped archival material, first-hand interviews, and movement analysis, I offer a revisionist account of the social dynamics and systemic factors that led to the creation of breaking as a distinctly working-class African American expression and its subsequent marginalization and misrepresentation in academia.

Given the significant discrepancy between the testimony of pioneering breakers and what has been reproduced in academic writings, I also utilize such testimonies to disrupt prevailing assumptions within the field of hip-hop studies. As part of this process, I emphasize the largely overlooked role breaking played in shaping hip-hops musical development, as well as the impact youth socialization and alternative identity formation had on the cultures emergence. Central to this research is my contention that the non-normative aesthetics and principles of early hip-hop practices were shaped by the underground, working-class dance spaces in which the movement arose, forming part of a broader tradition of cultivating expression within the African American jook continuum.