Getting Off: Portrayals of Masculinity in Hip Hop Dance in Film

Extract

Imagine you are fourteen years old. You are standing outside a general store with a group of friends. Some are chatting. Others are licking the drips off of melting popsicles. Suddenly, one starts the voice beat, a syncopated scattering of long and short huffs deep in his throat. You stop, turn, and begin to bob your head to the beat. Others chime in with claps, back beats, and “uh-huh's” and “oh-yeah's.” Someone takes a small cardboard floor mat from under his arm and sets it on the concrete sidewalk. You begin to congregate in a circle around the board. A few kids run over from across the street and add their faces to the anxious crowd. You wait for the first fighter to take the ring.

For B-boys and B-girls in the South Bronx in the early 1980s, this type of event was common. This cardboard square became a haven for self-expression and hope, a source of life. Within these rings of familiar faces, young black and Latino teenagers, almost exclusively male, used breakdance—in Nelson George's words “a serious game, a form of urban vernacular dance” (George 1985, 83)—to earn respect and authority in a neighborhood that provoked feelings of insignificance and hopelessness. Hip hop dance, George continues, “symbolizes hope for the future…. As Fab Five Freddy puts it…what's at stake is a guy's honor and his position in the street. Which is all you have. That's what makes it so important, that's what makes it feel so good” (George 1985, 111). For male teenagers growing up in poor, dangerous neighborhoods, the desire to become someone, to overcome and make it out as a somebody is a powerful drive.

Bronx teenagers found their voices through their bodies. They built up and perfected a large vocabulary of hip hop moves to communicate a wide variety of emotions and messages. Each move merged with the next to create a fluid, poetic language. From the inception of the hip hop culture, and persisting through its various eras—”Old School to the New School through gangsta rap to the latest innovators” (Bing 1998, 58)—hip hop dance has provided the arena for the expression and affirmation of masculinity. Built into this artistry is competition and domination, sexuality and libido, and hero worship.