Origin Story

Sim Simma! Who got the keys to my Bimmer? Who am eyeeeeeee?

First and foremost, I wanna say that I have a currently-on-hiatus podcast that details what I'm about to write. Go and give it a listen if you'd like.

Aight so, at the time of writing, I like to say that I've been dancing for 18 years. Realistically, even babies dance so technically I've been dancing all my life. But, I say 18 years cause I feel like age 10 is when the passion was unlocked.

A lot of Black families make it a priority to nurture kids' dancing abilities. Even little cousins will get the "aye" and the "I see you!" affirmations, and in the same breath will be correctively encouraged to "find the beat." I can vaguely remember some of that happening with my family as I grew up, but I wouldn't attribute it as a super primary cause for me getting into dance the way I did.

I remember being at my grandparents' house one day and browsing the TV. They had a different service provider than us, so one of my favorite things to do was to click through all the different channels to see stuff that I didn't often see at home. One of those times Kickin' It Old Skool (2007) was on, and I decided to watch it. The premise is basically this: you have this kid who has an accident on stage during a talent show in the 80s and wakes up from a coma 20 years later. But, because he's still a teen mentally, he wants to try to fulfill his dance dreams again. Or something to that effect.

The movie itself wasn't really that memorable, but I distinctly remember this scene right here:

This was my woah, what am I watching? moment. The shorter guy is an antagonist, for reasons I do not recall, but it's not really about him. It's about two things: the dance and the music. I'll start with the latter.

The song in question is Big Daddy Kane's 1988 record "Set It Off" off the album "Long Live The Kane". Never heard it before that day, but it'll always be stuck in my mind as a bboy record cause of the film. I ended up learning that my dad was a Big Daddy Kane fan back in the day, too, so the song is especially precious due to the cross-generational connection it provided us.

As far as the dance? I don't know who the dancer was that played as ole boy double but aye you did yo thang my dude! Even looking back on it now I can still say that was some nice, clean, skillful breakin. And it was here where I really had my first exposure to what most folks would call breakdance (media term) & what us in the global street dance community would call breakin' (or Bboying/Bgirling.)

Now, you ask yourself, what were my next steps upon seeing this clip? Well, like many, oh so many, dancers did when they first had their primary inspiration experiences, you copy that shit. You don't know what you doing, you don't know how to do it, but damnit that shit was cool and you gone try to do it too. And so copy I did. Later on I would learn that you not really posed to copy outright and just present shit as if you came up with it--we call that biting--but I wasn't versed at all in the etiquette and affairs of the game yet. I just wanted to do cool dances.

And do cool dances I did.