Why I struggle with commercial hip hop choreography

Firstly, I want to state two things.

1. I struggle picking up commercial choreography. Put me in a class and I will try my best to pick up a 16-32 count combo, but when it comes to remembering and executing right after? Shoot. So, maybe part of my struggle is that I can't actually do it very well.
2. Oddly, I don't struggle with all choreography. When they are more heavily rooted in a specific street dance style, e.g. it's just straight Popping choreo? Oh I do just fine.

A big reason why I started dancing seriously when I was younger was watching crews like Jabbawockeez and Quest Crew on America's Best Dance Crew, or watching various individual dancers on So You Think You Can Dance. And looking back on it, the most memorable parts of the performances I remember were always the highlighted regional styles--the Popping, the Breaking, the Footwork. I remember scenes where they showed different members struggling to pick up the industry-taught choreography, some of whom had to go home because of said struggles.

I remember on my dance team in college, there was a division between the Choreo and Freestyle teams, and I always felt there was something off about the choreography we learned and executed. I couldn't really figure it out till I grew older and experienced the different ways that choreography could look--learning Popping or Chicago Footwork routines at practices, seeing the intricacy of the strutting groups of the 70s and 80s like Demons of the Mind, or even watching new jack swing-era music videos. And the conclusion I came to was that the choreography I was learning in the 2010s (and even what I still see now) seemed largely divorced from the music. What I noticed over time was the choreography I would see in music videos, on tv, in shows, etc. became more about the technical execution of movements, so much so that I would consider it an abstraction.

There was a saying that became popularized as social media burgeoned and people would comment under dance videos: "HE HIT EVERY BEAT!" And generally what this meant was that the dancer displayed a level of musicality such that the average viewer noticed elements of the music that they likely would not have ordinarily. And I think what contemporary (in time, not in terms of the style of dance) commercial hip hop choreography does is it takes this conception of musicality and highlighting accents of the music, and it pushes it to its limits, such that the movements become decontextualized from the music. As such, they are impressive to witness--be it due to their difficulty in execution, their athleticism, or the like--however, it doesn't feel like dancing. It lacks groove, and in my experience, groove is what pulls people in. After all, all of the party dances people know and love--your Cabbage Patches, your Reeboks, your Nae Naes, and so forth? All grooves.

Better said, commercial choreography feels like when you put a bunch of different grooves together into one combination, and you don't take care to make sure that these grooves actually make sense together. And so, when you watch it, you recognize the different movements but they don't feel unified. An amalgamation but not a fusion. And as such I think that's why I struggle with it. It doesn't feel intuitive to me. Older choreographies kept enough of that groove, or they based the choreo on a specific groove, so it felt attainable and understandable. And maybe that's why I do fine with style-specific choreographies like I mentioned above. Because there's a clear groove or set of grooves running through that all work together in tandem. Or maybe it's that the choreography is simpler with older work, so I "get it" faster and more immediately.

I'd liken it to a voice actor who has to adopt a New York accent. They can choose from several of the boroughs, they can choose based on demographics--Italian NYers, Black guys from Harlem--they can choose based on time period, and all of it still makes sense in a "New York" framework. I think commercial choreography is like trying to pick up the accent of someone who is a world traveler, who's lived in all these different places for various periods of time, and they have all of these little intricacies that make sense to them. They use a combination of now-outdated slang in a language they learned when they were young, and they sound conspicuously young in a language they learned relatively recently. And all of this complexity and nuance works for them! But now you have to take what works for them and make it work for a lot of other people, and I feel like what I witness today is the cracks in that process. And those cracks make the whole shebang not particularly enjoyable for me.

Maybe I'm also just old on the inside. Ha!