"i need you alive"
i'm probably not the only one that's been thinking about breakdancing, huh?
here’s a comprehensive list about all the things the following article isn’t:
it isn’t an academic study on the “cultural politics of breaking” nor is it engaging with the “(deterritorialization) of gender in sydney's breakdancing scene: a b-girl's experience of b-boying”
it isn’t knowledgeable about the current, global landscape of breakdancing (outside of the anecdotal experiences of my own two, wandering eyes)
it isn’t studious, deeply aware or even particularly concerned with the history of breakdancing
it isn’t devoid of vulgar language (explicit content warning!)
here’s an exhaustive list about all the things the following article is:
thoughts cobbled together cohesively enough to resemble something like an essay
another piece that is not about film. but it is primarily referring to stuff i’ve watched so… we getting closer to being back!
sweary, a lil longwinded, ranty vibes
ok, enjoy the show!
i discovered “Ray Gunn” through the comedian Kevin Fredericks after seeing his tiktok clowning her:
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if you’ve had the pleasure of living under a rock for the last… however many days this hellscape has been burning: Racheal “Ray Gunn” Gunn is an australian “athlete” currently in the public eye for breakdancing woefully at the 2024 Paris Olympics, the first year the sport’s been recognised on the world stage.
i’m… somewhat sighing as i write this. if you’re a bitter ol’ wokey like me, you’ve probably seen this a dolezallian times before: mid white person takes something Black people pioneered, does it badly and gets flooded with undue attention and opportunities that actual talented Black people aren’t afforded, rah rah, yadda yadda.
that’s the small brain version of what’s got me huffing and puffing. the galaxy brain version is a spaghettified mess of strands that i’m gonna do my best to unravel.
but whilst we’re on the topic of the Olympics, let’s skip the political stuff and keep it light, shall we?
for all my aforementioned rock-dwellers: this is Imane Khelif. she’s a (gold medal olympian) boxer from Algeria who, whilst competing in the Olympic sport of boxing, boxed her italian competitor and knocked the sonic rings out of her. being an officer of the law, Khelif’s opponent, Angela Carini found herself confronted with a level playing field against a person of colour – yikes – and hastily forfeited the match.
but apparently, Imane Khelif hit this dainty, Neapolitan flower so hard that it mobilised an illuminati jerk circle of transphobes to say, “hang on a moment… i know male-on-female abuse when i see it… that Khelif is a man!”
thus, a real rogues gallery of twitter villains vehemently came together and accused Khelif of being a man (or being secretly trans? idk, i didn’t really understand their point through all the rabid frothing) as if she’s been playing some comedically cinematic long game since her childhood to invade the 2024 Olympics. their accusations are ironic as hell when you consider that they’ve been saying for years that one simply can’t just decide to be whatever gender they want to be. yet here comes the motherfucking oestrogen enforcement deciding on the gender of a female athlete off vibes because…? she’s brown and kind of strong? ok.
but Inigo, you handsome fool, this piece is meant to be about breakdancing, why are you bringing this up? *clap clap* focus!
you are right, friendly rock-dweller. lemme land.
sceptics of trans women in sport claim that the concoction of bodily chemicals, hormones, increased muscle density, bodily whatnots, that happen when trans women “experience male puberty” gives them an unfair sports advantage against cis women.
now, i know my limits in this conversation. i’m no biologist and my position on gender in sports doesn’t fucking matter. generally, i believe that sectioning games along gender lines is an inherently archaic system that pre-loads conversations about trans women (because let's be real, this embarrassing convo of “what do we do about trans people in sport?” is always framed as protecting cis women from cunning, horrible dudes who’re pretending to be women, but that fake concern never extends to say, a trans man’s safety in the ring against cis men. didn’t hear anybody worrying about Hergie Bacyadan's welfare. did you?) with so much undue hostility, bad faith and baggage that there’s basically no point having them.
but i want to dwell on a sentiment here: unfair advantage.
watching the Olympics is a bit of a mind-fuck if you have even a crumb of social awareness. you’ll see something like South Africa playing hockey as the camera pans to the South African crowd and it's just… a lagoon of white faces? Or you’ll accidentally switch on dressage and see nothing but europeans trotting about and, to mentally deal with pop of ennui you feel at the fact that you’ll likely never in your lifetime see an African country compete in this hoity-toity display of absurdity that’s considered a sport, your ADHD brain can’t help but recite Mick Jenkins: you ain’t never seen a nigga on a horse? you ain’t seen chief keef new porsche? Or you’ll be chilling and Israel will just pop up out of nowhere. or you hear about how the Brazilian gymnastics team won bronze despite the fact they had to fund themselves because Brazil funnels all its sports resources towards football and we’re just supposed to ignore how fucking sad that is and applaud the team’s effervescent grit and determination.
when athletes like Imane Khelif and Caster Semenya suffer from abuse for their capabilities, those defending them often highlight racialised differences when it comes to appreciating their “natural aptitude”. they will mention the curious case of Micheal Phelps– a white man who is often revered for the fact that he seemed to be genetically engineered to swim.
“some people are just biologically advantaged”
man… i don’t give a fuck about none of that shit.
if the Olympics reveal anything—it's that there’s a whole bag of motherfuckers who are situationally advantaged. all this undue hyper-individualistic focus on the biological advantages some have in sport, while we live in a world where forcefully underdeveloped countries are probably sitting on Simone Biles level talent that they don’t have robust enough infrastructure to nurture. point out that the real unfairness is quite obviously political/economical and you’ll probably be told that you gotta just charge it to the game. damn right idgaf about no biological advantages! Great Britain won the third highest number of medals in THE ENTIRE WORLD. you tryna tell me this tiny bundle of islands has a supernatural concentration of naturally athletic prowess? Or maybe, historically holding ⅓ of the world hostage, pillaging your way into global domination and shaping the planet in your fucked up image has long-lasting effects on the sports infrastructure you can provide and the talent you can mine whenever you wanna flex every 4 years.
which brings me back to Racheal Gunn (i am not entertaining her pseudonym, we can holster that one).
(also, this is where my disclaimer starts to come into play because fam, i am not giving this topic the effort of a properly researched essay. i refuse to squander any google search bar real estate on researching her, let alone give her the honour of a full-blown ADHD rabbithole. so we’ll keep it chatty.)
how does someone like Racheal Gunn get to the Olympics? well, i saw a thread that explained how Rachael Gunn’s husband was appointed to a committee of breakdancing in Australia. its newness as an event meant that there was no official infrastructure in place and where there’s a opportunity – who best to fill in the void but mediocre whiteness? thus – Racheal Gunn becomes the goofy face of breakdancing in 2024, ascent by situational advantage. this could be how it happened, some other odd set of circumstances: the craziest thing is… i don’t even care.
i care. but i don’t? i’ll explain.
i’m not going to pretend that i’m suddenly an avid fan of breakdancing. breakdancing is something that stopped being “cool” a long time ago. outside of a nostalgia kick, if you said to any of the mandem that you breakdance, they’re most likely gonna be like, "lol okay bro". not a totally clownable offence but definitely in the “go do a windmill then, bruv” camp of corn.
note: “cool” is a word with many faces.
Blackness imbues a lot of shit that we do with a spiritual level of coolness. all our cultural productions are pretty "cool" in an omnipresent, ancestral sense. you can look back on archive footage of Lindy Hop and see somebody’s great grandma proper hitting that shit. but when Jonathan Majors dances like that to Kendrick Lamar’s not like us… it looks weird af! so we clown! because he’s cutting shapes like it’s the 1940’s.
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Breakdancing is cool and was also cool once because Black coolness meanders through space and time.
“cool” is often a fixed window in time because Blackness has its own circadian rhythm. we live in a sense of flow; discovering, undiscovering, rediscovering new ways to express our lived reality. so sometimes what we make plants its feet and grows into a staple. sometimes just they die. and they don’t die the same way as other things that have died. so some of us cling to them and cry. but most of us just let them go. but even when we let them go, they are kept in the collectively-understood museum of coolness, sometimes repurposed as an homage to yesteryear, but almost always held in regard within some intangible, spirit realm of Black expression.
jazz, in its golden era, was received as vulgar, unsophisticated devil music by most white audiences. for reasons a cultural/jazz historian would be able to illuminate better than I ever could, jazz fell out of favour in the Black community and by 2014 you get the oscar-winning Whiplash, a film that treats the genre in this bizarrely regimented way akin to military drilling that feels at odds with the genre’s very spirit.
"Not my tempo" betrays a lot of what I know about jazz, what I feel about jazz.
things stop being cool to Black people. and often, a frankensteinian process of colonial extrapolation begins to happen. once in our graveyards, the sophistication of our stuff is suddenly recognised, the complexity of it is acknowledged institutionally and it is watered down, misunderstood, removed from its social and political context, generally bastardised, becoming this gross construct that just doesn't make sense to any Black person with even a sliver of knowledge about its original form.
*cough, cough Hamilton*
contrary to what you think i may be getting at – i actually don't yearn for the brilliance of our cultural productions to be recognised by white or nonBlack people out the gate. i don’t want them to get on board straight away, or rather, i don’t care if they do or they don’t. what i actually yearn for is the opposite.
there’s been this eerie resurgence of breakdancing which, i assume, is part of a larger, growing movement of hip-hop dancing generally that i’ve seen sweeping across europe and asia. if i’m indulging in a spot of light doomscrolling, sometimes i’ll see a sauceless video of nonBlack people throwing their entire bodies and facial expressions into krumping or some shit whilst a crowd of mostly beige faces gas them up. or I'll see a nigga hitting that shit, lit, but i’ll catch the presence of the same unmelanated audience and i can't help but think it looks like a live-streamed minstrel show. but okay, cool. i’m tryna do better when it comes yum-yucking (yuck-yumming?)
but breakdancing… died, man. and it should stay dead.
who decides what lives and dies? what about all the breakdancers who are actually good, who are making a living from these competitions, from the olympics? what about them? their jobs? their livelihoods? and who are you, a Black brit with no cultural lineage to hip hop culture beyond an avid enthusiast, to say what’s dead?
obv quite tongue-in-cheek but there’s so much to say about today’s creative landscape; the confusingness of our current culture, how it's producing this weird inability to tell if things were better before or whether they’re just hollow now (it’s both, btw).
my belief can basically be reduced to this: in the age of the internet, nothing dies.
or rather, nothing is allowed to die.
usually, when our things fall out of style, they’re memorialised as artistic monuments, remembered as fond, nostalgic eras, recognised as fleeting creations made beautiful by their ephemerality. we move on. Black Circadian Rhythm.
plainly put, breakdancing shouldn’t be an Olympic sport. breakdancing is something that should be dead, enjoyed quietly in the pockets dimensions where it is honoured, like when I bang Alice Coltrane’s Turiya and Ramakrishna for the one thousandth time as I swan around the kitchen making star-anise + cardamom spiced carrot purée to go with my smoked garlic fondant potatoes and szechaun pepper roasted duck breast… or something. but like so many other stuff that shouldn’t be alive anymore, breakdancing is just roaming around, reanimated, exploited by actors far divorced from its original conception. i see gross constructs like this all the time now. every time i stumble across another, i wince and feel cold. i acknowledge what i’m seeing is mechanically good. pristine even. but it’s dead behind the eyes. its soul vacated long ago.
the thing that breaks my heart about Racheal Gunn is that she is the unremarkable and logical end product of not adhering to the Black Circadian Rhythm, emblematic of a world that does everything its power to snuff out our life but refuses to let us die in peace, that cannot bring itself to honour our remains, that will desecrate the bodies of our work for good measure.
i’m sure there are b-boys and b-girls out there who honour the tradition and spirit of breaking, are fantastic at it, they maybe even say to themselves, “i have to be twice as good to get half as respected in this community”. i hope those people refused to go to the Olympics.
"(the aesthetic sociality of Blackness) cannot be owned but it can be stolen."
—Fred Moten
the construct remains gross because it shouldn’t have been allowed to grow along this trajectory, inevitably paving the way for Rachael Gunn to half-ass her way into 15 minutes of fame, stinking up the gaff with with less-than-zero skill on Jimmy Fallon, awkwardly-limb-dancing on the grave of an art-form who’s zombification has been, in part, made flesh by nonBlack POC who’ve used the medium of breakdancing as a self-aggrandisement mechanism; a way to shimmy closer in proximity to the coolness that Blackness so often oozes naturally.
and maybe that’s fine, you know? maybe that’s the price of being innovators of coolness. but what i truly yearn for is respect when our things die. for them to be left dead and moved tf on from. i yearn to not worry about the robbing of their graves. you missed it, bro. and we’ll innovate again. maybe, you'll get to be slim shady LP era eminem, if you're good enough, respectful enough, diligent enough. or maybe you’ll be ian. or maybe you'll miss the next wave, too. maybe, you’ll have to wait until the next sleep cycle, idk. idgaf.
i'm just tired of seeing zombies all the fucking time.
we can’t tell whether things were better when we were younger or whether everything is soulless now because we are walking around with unnatural zombies everywhere.
and the saddest thing is: the Black Circadian Rhythm is the most natural thing in the world.
this planet is wheezing because it resists the rhythmic clock that the Black Circadian Rhythm is inherently wound to. this society doesn’t let things rest, it doesn’t let power be toppled, it doesn’t let old worlds crumble, it doesn’t circulate, reimagine, reinnovate. it wants shine and newness always, to use endlessly, it craves immortality. it wants wealth to defy the laws of physics, to keep flooding upwards. it wants to defy nature, conquer it even, as if it can be a god separate from nature, never acknowledging the beauty of bending nature to its whim or, even better, bending with it. its excessiveness is never satiated. “how can we make money from this?” “how can we profit from this?” “how can we exploit this?”
but so much of the Black Circadian Rhythm is doing shit just because. and then getting really good at it for no reason. then becoming immeasurably good at it. then moving on, hopefully with grace, and allowing for the next thing to come along, guiding it if you’re that way inclined. but for that to happen, you have to let things die with honour.
Of Further Interest: Hanif Abdurraqib & Fred Moten - "Building a Stairway to Get Us Closer to Something Beyond this Place"