You Can't Kill Breaking Because Breaking WON'T DIE!!

The reactions on social media to the debut of Breaking in the 2024 Paris Olympics illuminate that a Breaker’s struggle for integrity outside and inside their culture continues. In real-time, we’re witnessing how the dance makes it center stage, only to be belittled by the mainstream. Critics in the industry are so quick to denigrate a dance that’s responsible for setting in motion documentaries, Hollywood films, advertisements, etc., centered around Hip-Hop culture.

Breaking, and subsequently, the B-Boys and B-Girls that make up the dance, always existed as a counter-culture. The dance was never FULLY welcomed in Hip-Hop. Coincidentally, the term “Hip-Hop” itself was a derogatory label used to describe the very dance that inspired DJs like Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash to extend “the broken part” of a record, “Man get outta here with that hippity hoppity shit!” – Grandmixer D.St (1st generation breaker).

So, what happens when the 2024 Olympics shines its spotlight on the millennial and zoomer generations of B-Boys and B-Girls? Social media users who haven’t accomplished one meaningful thing in their lives take to Instagram, X, FB, and TikTok to mock, satirize, parody, ridicule, and make jokes about the element of hip-hop responsible for introducing our culture to the world.

To the influencers, podcasters, radio personalities, Rap music pundits, “journalists,” rappers, DJs, and social media users who think they’re somebody on the web but are nobody in the real world, using their profiles to highlight what went wrong with Breaking in the 2024 Paris Olympics and asking loaded questions like “Did y’all enjoy Breaking at the Olympics?” FUCK YOU! To the B-Boys and B-Girls throughout the globe who’ve fought harder than any Rapper or DJ for relevance over the last 51 years and might find themselves questioning whether it’s worth sacrificing your bodies to preserve Hip-Hop’s most influential dance for future generations because of the disrespect we’re seeing from people on social media, FUCK THEM!

All I’m asserting is that B-Boys and B-Girls should have been celebrated after the wake of the Olympics. Especially considering the determinants behind the dance’s creativity is one’s body. It’s not a laptop running a DJ app lip-syncing or artificial intelligence. What we saw from the competitors in this year’s Breaking Olympics category wasn’t a novelty; it was human innovation and should be revered instead of mocked.

Ultimately, Breaking might not have been built for public acceptance, but it was made to last and this weekend symbolized the fact that it’s the only Hip-Hop element with the potential to shine brighter than the genre itself in spite of the non-support it receives from so-called “Hip-Hop heads” and the casual fan that doesn’t know shit.

I’m hearing the Los Angeles program for the 2028 Olympics will drop Breaking from its rotation, which is a blessing in disguise because I don’t feel a dance that was cultivated in tenement building hallways and ghetto parks can sustain itself in the glare of the public before peons whose claim to fame is “owning” a social media profile start tearing the dance down.