Popping’s most popular origin story credits the genre’s creation to Fresno’s Sam Solomon, aka, Boogaloo Sam. Origin stories are tricky on the one hand they provide an easily digestible narrative that pinpoints a specific starting point on the other hand, however, they often over-simplify complex histories or otherwise obscure conflicting details and alternative origins. By the time kids in Kenosha, Wisconsin marveled at Pop N’ Taco’s spastic, yet simultaneously fluid, dance routines in the film “Breakin’” or even Michael Jackson’s flawless execution of the backslide 3 during his “Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever” performance, they were bearing witness to a dance whose kinetic genealogy was rooted not in the Bronx or Hollywood, but in Fresno. ![]() Historian Robert Farris Thompson describes popping as: “rhythmic angulations of the torso and limbs executed at a moderate tempo if one is poppin’ or very fast if one is tickin’.” 1 Pioneering popper, Timothy Solomon aka Pop’in Pete offers a more direct definition when he says popping is “hittin’ your joints, hittin’ hard with your leg, your neck, your head.” 2 Contemporary popping encompasses a range of movements, steps and styles including boogaloo, animation, ticking, strutting, roboting, strobing, tutting to name a few the common denominator in these styles is the fluid “popping” or “htting” of the joints and muscles. However, these various attempts to popularize and commodify breakdancing typically missed a crucial point, namely, that breakdancing was actually an amalgam of various dance styles, each with their own distinct histories and geographic contexts. In the ensuing breakdancing craze that spread across the nation, morning news show profile pieces, suburban dance studios and even an episode of the sitcom “Silver Spoons,” similarly depicted breakdancing as a unified dance genre no different than the waltz or the tango. However, even when Breaksploitation films depicted authentic representations of popping (which they did not always do), they created the impression that popping was simply a particular set of steps under the broader breakdancing umbrella. “Breaksploitation” films, as they became collectively known, like “Beat Street,” “Breakin’” and “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” featured actual poppers like Bruno “Pop N' Taco” Falcon and Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers showing off the dance’s characteristic pops, ticks, jerks, and spasms. Popping first entered national consciousness on the backs of a series of mid-1980s Hollywood breakdancing films. However, popping is unique because its roots trace back not to quintessential deindustrializing communities like the Bronx or South Los Angles but to the capital of California’s breadbasket, Fresno. Like many street dance styles, popping is a product of working class youth of color making the most of limited resources. At its best, popping is a time-lapsed spasm or a stop-motion convulsion highlighting intricate movements in even the tiniest muscles. As its name suggests, popping is a dance style defined by the popping of one’s muscles and joints.
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