Crip Walk
The crip walk , also known as the C-walk , is an American dance style . The Crip-Walk originated from gang life in Los Angeles in the 1980s and only became suitable for the media in the late 1990s. It began as a symbolic ritual dance through which members of different gangs communicated with one another and developed into a firmly established dance style of American hip hop by the late 1990s .
history
The Crip-Walk was developed from a gesture by members of the Crips , one of the two main gangs of African-American youth gangs in Los Angeles. These "wrote" letters with their feet, mostly their names, or typical terms of the gang scene. The name of the opposing gang, the Bloods , was also shown in this way and then crossed out. The steps became popular for the first time through rapper WC , who performed the crip walk on stage in front of the cameras. Even Snoop Dogg dancing in the video for his single Drop It Like It's Hot in this step sequences. Rappers with gang connections would say that the C-Walk is not a dance, but a way of showing the connection to the respective Crip gang.
The Blood-Gangs or Bloods, however, have developed an optically practically identical gait / dance, which is accordingly referred to as a "Blood Walk". So the C-Walk is not limited to the Crips, nor are popular rap artists with Blood origins or connections, such as Mack 10 of Westside Connection , who is a member of the Queen Street Bloods in LA, or Kurupt , of connections both to Bloods and Crips, dance the Crip- / Blood-Walk or show it off in their videos and appearances. Examples are tour appearances by Westside Connection or Kurupt's videos for songs like Who Ride with Us and C-Walk .
C-Walk styles
There are roughly four C-Walk styles:
- Originally practiced crip walk is as OG crip walk (OG stands for O riginal G angsta) or short OG referred, which are distinguished mainly by chilled out music and the overwhelming performance of the basic step, the V-Step , features.
- The OS crip walk (OS stands for O ld S chool) or shortly OS is a modification of the OG. This style mainly contains "hops" (the steps are "jumped") because the music is usually faster than on the upper floor.
- The modern version of the cripwalk, the so-called club version, is the clown walk , in which additional dance steps were added. The clown walk formed the basis of the clowning known today , whereby the clowning represents more of an attitude towards life and has nothing to do with the original OG walk. Clowning has the basis in the cripwalk over several corners, but it distances itself from the "gait formation and movement". So you can see it as a positive counterpart to negative gang life. The term clowning is also used in the C-Walk scene as a short form for the clown walk, which, however, cannot be compared with the clowning itself, since the clown walk often only expresses the legs.
- The latest variant of the C-Walk is crowning , which is also called laid back clowning (in German, for example, “relaxed clowning”). It's a mixture of the new clowning and the old crip walk. The speed of the music is based on the OS, but the steps on the clown walk.
The different styles emerged later from the original Cripwalk and influenced each other (also retrospectively).
Videos
- C-Walk Vol. 1 , documentary, Unda Dog Records & Films 2002.
literature
- Christoph Eisemann: C Walk on YouTube : Social space construction, appropriation and development in a digital youth culture (= digital culture and communication , Volume 3), Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2015, ISBN 978-3-658-06428-0 (dissertation Pädagogische Hochschule Ludwigsburg 2013 , 349 pages).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Richard Thomas: A new dialogue ( Memento of the original from January 8, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , 2006 European Workshop on Design & Semantics of Form & Movement on October 26, 2006 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, page 12, PDF
