New York City Breakers

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New York City Breakers is a breakdancing group that was founded in New York in the early 1980s.

The founding was inspired by a battle at Lincoln Center between the Rock Steady Crew and the Dynamic Rockers , which received media attention. In 1982 the crew got the offer to play against the Rock Steady Crew in a club run by Michael Holman . At the time, the New York City Breakers were still called the Floormasters Crew . After this gig, Holman became their manager, and the crew has been called The New York City Breakers ever since.

As early as 1983, the New York City Breakers performed at a large corporate party for the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch . The crew was featured in the 1984 hip-hop television pilot Graffiti Rock , produced and hosted by Holman . The pilot was on a local New York station and focused on hip hop culture. Here also were Shannon and Run-DMC on. In June 1984, 6,000 people gathered in Boston City Hall Plaza to see a performance by the New York City Breakers.

The New York City Breakers were among the main characters in the hip-hop film Beat Street . The appearance at the opening of the 1984 Olympic Games in front of Ronald Reagan can be considered a highlight of the crew's popularity .

In the mid-1980s, the New York City Breakers performed in the Vatican and in front of Norway's royal couple.

Appearances by the New York City Breakers and the Rock Steady Crew on West German television programs ensured a high media presence for breakdance. The fascination was aroused among young people in West and East Germany and is still felt today.

Around 2010 some members of the crew were still active and performed occasionally.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c John G .: The New York City Breakers. In: OldSchoolHipHop.com. August 12, 2010, accessed October 13, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b Kimberley Monteyne: Hip Hop on Film: Performance Culture, Urban Space, and Genre Transformation in the 1980s . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2013, ISBN 978-1-4968-0262-0 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  3. ^ Imani Kai Johnson: Hip-hop dance . In: Justin A. Williams (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop (=  Cambridge Companions to Music ). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2015, ISBN 978-1-107-03746-5 , pp. 26 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  4. ↑ Fahamu Pecou: Whirl trade: The peculiar image of hip hop in the global economies . In: Christopher Malone, George Martinez Jr. (Eds.): The Organic Globalizer: Hip Hop, Political Development, and Movement Culture . Bloomsbury Academic, New York 2015, ISBN 978-1-62892-005-5 , pp. 105 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  5. ^ Leonard Schmieding: Track 5. Breakin 'Around the Bloc: Hip-Hop in the German Democratic Republic . In: Sina A. Nitzsche, Walter Grünzweig (Ed.): Hip-Hop in Europe . Cultural Identities and Transnational Flows (= Kornelia Freitag, Walter Grünzweig, Randi Gunzenhäuser, Martina Pfeiler, Wilfried Raussert, Michael Wala [Eds.]: Transnational and transatlantic American studies . Volume 13 ). LIT Verlag, Vienna / Zurich / Berlin / Münster 2013, ISBN 978-3-643-90413-3 , p. 105 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).