Popping is an art form consisting of floating, ticking, wave movements, and mimickery,
combined, separate, or pieced together, giving a cartoonist or robotic illusion while dancing.
From creating visual effects like frame-by-frame motion to appearing as though you hover above
the ground on a pillow of air, popping has the potential to be as technically difficult as any other
style of dance. Although the physical aspect of it doesn't get as strenuous as pulling of a flare to
1990 to headspin finishing with a tweaked out freeze, popping like b-boying is without a doubt
hip hop.
The thing which I think has hurt popping the most, making it seem even to someone such as
myself that loves the dance, is the lack of originality. It seems as though every self-proclaimed
"popper" or "locker" I see out there live on video, is just Xeroxing the movements they've seen
done. At one party I saw a girl do nothing but combinations of moves she must have obviously
picked up watching Animation and RE do their thing at Radiotron. If people want to be poppers
or rappers or whatever, they need to quit biting and come up with their own stuff. It is one thing
to watch somebody and get a feel of what this whole thing is about, but to steal an entire series of
ideas and then bust them publicly as your own, is just dancing's way of
plagiarizing.
Somebody not in to the scene might point out that dancing is dancing and nobody has a patent on
any movement, but try to go out and bust the moonwalk and have people not think you've
watched a Michael Jackson flick or two. The point is it's a way to express yourself and as we are
all unique individuals, we can express ourselves in uniquely individual ways. Even within my own
crew, stealing one another's ideas is something that just is not
done.
As far as an addition to the glossary, I would want "chain reactions" in there, as one of the doper
styles that has caught my eye that most people I talk to don't really notice. The definition I would
write would read "A series of organized movements done forward and backward having a
robotics illusion, obviously being a memorized pattern". To that I would add "freestyle chain
reactions", being those "Chain Reactions created on the beat, normally shorter than a rehearsed
one".
Peace Out,
Jigsaw of C.O.T.A