Breaking began in the Bronx before studios sold new style
Hip-hop dance covers street styles born with 1970s U.S. crews and later studio versions. Soul Train and films such as Breakin’, Beat Street, and Wild Style broadcast early crews. Breaking grew in the South Bronx; California funk styles such as locking and popping travelled beside it.
Breaking started as elaborations of James Brown’s 1972 Good Foot dance and was not yet the floor-heavy form later audiences expect. Afrika Bambaataa counted breaking among hip-hop’s pillars with MCing, DJing, graffiti, and knowledge. Battles unfold in cyphers—circles of watchers—or Apache Lines between crews. Scholars such as Moncell Durden argue that, historically, only breaking and related social dances are hip-hop proper; media folded funk styles into the brand.
Locking, first called Campbellocking, was created in 1969 in Los Angeles by Don Campbell and popularised by The Lockers, including Toni Basil. Dancers freeze in locks, then move again. Popping rose in Fresno in the 1970s with Samuel Solomon’s Electric Boogaloos, jerking muscles into pops or hits after Oakland boogaloo roots. Party fads—Roger Rabbit, Cabbage Patch, Worm, later Humpty and Running Man—fed social dancing in the 1980s and 1990s.
Studios answered with commercial new style and jazz-funk so trained dancers could set street material for class and stage. Television and film from The Grind and Planet B-Boy through America’s Best Dance Crew and Step Up carried the look worldwide, while contests such as World of Dance and Hip Hop International kept competitive circuits alive.
California's funk styles were a whole family rather than two famous moves. Roboting, bopping, hitting, bustin', boogaloo, strutting, sac-ing and dime-stopping all took shape there in the 1970s alongside locking and popping, which is why Durden's narrower definition unsettles later marketing. Casual viewers often mix up locking and popping, but a locker holds each position longer, snapping into a sudden pause before moving on. The screen boom of the 1990s and 2000s also included Rize, StreetDance 3D, Saigon Electric and the web series The LXD, and those broadcasts carried the dance well beyond the United States.
Source: Hip-hop dance
