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As its name suggests, popping is a dance style defined by the popping of one's muscles and joints. At its best, popping is a time-lapsed spasm or a stop-motion convulsion highlighting intricate movements in even the tiniest muscles. Like many street dance styles, popping is a product of working class youth of color making the most of limited resources. 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.
Popping first entered national consciousness on the backs of a series of mid-1980s Hollywood breakdancing films. 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. 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. 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, 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. Popping was one such dance style.
Many American's first introduction to popping came from Breaksploitation films like 1984's Breakin' which featured Bruno Pop N Taco Falcon, a dancer who trained under Boogaloo Sam and Pop'in Pete.
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. 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 backslide3 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.
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. Popping's most popular origin story credits the genre's creation to Fresno's Sam Solomon, aka, Boogaloo Sam. In this version of the dance's origin story, popping's characteristic rhythmic angulations were rooted in the holy ghost-inspired spasms and contortions exhibited by sanctified women that Sam encountered at Fresno's First Corinthians Baptist church.4 By 1975, Sam began constructing secular interpretations of these divine movements which he shared first with other Fresno dancers and eventually with his brother, Pop'in Pete, who had moved south to Long Beach.5
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A competing origin story traces popping back to Fresno's Tulare housing project where William Green Jr., aka Tick'n Will and Ricky Darnell McDowell developed foundational popping moves like the old man, the twist-o flex and the neck-o flex over the course of numerous weed-fueled dance sessions held in their respective apartments. Will and Darnell eventually met Sam Solomon at Fresno's Roeding Park in 1976 while practicing their unique dance moves; immediately impressed by their talent, Sam invited Will and Darnell to join a dance group he was forming. The newly constituted Electric Boogaloo Lockers perfected their routines during practices at the Mary Ella Brown Community Center, and created local buzz while performing at talent shows, the Fresno County fair and eventually shows further away from home in San Jose and Sacramento. The last piece of this origin story puzzle came when Sam moved down to Long Beach where he taught the new dance that Will, Darnell, and he developed to the aforementioned Pop'in Pete who then joined the group and helped further polish their routines.6
While these differing creation stories offer conflicting takes on the precise moment of popping's birth, they have an important commonality; namely, a focus on Fresno community institutions. Both accounts specifically feature institutions from the city's economically depressed and largely segregated, west end. The centrality of the First Corinthians Baptist Church, the Tulare housing project and the Mary Ella Brown Community Center, all highlight the fact that Fresno's west end was an important player in popping's evolution.
Boogaloo Sam and his Electric Boogaloo lockers practiced their early routines at the Mary Ella Brown Community Center in west Fresno. | Image: Sean Slusser
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