Hip-hop dance as seen today is a broad category that incorporates a variety of old and new urban dance styles. The older styles that were created in the 1970s include uprock, breaking, and the funk styles. These dance styles all started independent of each other, half of them in New York and the others in California. Uprock was created in Brooklyn, N.Y. and breaking was created in The Bronx. In its earliest form, breaking began as elaborations on James Brown's Good Foot" dance which came out in 1972. Breaking at this stage was not primarily floor oriented as is seen today; it started out as toprock which is performed standing up. In 1973, DJ Kook Herc invented the breakbeat. A breakbeat is a rhythmic musical interlude of a song that has been looped over and over again to extend that instrumental solo. Kool Herc did this to provide a means for dancers who attended his parties to show their skills. B-boy and b-girl stands for "break-boy" and "break-girl"; b-boys/b-girls dance to the break of a record. Another influence on toprock was uprock. Uprock looks similar to toprock but it is more aggressive and is meant look like a fight. Unlike toprock, uprock was not performed to break beats. The song was played from start to finish. Also, uprocking is done with partners but in breaking each person takes turns dancing. Further influenced by gymnastics and martial arts, breaking went from being a purely upright dance style—toprock only—to becoming more floor oriented.
The funk styles refers to several street dance styles created in California in the 1970s that were danced to funk music. These styles include roboting, bopping, hitting, locking, bustin', popping, electric boogaloo, strutting, sac-ing, dime-stopping, etc. Similar to breaking, James Brown also had a big impact on the boogaloo style of dance. One of Sam Solomon's inspirations for creating boogaloo was James Brown's dance "the popcorn" and the name of the dance was taken from the title of the James Brown song "Do the Boogaloo". The most popular and widely practiced of the funk styles are locking and popping. Locking is the older of the two and was created by Don Campbell in the late 1960s. Popping was created by Sam Solomon in the 1970s. The 1980s media incorrectly brought these styles under the "breakdance"/"breakdancing" label causing a confusion about their origin. They were created on the west coast separate from breaking and came out of the funk cultural movement rather than from the hip-hop cultural movement. The television show, Soul Train, helped to spread locking and popping's popularity. Both The Lockers and the Electric Boogaloos—dance crews responsible for the spread of locking and popping—performed on this show. Today, the funk styles are now performed to both hip-hop and funk music.
