How East Bay B-boy Mooncricket is risking homelessness to give breakers their due.
When Moon Cricket and his crew, the Termites, take over a section of a park in downtown Stockton on Wednesday evenings, they perform a reenactment of the oldest ritual in hip-hop. One kid plugs a vintage boombox into a public outlet, while another unrolls an eight-foot square of linoleum. The six-man, mostly teenaged Termites stretch their legs around the portable dance floor as a DJ mix of crackly old funk emits from the stereo. Then they take turns strutting on the smooth surface, doing head spins, windmills, and other staple moves from break dancing's almost-thirty-year-old unwritten choreography manual.
The only clue that it's not the Bronx in the mid-'70s -- besides the newer models of Adidas on the dancers' feet -- is the presence of a second group of hip-hoppers sitting on a bench at the other end of the park. These four twentysomethings sharing a joint in the shadows clearly take their fashion cues from a far more modern era: Ja Rule videos, most likely. Wrapped in football jerseys, thin gold chains, and crisp black jeans, they're as aloof and sullen as the cool-guy greaser kids in a '50s movie. And they're trying hard not to watch as the Termites land increasingly impressive aerial moves.
Moon Cricket, who at 29 serves as the de facto coach and father figure to the Termites, surveys the two encampments sharing the space: "The bling-blingers," he says, nodding towards the stoned, stony-faced toughs on the far end, "and the B-boys," meaning his crew, which is preparing for a breaking battle that weekend. Two groups sharing the same language -- beats, rhymes, and show-and-prove bravado -- that probably couldn't have much of a conversation. It'd be like fans of Buddy Holly and Slayer sitting down to talk about rock.
Dancing, for the blingers, is what one does casually at clubs, preferably while sipping cognac and spitting game to women. Practicing dancing for a low-stakes competition just seems corny. But to the B-boys, hip-hop is not a spectator sport, and one's legitimacy rests on how well one can perform, be it in a dance, DJ, or MC battle.
Mooncricket, Beto Lopez, is deeply troubled by this gulf separating the new and old schools of hip-hop culture. The problem, as he sees it, is one of education. "Most of the kids who get into hip-hop now do it through the radio and MTV, and have no idea B-boying is where rap music came from," he says later at his Stockton studio. "It's not really their fault -- kids follow the fads and what's in the videos. The problem is that the industry's misrepresenting or just not telling the history. For example, what they're calling hip-hop dance these days are movements that come from breaking, uprocking [breaking's upright counterpart], and popping [uprocking's twitchy cousin] -- they use all of our stuff, but they don't give respect to where it came from. They want to separate it all and claim it as theirs."
Lopez's life mission is to cure this ignorance. He intends to be the first to accurately and completely tell the history of B-boying, which he sees as the earliest manifestation of what we today call hip-hop. Lopez has moved from the East Bay to Stockton, stopped paying his bills, and become intermittently homeless to bankroll, research, shoot, produce, and direct a documentary he's calling The B-Boy Connection. In the nine years he's been at it, he's probably amassed more break-dancing footage than anyone on earth. He says the film -- 90 percent finished and in need of a final infusion of capital -- will be the last word on the origins of the culture that now generates more than a billion dollars annually. "I want the viewer to finish watching my film and say, 'Ah, I finally get it. That's where hip-hop came from.'"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lopez is in an uncommon position to tell the complicated, obscure history of B-boying the right way, because he's not just a filmmaker looking in from the outside -- he's been a dancer for twenty years. Yet he's also not so close to his subject as to skew his presentation. B-boying, which consists of the showy, athletic dance styles of breaking (done on the floor) and uprocking, popping, and electric boogaloo (done standing up), was birthed by New York City blacks and Puerto Ricans in the early '70s. So as a half-black, half-Mexican kid who grew up around the Bay Area and Stockton, Lopez is at once immune to the politics and backbiting rife amongst the pioneering New York B-boys, but also down enough with the culture to gain their trust.
A filmmaker colleague named Israel beat Lopez to the punch by releasing the first documentary on B-boying -- 2002's The Freshest Kids -- but Israel took on breaking's highest-profile dancer, Crazy Legs of the Rock Steady Crew, as an executive producer. As a result, the film veered close to becoming a promotional vehicle for Rock Steady, and many of the originators who weren't tight with the crew were marginalized or omitted from the story altogether.
Lopez, who has amassed more than four hundred hours of interview and competition footage, has taken a hard-nosed approach to ferreting out the truth from the murky and often contradictory folklore that aging NYC B-boys present as their history. Lopez took numerous quasi-pilgrimages deep into the Bronx and Brooklyn looking for forgotten original B-boys, like an anthropologist searching for shamans in the rainforest. Some were in their forties and didn't know breaking had come back, so they were amused to have a camera suddenly thrust in their faces and be plied with questions. As they'd get a gleam in their eyes and start reliving their salad days of battling in the park, Lopez would have trouble discerning which facts had been colored by nostalgia.
So he insisted on proof.
"I'd say to them, 'I don't mean to put you on the spot, I believe you, but can you give me an example?'" he recalls. "And when they do, I'm blown away. They're doing the real uprocking, and these guys are in their mid-forties pulling all these moves no one today has even seen. Or they'd run into their houses and pull out a picture of them battling in '73, and I'd think, 'Oh, snap! Now we're talking; here's documentation.' That's when I started figuring out there were parts of the story that were not being truthfully presented."
The more he poked around, the more he found that the popular mythology about who invented what and when was just that. The outside world found out about B-boying in the early '80s through the movies Breakin', Style Wars, and Wild Style, which presented the New York scene as a break-dancing golden age. But actually, "by the time they were documenting it, B-boying was already dead," Lopez says. "By 1975, the blacks started falling out and the Puerto Ricans came in. By '77, the blacks turned to MC-ing because they saw where the money was."
So when the filmmakers finally got to shooting, Lopez was surprised to discover that they had to scrape around to find breaking crews that were still active. The two they did find -- Rock Steady and the Dynamic Rockers -- still get most of the attention when a magazine or MTV does a special on rap music's beginnings. Lopez learned that these crews were just the tip of the iceberg, however; many of the dancers who came up with breaking's foundational moves were languishing in obscurity.
As Lopez unearthed more, he began meeting resistance from the sacred cows of the scene and "B-boys who claim to be original and are making money because of it, but can't answer certain questions [proving their claims]," he says. "The politics that I'm dealing with is that certain people don't want other people to get their props. Certain people don't want my film to come out at all. Some of the stuff I shot would be life-threatening if I released it. I felt like I was living in a movie when I'd go to New York to film it. But I'm a filmmaker, and it has to be done."
Ultimately, what motivates Lopez is his insistence that hip-hop should tell its story in its own words, using its own mouth. "Whenever MTV does a story on the history of hip-hop, they also talk to historians, not the people who were actually there," he says. "If I don't do this documentary, nobody's going to get to these people. It took me months and months of searching and proving my intentions to get to some of these people. If I don't do it now, in fifty years someone will, and all that will be left will be historians speaking on behalf of these people. These guys have the opportunity to talk for themselves now -- that's why I'm doing this."
As he's giving this interview, Lopez frequently picks up his phone to see if his service has been canceled yet. The other week, his car was towed for unpaid registration. He has almost entirely self-funded The B-boy Connection since he became serious about it nine years ago, but the financial obstacles look insurmountable without outside help. He's had a number of investors play footsie with him, but they just want to throw in enough money to bring the flick to a quick release.
"I've sacrificed too much for this to put it out direct to DVD," he sighs. He says the only proper debut for it is Sundance. "This is not just for the B-boy scene -- this is for the world to see. I want country mothers to see this film. I want everyone who's not part of hip-hop to see it, so they respect B-boying and say, 'I had no idea. I thought Michael Jackson invented those moves.'"
So Lopez finds himself in the classic dilemma of the purist artist: He's not willing to cut the corners that will enable him to get his project finished. "I'm always in and out of a depression with this film," he says. "Every year I go through this -- every time I miss that Sundance [submission] deadline, which is the first of October, I get frustrated, and it seems like I'll never get it out. But then I'll go back to New York for more footage, and everything comes together so well: I'll get an interview from someone no one thought would ever talk on camera. So I know things will work out eventually."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back in the park, the blingers are concentrating intently on their blunt, because it would be uncool to gape at the dancing in front of them. But the Termites are now fully warmed up, and the one who earned the name Moon Cricket -- because of the hyperactive, jumpy way he played basketball as a kid -- is ******* his way through a kinetic history of B-boying on the linoleum.
This is his secret weapon in battles: Lopez has footage of old-schoolers pulling moves that only a handful of middle-aged New Yorkers have ever seen, so he incorporates these lost techniques into his routines. At his age, he focuses considerably less on floor work than the youngest Termites -- sixteen-year-old twins -- and instead uprocks with the vigor of a '70s James Brown, arms jutting over his head and crossing in front of his chest.
The display is hypnotic and impossible not to watch. Soon the once-dour kids across the park are shamelessly taking it all in, pointing and nodding their props when a B-boy manages a stylish spin or freeze. For a moment, the gulf between them is gone, and hip-hop is whole again. This is the flash of unity and recognition Lopez hopes to effect with The B-boy Connection, if he can keep the repo man away long enough to get it made.
eastbayexpress.com | originally published: December 10, 2003
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/issues...l/1/index.html
http://www.recordnet.com/articlelink...122902-l-1.php
Well I just found out that this article on me is on this site that I'm still learning about. From the News article that was did about my film I'm finding out that people are willing to help or want to help but the editor never put my email listed. Also didn't gt my name right. I go by Beto Lopez or Mooncricket. Anyway I'm closer to getting this film done and there are possible investors that want to get involved but I'm now interviewing them before i make my decision on who can help make this film possible in completing it correctly as planned. If any one thinks they can be a part of this project in getting it completed and knows the film industry well please contact me. I have someone working on the site for me taht responded to the article and it will be up soon. Now is the time, the movie coming out by Sony pictures is putting pressure on me because everyone that knows me knows that I have the real story and The movie "You Got Served that is coming out in theaters this month is another fake movie with breaking.
http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/y...ved/index.html
Thank you and God Bless
Mooncricket
[email protected]
--------------------
Mooncricket
--------------------
Mooncricket
