Miami & Ft. Lauderdale's Locking & Popping History

Since Day One
Miami

& Ft. Lauderdale's Funk Styles History

            My name is Aquaboogy, and I belong to a generation of Poppers & Lockers that hail from South Florida, specifically Miami & Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. This small peninsula has produced as much talent in both the music and the dance world, yet I feel it’s seldom acknowledged. The purpose of this report is to inform the world, and South Florida, of its rich and vast history in Funk Styles (i.e. Locking & Popping) so that we shall be unanimously held as a pillar of this culture and its coinciding art forms.

            I am 42 years old. I grew up in the 70's & 80’s. I was a kid when I first learned about Popping, Breaking & Locking. I had some of my terminology wrong, like many people. I used to call Locking…Body Rocking…named after a movie I remember seeing. I had the correct term of Popping (I was taught by a school friend) and Breaking, I watched all the movies as a kid and loved shows like Soul Train, Solid Gold Hits. I loved groups like Captain Crunch & The Funky Bunch, The Electric Boogaloos, Rock Steady Crew, New York City Breakers…these were legends for me. We watched Street Dance come from the streets, clubs, to national television, movies and in front of our nation’s leaders (i.e. NYC Breakers performing for Ronald Reagon) this culture was so amazing to me.

            Then I remember watching “What’s Happening” and trying to mimic Rerun (aka Penguin from the Lockers), enthralled by the funkiness. Michael Jackson, Prince, P-Funk, Afrikka Bambata, it was a legendary time in music and Street Dance. I remember watching Poppin’ Taco, Poppin’ Pete, Shrimp & Shabadoo in Breaking, it was a magical time for a kid growing up in Miami, with Street Dance and Hip Hop all around him.

I grew up in Hialeah & Carol City, two neighborhoods with more emphasis on hood that neighbors; so these activities were cherished avenues that steered us away from trouble. I had mastered my arm as a kid in Elementary, after watching the movie Breaking. I was attempting to Robot and Pop. But, these hobbies were replaced by others as I grew up due to my religious ministry family's disapproval of the Hip Hop music and dance culture and also because popular styles changed. I remember rocking my Cross Colors suit one day, looking at my friend’s high-top fade saying, damn things have changed since the times of Parachute Pants, Kangaroos, Adidas suits with Shell Toes and fat laces. I changed with change and so did my dancing, until the 90’s arrived and it all came back full circle.

            Let me stop you here, for as I was involved in these school party scenes, I would catch murmurs of bygone dancers, stories of dancers that older folks used to pass on to us. But I never witnessed them first hand, for I was too young and too involved in my own world. I would not learn of these pioneers until much later on.

Back to the 90’s, the Rave Scene brought me back to dancing and pulled me away from a life with gangs in high school. It introduced me to massive arenas, audiences for me to hone my craft. It was 1993 when I was hooked again into dancing, music, and consequently, an exhausting life of parties. It was not long before it brought back the little Locking, Popping &Waving I used to mess around with as a kid, and I began a new quest to learn the arts I cherished so much.

These wild circles in nightclubs like “The Edge” in Ft. Lauderdale, The Fever Parties in South Beach’s Diamonte & War Saw, were defining moments for me as a dancer. It was a time in the early 90’s when dance had no rules. You would battle all kinds of dancers back then…it was not genre based.

As I started learning names of styles, I began seeing the differences of an ever-evolving culture in dance within the Rave scene. But while many cats began redefining styles like Waving, evolving new approaches based on the new techno music of the times, (which I did for many years) the newer labels like Liquid (and who remembers the French guys and their Wave-Dancing of the early 2000’s) did not win me over. I decided to go back to the 70’s & 80’s, to search for the real Funk again. And the search has led me to today, where now I sit back and remember the decades involving my love for Street Dance. Now that I got my little story out of the way (I felt compelled to do so to establish an understanding of my personal history) let’s get to the meat and potatoes of this prose.

Dancers that are 10-20 years older than me have educated me in a bit of South Florida history I would like to share. While Breaking History is well documented in Miami through events like Bboy Masters Pro Am, not much is known of our history, the Poppers & Lockers.

Locking in the 70’s

            There were two predominant races in the first generations of Street Dance down here: Blacks & Hispanics. Caucasians, Asians (& other Races) were involved, but as a minority down here. I only mention this for you to understand the Caribbean flavor that affected our dancing in South Florida. It’s a very tropical place, filled with a myriad of flavors and spices that is personified in our dance. So we’ve always had our own style even though we were doing a West Coast dance.

Miami had some amazing Locking crews back in the early 70’s. Mighty Tiny aka The Disco Kid (now known as Kid Dynamo) was introduced to Locking in the late 60’s by watching Don Campbell on Soul Train. He began Locking in Miami and he was thrilled to see that a Locking scene had blossomed. Dynamo later was recruited by his cousin and they began a crew called the Warlocks. They were known for their flashy suits and even flashier dance routines. Kid Dynamo and his cousin also did routines on roller skates, a big hit back in the day in South Beach. Dynamo later moved to New York and was heavily involved in professional dancing and Disco competitions in the 80's – representing Locking to its fullest.

Then you had another legendary crew called: The Ghetto Dancers. Whose leader, an OG Locker by the name of Sport, began terrorizing nightclubs from Miami to Ft. Lauderdale. I was told of legendary confrontations on the dance floor (to live funk bands in those days) where the Warlocks went up against the Ghetto Dancers in South Beach nightclubs. I could sadly only imagine!

Kid Dynamo left Miami and moved to Puerto Rico in 1979.  With his cousin, he helped pioneer the Locking (& Street Dance scene) in the island paradise in the 1980’s.

The Warlocks, South Beach, 1974

While Sport’s crew, The Ghetto dancers later became known as the legendary “The Amazing Wizards” the same year.

The Amazing Wizards, led by Terry Elliot (aka Terry-T) had dancers like Rico, Sport, Peanut & other lively Lockers. Terry T began Locking in 1978 at a ripe age, but later became the leader of Florida’s elite group of Lockers, some that had been Locking since the Ghetto Dancer’s time a decade earlier.

It is fair to mention that there were numerous legends of other dancers like Dancing Sam, Sand Man, Lockers that are too many to mention in this article (& forgive me if I didn’t mention you). But it was the Amazing Wizards that attracted the attention of Jeff Countach (The Lockers, Dancing Machine) and went on a world tour. The first Street Dancers that reached international notoriety from South Florida were Lockers! So our early history is filled with many Locking & Popping OG’s!

  

                                                    Gumby, Sport, Peanut, Aquaboogy, Terry T, Rico, Kid Dynamo

                                                                      (Boogie Squad & The Amazing Wizards)

Popping in the 80’s

            Now while Miami had some incredible Lockers, Ft. Lauderdale started buzzing with a new generation of dancers in the early 80’s. Popping, and its many sub-styles, erupted hard in Ft. Lauderdale hoods. On the top of this movement was Timothy Johnson (otherwise known as) Mechanical Master.  Mechanical had legendary battles with the Amazing Wizards as a new clash of styles occurred, Robot, Waving & Poppin versus Locking. These legendary foes went to the floor in battles that filled my head with exciting recounts of epic moments in Ft. Lauderdale nightclubs, battling for shoes, money or just a name. Mechanical began taking his animated styles to nightclubs and dance competitions up and down the peninsula, eventually landing him in Los Angeles, where he further evolved his Popping style and was the first Popper that battled nationally.

                                                Timothy Johnson (Mechanical Master)

Mechanical Master was an icon of the 80’s Ft. Lauderdale dance scene, like Terry T & the Amazing Wizards were icons of Miami. These legendary dancers lost contact with the dance scene in the late 80’s/90’s until I reunited them decades after. These once rivals are now OG’s of a remarkable scene that blossomed unannounced to the rest of the world.

Other generations of Poppers sprung: The Deadly Venoms of Miami (Chillski, Zero, Cuba), who were my arch-nemesis’s in the 90’s, were wrecking their scene early on in Miami history. They birthed several generations of Poppers that battled many of my own students. Mechanical Master was one of my teachers and mentors coming up in the 90’s. While other famous dancers like Devee (Who Can Roast The Most) came from his teachings as well.  

All in all, Miami & South Florida has been known as a Mecca for Breaking since so many ground-breaking crews hailed from this sea-side city (Street Masters, Flip Side Kings, Ground Zero) and it’s rich history that blossomed from the 80’s. Slowly, the scene became a Breaking scene when these styles were revived by Europe in the early 90’s. Miami Poppers & Lockers became the vast minority, until later generations have been wrought by the blood & sweat of local heroes that the world has yet to know. I am but a link in a long line of them. That is why I felt the need to write this bit of history down, to let the generations of Street Dancers in South Florida, and the rest of the world know, when it comes to Locking & Popping, we down here, have been doing this since day one! Since Day One!