Tie me kangaroo: B-Girl Raygun of Team Australia competes in the breaking at the Paris Olympics. (Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)
Compiled by legendary producer Arthur Baker, the just released Breaker’s Revenge is a near-definitive collection of original funk, soul, Latin, disco and electro-classic tracks from 1970 to 1984.
The tracks are a combination of classics and obscurities, all guaranteed to get B-boys, B-girls and breakdancers moving at any South Bronx block party, community hall or park jam in the Seventies and Eighties.
They were made famous by the first major hip-hop DJs — Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa — who played them endlessly. Among those artists are Dennis Coffey, The Jimmy Castor Bunch, James Brown, The Mohawks and Baker himself.
They have been sampled many thousands of times over by every hip-hop artist and producer of note.
In his producer’s notes on the 18-track double album, Baker writes he was “inspired to release a compilation in tribute to all the B-boys and B-girls who created the culture and danced to this music, by the inclusion of breaking as a competitive event at the Paris 2024 Olympics”.
I’ve been listening nonstop to Breaker’s Revenge as a comedown balm after breaking’s first, and probably last, outing at the Olympics. It won’t be at the 2028 LA games.
Many friends sniffed “it isn’t even a sport” but I laughed with joy, astonishment, appreciation and admiration this weekend as the 16 B-Boys and 16 B-Girls made their best, beautiful moves to the great music of DJs Plash One from Poland and Fleg from the US — tracks not known to the competitors before the matches — and many of them, coincidentally, on Breaker’s Revenge.
The 10 judges’ criteria were technique, vocabulary (number and variety of moves), execution, musicality (how the breaker expresses to the music) and originality (how they “wow” the audience).
B-Girl Ami from Japan competes in the breaking event at the Paris Olympics. (Elsa/Getty Images)
The gold medallists were the astonishing Canadian Philip Kim, aka B-boy Phil Wizard, and Japan’s awe-inspiring Ami Yuasa, or B-girl Ami (all participants have a hip-hop nom de plume).
Even the commentators were excellent — none of the typical American bias as in other sports —from Candy Bloise, aka BGirl Candy. Just informative, professional and entertaining.
But did I say 16 B-Girls made their “best moves”? Well, make that 15 because one of them, the Australian academic Rachel Gunn, aka B-Girl Raygun, was clearly — pardon my language — taking the piss.
Unlike the rest of the participants who dressed according to the proud breaking tradition, she rocked up in an Australia tracksuit and baseball cap. Her performance was as if she was playing the game Charades, where one has to act out words or phrases. It looked like hers were: “kangaroo”, “passive-aggressive bartender wiping the counter”, “overtired toddler crawling on the floor”, “air swimming”, “make koeksister legs like you urgently need to go to the loo”, “slithering snake”, “showerhead”, “dance like nobody is watching” and “smug, entitled academic illustrating cultural appropriation”.
Gunn lost all three of her round-robin battles, without earning a single point. Her bizarre moves turned her into a meme machine with people on social media showing her what taking the piss actually looked like.
The head judge Martin Gilian, aka MGbility, said at a press conference that Gunn embodied the spirit of the discipline in her effort to be original.
“She got inspired by her surroundings, which in this case, for example, was a kangaroo,” he said, according to the Daily Mail.
About her zero score, “That doesn’t mean that she did really bad. She did her best. She won the Oceania qualifier. Unfortunately for her, the other B-girls were better,” MGbility said, overstating the glaringly obvious.
The Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese told reporters: “Raygun had a crack, good on her, and a big shout-out to her.
“That is in the Australian tradition of people having a go. She’s had a go representing our country and that’s a good thing.”
But Megan Davis, a respected Aboriginal Australian activist and international human rights lawyer, was not impressed.
“Getting zero points on purpose in three rounds for an academic study subsidised by the taxpayer both at a university and Olympic level isn’t funny and isn’t ‘having a go’,” she said on social media via The Australian. “[It’s] disrespectful to other competitors.
“I’m glad most Aussies aren’t buying the Kool-Aid.
“This is a mainstream media-driven narrative. Cos they see themselves in her. Affluent, comfortable life, educated, not a care in the world, nothing matters really, what fun, what a fun Aussie gal, chortle chortle.”