I’m grown now, but when I was young I started dancing to get past all of that. Me, being different, not wanting to be like everyone else, not wanting to shoot people and think it’s cool, it was never like that for me.
“You have to really tell yourself that you have a heart. “Growing up around all the violence and all the shooting, you have to be strong,” 21-year-old Kemo told me over the phone. This is in addition to 266 and 119 shooting victims in Austin and North Lawndale respectively in 2015. Kemo plans to join the tour for a few dates.ĭLOW is from Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, known as L Town, while Kemo hails from North Lawndale, known as K Town.īoth neighborhoods have some of the highest rates of violent crime in Chicago.Īccording to The Chicago Tribune, there were 48 homicides in Austin in 2015, along with 24 in North Lawndale that same year. He was about to finish rehearsals for a national dance tour called Let’s Dance: The Tour. In 2015, DLOW blew the roof off the scene, dropping the “ Do It Like Me Challenge,” which hit over 51 million YouTube views and charted on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number 45. DLOW dropped the “ DLOW Shuffle” in 2014, which racked up over 8 million YouTube views. Kemo struck early with his original song and dance called the “ Kemo Step” in 2013, which has over 4 million views YouTube views to date. Search Lil Kemo and DLOW on YouTube and you’ll find dozens of clips of the two with hundreds of thousands to millions of views.Īfter gaining steady popularity online, the two began creating their own viral dance crazes. Their videos had intricate choreography where both dancers played off each other’s moves and energy, taking the basic bop moves and injecting them with precision and personality. The duo started making bopping videos together in the summer of 2013, filming dance routines in the streets of Chicago and posting them to YouTube. Kids make bop videos in their homes, in their schools, and in the streets.ĭLOW and Kemo’s videos are consistently the most popular of the many out there. There are hundreds of videos on YouTube, Instagram, and elsewhere of kids doing the bopping dance. Englewood native DJ Casper created the famous “Cha Cha Slide” (which hit #1 in the U.K. Simply put, it’s fast, it’s mesmerizing, and it’s turnt up.īopping is the latest in Chicago’s long history of dance crazes.Ĭhicago producer RP Boo pioneered footworking in the ’90s, which would eventually lead to Chicago duo Dude ’N Nem’s seminal “Watch My Feet,” as well as the Teklife juke music crew.Ī lot of the slide dances you’ve heard at weddings and bar mitzvahs owe a lot to Chicago as well. Though not particularly tied down to specific moves, the dance is roughly based around butterfly leg movements and freestyle arm motions. Somewhat reminiscent of footworking, another type of Chicago street dance, bopping is a frenetic mix of alternately smooth and jerking body movements. It is genuinely hard to describe the bopping dance with words. A lot of people listening to it for the first time won’t get it.”
“You can never really understand what genre bop music is,” 20-year-old DLOW told me over the phone. Bopping is its own unique blend of DIY hip hop in a city with dozens of flavors of rap. Though bop dancers don’t exclusively dance to bopping music, it shouldn’t be confused with Chicago’s hardcore drill rap genre, nor Chicago’s storied ghetto house scene.
Primarily created by local Chicago rappers, the music is upbeat, bouncy, repetitive, and full of auto-tuned vocals. DLOW and Kemo’s dance speciality is called “bopping,” which is both a style of music and a dance (and not the word’s previous incarnation, meaning more generally to dance).