Saturday, June 06, 2009

The Freshest Kids - a review

The Freshest Kids is a true and vivid history of Hip Hop. To many people, breakdancing died an embarressing death in the eighties as a played out fad. To many people like me, when the commercial fad ended, we were still amazed to see its heartbeat continue however faint in its hollowed out husk, only to see it come roaring back to life. In my case, at the Chinatown Y in Boston, where a group of Asian, Black, Latino, and a smattering of White kids were busy adding hand springs, flips, and other acrobatics to the traditional windmills, backspins, and body rockin.

The Freshest Kids puts 2 and 2 together, showing but 4 the the strength of the artform, its rough and ready roots, and the heart and soul of its originators, Madison Avenue might well have won the day. But all things that are hard fought, well-crafted, and elemental are indeed enduring. So it is with the B-Boys and B-Girls, God bless them all.

A story of the human spirit, it reminds us to be inspired by kids, their creativity, ingenuity, and explosive power when you remove the shackles of pretense and oppression in its other other pernicious forms. Because these kids with less than nothing, took only what they brought with them and made something that reaches through space - across the world to people and places they'd never seen - and time - back to ancestors they never knew they had. They truly are and ever will be The Freshest Kids.