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Steffan "Mr. Wiggles" Clemente is a street dancer, noted for his popping skills. He is a member of the Rock Steady Crew, The Electric Boogaloos, Tribal Click, Zulu Nation, and TC5, also known as The Cool Five or The Crazy Five. Wiggles has been active as a dancer, actor, choreographer, dance instructor, music producer and graffiti artist.
Steffan "Mr. Wiggles" Clemente, born in 1965 in Bronx N.Y., is a South Bronx Puerto Rican raised on hip hop since the early '70s. His dancing career started by battling all around New York City. He built his battling reputation until he was able to battle around the world. This includes Europe, South America, Asia, the Middle East, Canada, and on the stages of Broadway. Mr. Wiggles has also been credited for 2 important movies which helped establish hip hop today. These movies are "Beat Street" and "Wild Style". [1]
During his time in the graffiti crew, TC5, Clemente was known as "Rek" by other members of the group. Clemente originally got his stage name of Mr. Wiggles from a leader in the TC5 crew, who went by both "Seen" and "Mr. Wiggles." While cutting class, Clemente had shown Seen a certain dance move which inspired him to give Clemente his side-alias, Mr. Wiggles. [2]
Aside from dancing, Mr. Wiggles also worked in theater, film, and music with popular artists such as Graciela Daniele, Bill Irwin, and Ann Marie DeAngelo. [3] He has been a featured artist in the Apollo Theater and performed at the Kennedy Center. He has appeared in music videos with artists such as Missy Elliot, [4] Usher, [5] Madonna, and Limp Bizkit, [6] among others. [7]
Steffan Clemente is married to Zoraya Clemente and has 6 children named Unico, Alexandra, Talib, Ammar, Atiya, and Zamaria. [8]
Wiggles performs as a solo artist and with the Electric Boogaloos and Rock Steady Crew. He is also committed to participating in outreach programs teaching youth about the positive aspects of hip hop culture. [9]
Wiggles received a 1993 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. [10] Wiggles was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for the Ghettoriginal production of Jam on the Groove. He won a Bessie Award for Best Choreography for the theatrical production of So What Happens Now, a play dedicated to Buck4, a deceased Rock Steady Crew member.
Wiggles along with the members of Rock Steady Crew was acclaimed at the first VH-1 Hip Hop Honors in 2004. [11]
Mr. Wiggles' instructional VHS tape Mr. Wiggles Sessions: Vol.# One[ sic ]: King Tut Style was featured in an episode of Red Letter Media's Best of the Worst entitled Wheel of the Worst #17. The episode ends with Rich Evans parodying Clemente as "Mr. Jiggles" who demonstrates "King Gut Style." [12]
Limp Bizkit is an American nu metal band from Jacksonville, Florida. Its lineup consists of lead vocalist Fred Durst, drummer John Otto, guitarist Wes Borland, turntablist DJ Lethal and bassist Sam Rivers. The band's music is marked by Durst's angry vocal delivery and Borland's sonic experimentation. Borland's elaborate visual appearance, which includes face and body paint, masks, and uniforms, also plays a large role in Limp Bizkit's live shows. The band has been nominated for three Grammy Awards, sold 40 million records worldwide, and won several other awards. The band has released 26 singles, the most notable of which include "Nookie", "Re-Arranged", "Break Stuff", "Take a Look Around", "Rollin' ", "My Generation", "My Way", "Eat You Alive", and their cover of the Who's 1971 single "Behind Blue Eyes", all of which have charted within the top 20 of the US Alternative Airplay Chart.
Nu metal is a subgenre of alternative metal that combines elements of heavy metal music with elements of other music genres such as hip hop, alternative rock, funk, industrial, and grunge. Nu metal rarely features guitar solos or other displays of musical technique; the genre is heavily syncopated and based on guitar riffs. Many nu metal guitarists use seven-string guitars that are down-tuned to produce a heavier sound. DJs are occasionally featured in nu metal to provide instrumentation such as sampling, turntable scratching and electronic background music. Vocal styles in nu metal include singing, rapping, screaming and growling. Nu metal is one of the key genres of the new wave of American heavy metal.
Fred Brathwaite, more popularly known as Fab 5 Freddy, is an American visual artist, filmmaker, and hip hop pioneer. He is considered one of the architects of the street art movement. Freddy emerged in New York's downtown underground creative scene in the late 1970s as a graffiti artist. He was the bridge between the burgeoning uptown rap scene and the downtown No Wave art scene. He was immortalized in 1981 when Debbie Harry rapped on the Blondie song "Rapture" that "Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody's fly." In the late 1980s, Freddy became the first host of the groundbreaking hip-hop music video show Yo! MTV Raps.
Style Wars is an American 1983 documentary film on hip hop culture, directed by Tony Silver and produced in collaboration with Henry Chalfant. The film has an emphasis on graffiti, although bboying and rapping are covered to a lesser extent. The film was originally aired on the television network PBS and was subsequently shown in several film festivals to much acclaim, including the Vancouver Film Festival. It also won the Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival.
Popping is a street dance adapted out of the earlier boogaloo cultural movement in Oakland, California. As boogaloo spread, it would be referred to as "robottin'" in Richmond, California; strutting movements in San Francisco and San Jose; and the Strikin' dances of the Oak Park community in Sacramento, which were popular through the mid-1960s to the 1970s.
Beat Street is a 1984 American dance drama film featuring New York City hip hop culture of the early 1980s. Set in the South Bronx, the film follows the lives of a pair of brothers and their group of friends, all of whom are devoted to various elements of early hip hop culture, including breakdancing, DJing and graffiti.
Richard Colón, better known by his stage name Crazy Legs, is an American b-boy who was featured in the earliest stories on hip hop dancing to appear in mainstream press, and as president of the Rock Steady Crew brought the form to London and Paris in 1983. Today he is also involved in community outreach, dance instruction, and dance theater productions. He has appearanced in fiction films and documentaries. Crazy Legs is current president of the Rock Steady Crew.
Wild Style is a 1983 American hip hop film directed and produced by Charlie Ahearn. Regarded as the first hip hop motion picture, it includes appearances by seminal figures such as Fab Five Freddy, Lee Quiñones, Lady Pink, The Rock Steady Crew, The Cold Crush Brothers, Queen Lisa Lee of Zulu Nation, Grandmaster Flash and ZEPHYR.
Rap rock is a music genre that developed from the early to mid-1980s, when hip hop DJs incorporated rock records into their routines and rappers began incorporating original and sampled rock instrumentation into hip hop music. Rap rock is considered to be rock music in which lyrics are rapped, rather than sung. The genre achieved its greatest success in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Hip hop dance is a range of street dance styles primarily performed to hip hop music or that have evolved as part of hip hop culture. It is influenced by a wide range of styles that were created in the 1970s and made popular by dance crews in the United States. The television show Soul Train and the 1980s films Breakin', Beat Street, and Wild Style showcased these crews and dance styles in their early stages; therefore, giving hip-hop dance mainstream exposure.
Breaking, also called b-boying, b-girling or breakdancing, is a style of street dance originating in the Bronx by African American and Puerto Rican communities in New York City, United States. While diverse in the amount of variation available in the dance, breakdancing mainly consists of four kinds of movement: toprock, downrock, power moves and freezes. Breakdancing is typically set to songs containing drum breaks, especially in funk, soul music and hip-hop music, although modern trends allow for much wider varieties of music along certain ranges of tempo and beat patterns.
"Work It" is a hip hop song written by American rapper Missy Elliott and her producer Tim "Timbaland" Mosley for Elliott's fourth studio album Under Construction (2002). The song's musical style, and production by Timbaland, were heavily inspired by old school hip hop from the early 1980s. It samples Run-D.M.C.'s "Peter Piper" and Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three's "Request Line".
The Electric Boogaloos are a street dance crew responsible for the spread of popping and electric boogaloo. The name "Boogaloo" came from a song called "Do a Boogaloo" by James Brown, which was also adapted as a Boogaloo street dance done from Oakland, CA. They were founded by Boogaloo Sam in Fresno, California in 1977. Their original name was the Electric Boogaloo Lockers but "Lockers" was dropped the following year.
"Rollin' (Air Raid Vehicle)" is a song by the American rap rock band Limp Bizkit from their album Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water. It was released as the second and third single simultaneously, along with "My Generation", on September 5, 2000. The song peaked at number 65 on the US Billboard Hot 100, giving the band their highest-charting single in the US, and remained on the chart for 17 weeks. Internationally, "Rollin'" topped the charts in Ireland and the United Kingdom and peaked within the top 10 of the charts in Austria, Finland, Germany, Norway, Portugal, and Sweden.
"Counterfeit" is the debut single by American rap rock band Limp Bizkit, released in August 1997. It is from their debut album Three Dollar Bill, Y'all (1997). Notable for showcasing guitarist Wes Borland's experimental playing style, the song was written by Borland, DJ Lethal, Fred Durst, John Otto and Sam Rivers as a response to local bands that copied Limp Bizkit's style.
The New York City Breakers are an original B-boy group in early 1980s that was established in the Bronx borough of New York City formed by Michael Holman. The group originally consisted of members from Wildstyle and "Floor Master Crew"
Snoop Dogg has appeared in various video games, music videos, television series, and film appearances such as the Academy Award-winning drama Training Day and the critically acclaimed cable television series The L Word. He also has appeared in documentaries on Hip hop music and other subjects, and is the subject of a 2012 documentary, Reincarnated, on his transformation into "Snoop Lion", a reggae artist.
Hip-hop theater is a form of theater that presents contemporary stories through the use of one or more of the four elements of hip-hop culture—b-boying, graffiti writing, MCing (rapping), and DJing. Other cultural markers of hip-hop such as spoken word, beatboxing, and hip-hop dance can be included as well although they are not always present. What is most important is the language of the theatrical piece and the plot's relevance to the world. Danny Hoch, the founder of the Hip-Hop Theater Festival, further defines it as such: "Hip-hop theatre must fit into the realm of theatrical performance, and it must be by, about and for the hip-hop generation, participants in hip-hop culture, or both."
The history of hip-hop dances encompasses the people and events since the late 1960s that have contributed to the development of early hip-hop dance styles, such as uprock, breaking, locking, roboting, boogaloo, and popping. African Americans created uprock and breaking in New York City. African Americans in California created locking, roboting, boogaloo, and popping—collectively referred to as the funk styles. All of these dance styles are different stylistically. They share common ground in their street origins and in their improvisational nature of hip hop.
Timothy Earl Solomon, known as Popin' Pete, is an American dancer and choreographer who popularized the "popping" dance style and member of the Electric Boogaloos. Pete’s career has spanned over forty years since the emergence of popping dance.
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