yoko.cool / Street Kingdom, Founders of Krump (3:32)
Krump is a relatively new dance style, developed on the streets of South Central Los Angeles in the early 2000s. This video features Street Kingdom, a krump crew led by Tight Eyez (in the HYPE shirt), who is widely regarded as the founder of the dance.
With its stomps, jabs, and a wild arm-swinging, krump is a fast and explosive dance, but it is also highly controlled. You would be right to imagine rock-hard musculature underneath all those baggy shirts. It is also aggressive and menacing, but not necessarily malicious — when krumping was a street dance in its simplest incarnation, it was used as a method of releasing anger and frustration in a positive way.
I first got my taste of krump watching Rize, a 2005 documentary by David LaChapelle. Having seen krumping (and its predecessor, clowning) being documented as an expressive outlet amid the hardships of inner city life in LA, it is awesome to see it now being featured as a mainstream street dance. I’m loving that the dance is evolving, too — I didn’t see any of those hat tricks in Rize!
Yoko
Fun fact: Apparently David LaChapelle’s first introduction to krump was when he was directing Christina Aguilera’s super-hot 2002 hit music video for Dirrty (4:41). I’m not 100% positive and I feel a bit embarrassed watching the video a second time, but my guess is that krumping makes an appearance during Redman’s rap, when he’s walking through that hallway full of grinding people.