"I remember going for the first time to a place called The Roxy in New York because you can see people breakdancing there. That's the only reason I went! It's amazing, kids are still doing that"
About this Quote
There is something endearingly unpretentious in Chris Frantz admitting he went to The Roxy for exactly one reason: to watch kids breakdancing. No mythmaking, no name-dropping, no “scene” talk. Just a working musician clocking a form of movement so electric it overrides everything else New York supposedly offers. That bluntness is the point. It frames hip-hop’s early culture not as an academic subject or a trend to be packaged, but as an irresistible live phenomenon.
The subtext is a quiet corrective to the way we narrate downtown Manhattan as a closed loop of CBGB guitar gods. The Roxy was a crucial collision site in the early 1980s where punk, new wave, and hip-hop literally shared floorspace. Frantz, a Talking Heads drummer, is positioned right at that crossover: an artist from a “white art-rock” lineage acknowledging a Black and Latino street form as the real draw. It’s admiration, but also a snapshot of how cultural capital moves: innovation bubbling up from kids with cardboard and boomboxes, pulling in curious outsiders who thought they were the center of the story.
“It’s amazing, kids are still doing that” lands as more than nostalgia. Breakdancing is physically demanding, famously ephemeral, and constantly declared dead by people who stop paying attention. Frantz’s amazement reads like respect for the culture’s durability - not because it was preserved, but because it kept evolving in public, one body at a time.
The subtext is a quiet corrective to the way we narrate downtown Manhattan as a closed loop of CBGB guitar gods. The Roxy was a crucial collision site in the early 1980s where punk, new wave, and hip-hop literally shared floorspace. Frantz, a Talking Heads drummer, is positioned right at that crossover: an artist from a “white art-rock” lineage acknowledging a Black and Latino street form as the real draw. It’s admiration, but also a snapshot of how cultural capital moves: innovation bubbling up from kids with cardboard and boomboxes, pulling in curious outsiders who thought they were the center of the story.
“It’s amazing, kids are still doing that” lands as more than nostalgia. Breakdancing is physically demanding, famously ephemeral, and constantly declared dead by people who stop paying attention. Frantz’s amazement reads like respect for the culture’s durability - not because it was preserved, but because it kept evolving in public, one body at a time.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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