Keeping the Beat: In Defence of Raygun

From ecstacy to heartbreak, the Olympics lets it all out in an endless pentathlon of intense emotions. Humour, however, has never really been an Olympic qualifier (unless you count the unintentional hilarity of events like artistic swimming). Rachel Gunn, Australia’s Paris Olympic b-girl entrant, known as Raygun, made a lot of people laugh, and outraged many more. For the offended, Raygun’s Olympic inclusion was an injustice (or a conspiracy). Her performance a travesty. Her profile an affront. Most of the ridicule and vitriol though, didn't come from inside the breaking scene. Was this more than solidarity or sympathy? Did other breakers know something all the dissing instant experts didn’t? I’m definitely no expert either, but I do have an enduring affection for the art. For me, it was the original breakers’ ability to combine goofiness and technical prowess that was so compelling – the staged conflict, with dramatic mockery, comedic stooging and sexual spoofery, played against feats of wild athleticism.

Early 20th Century pulp magazines introduced the 'ray gun' as a futuristic weapon largely devoid of the gory consequences of real-world violence. In science fiction, the victim is stunned, dematerialised, or killed, by an energy beam that barely leaves any visible sign of impact. These bloodless deaths enable the morally superior protagonists ('the good guys') to maintain righteousness. Without the gruesome particulars of graphic violence, the sanitised conflict can also be more easily cast as metaphoric and mythic for a popular audience. The struggle between good and evil is more effectively abstracted without the visceral mutilation of the mortal body. In Star Wars, for example, we don't care much for the suffering of anonymous stormtroopers as they are relentlessly dispatched by Resistance 'blasters'. Conversely, even H.G. Wells' imperialist Martians, in his 1889 novel, The War of the Worlds, with their ray gun precursor 'Heat-Rays', are avoiding too much mess, instantly incinerating their human victims. The ray gun is an allegorical technology, a tool for transmuting messy violence into a symbolic contest. Not unlike breaking.

There is always a risk of oversimplifying the complex relationship between 'oppositional' youth subcultures and 'dominant' commercial culture. Dick Hebdige’s hugely influential Subculture: The Meaning of Style, for example, which examined post-war British youth social groups, has been accused of romanticising the contrast between an underground and mainstream, a narrative that alleges an overstating of the familiar process of the capitalist economy disarming and commodifying alternative or antagonistic cultures. And yet, resistance does spring spontaneously from the streets. Breaking is a street art. It was born from social and economic neglect and frustration, not to mention structural poverty and racism, alchemised into improvised creative culture. And the romantic mythology of breaking substituting for endemic urban violence is fairly literally true. The notorious South Bronx Black Spade gang “warlord”, and later hip hop pioneer, Afrika Bambaataa, established Universal Zulu Nation to redirect young gang members away from violence and towards music, dance and art (while latterly also being accused of sexual assault). The adversarial format platformed at the Olympics, and common from its very origins, is a stylised street ‘battle’.

My early teens had their share of messy violence, and they coincided, for better and worse, with the early 80’s. It was the stubborn tail-end of an oppressive, Aussie macho culture, untroubled by feminist critique, where marginalisation, alienation and archaic gender roles, compounded by the onset of blithe neoliberalism, manifested in my neighbourhood as schoolboys very regularly beating each other up. Every day after school, train station car parks would host pre-arranged and opportunistic fights, with crowds of onlookers – a sort of subtropical, bitumen-paved adolescent fight-club. And if you were a white, working-class kid in the stagnant outskirts of Brisbane – especially if you were too young to connect with the local oppositional music and arts scene that had helped birth punk – the world was happening elsewhere.

For a while though, I didn’t need the world. I had books, friends, and the muddy South Pine River, a winding waterway bordering the limits of greater Brisbane and Pine Rivers, a wild setting for imagination and mischief. We were trespassing in the river’s sand quarry to jump off dunes, climb machinery, and fish off rusty barges. Also building stuff – bonfires, cubby houses, and most importantly, endless tangled mythology, ideas about who we wanted to be.

The early eighties also saw hip-hop leave the New York boroughs and somehow find its way into the mainstream, and into suburban teenage bedrooms all around the world. The shock and excitement of hearing Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash on the radio was a different kind of thrill from adventuring in a muddy river.

In mid 1984, my neighbour, Peter, talked his overworked single mum into taking us to see Beat Street at the cinema. I’d bought hip-hop and breaking group Rock Steady Crew’s single, and later their album, and would trawl the music video shows on tv for any sign of Crazy Legs and Baby Love in their blue and yellow jumpsuits. Beat Street put all the pieces together. I had a side business at school painting graffiti on school bags. Peter and I watched the movies and music videos and attempted to learn the moves. We called our crew ‘Beat Zone’ and we’d carry our cardboard down to the local Westfield shopping centre to battle with other crews, until we were chased away by security guards (kids dancing in public – call the cops!). We were only slightly more welcome at a daytime underage event at Sybil’s nightclub in Brisbane city, where once every hour the DJ would deign to play a few hip-hop tracks and the breakers would briefly take over.

Peter called himself ‘Choc’. I still remember my mum telling me not to call him by his nickname, and me not understanding why. He was my friend, but it was beyond me then to consider that the only black kid in the street might be employing a strategy of pre-emptive self-defence. Like the reclaiming of certain other racial slurs as redeemed ‘in-group lexicon’, Peter was likely anticipating and neutralising what must have been incessant othering. Hip-hop, however, was fundamentally a black and immigrant invention, and here I was the interloper. At 13 years old, I was generally aware of its cultural origins, if not notions of cultural appropriation, and was confident hip-hop could accommodate me – after all, it has always absorbed and reflected diverse influences, from Chinese kung fu, Latin American and Caribbean traditions, to experimental Krautrock and Japanese electro pop. Though I’m not suggesting the art got anything much back from this Aussie teenager. I would have loved to talk with Peter about all this, but we lost touch after he moved away.

Before Rachel Gunn became Raygun, and started winning competitive breaking events (including the Oceania Breaking Championships in 2023, which qualified her for the Paris Olympics) she had a varied contemporary dance background. She is also an academic at Macquarie University, and Gunn’s 2017 cultural studies doctorate (Deterritorializing gender in Sydney's breakdancing scene: a B-girl's experience of B-boying) has been a key source of suspicion and hostility. Among the memes and caustic commentary, Gunn, a white, middle-class woman, has been mocked for expressing sensitivity around “white appropriation”. Writing in the Saturday Paper, Martin McKenzie-Murray was scathing: “perhaps a royal commission into departmental cultural studies wouldn’t be such a bad idea”. (Echoes here of conservative “Cultural-Marxism” taunts, and US Republicans' instrumentalist and ideological attacks on liberal arts education.) And then more generally about her ability: “If we remove elaborate mischief as an explanation, then we’re left with two options: heroic indifference to one’s inability or a tragic obliviousness to it.” Then McKenzie-Murray writes off breaking itself: “breaking doesn’t mean much anymore in the country of its origin; it’s no longer considered one of the “pillars” of hip-hop.” Doesn’t mean much to whom? To one of the world’s most nakedly profitable cultural industries? If this is his measure, breaking has never counted. The Paris Olympics and some sponsorship from Red Bull aside, except for that freak moment in the 80's, it's always been grassroots and counter-culture.

It’s true the locus of breaking has shifted to Asia and Europe, and that the pillars have splintered, relative to hip-hop’s formative years. But is cultural relevance really still contingent on market viability? It’s as if punk (and Bronx block parties) never happened. “To defend the sanctity of breaking when its ostensible custodians have abandoned it seems vaguely embarrassing to me” claims McKenzie-Murray. To me, an endless source of reliable embarrassment is commentators framing a subculture through the lens of dominant culture. Ballet has custodians, Olympic badminton has custodians, breaking just has kids with cardboard and beats.

I watched all the Olympic breaking, and found it as joyous and skilled as any of the established events, even as I listened to a lot of commentary that deemed it unworthy. Still, I did have some doubts. I missed the popping, animation, boogaloo, and freestyling. The Olympic formality made the whole thing feel a little wack, as the b-boys and b-girls say. Too much daylight, not enough volume, not enough improv, too restrained, too polite. A plotted, ambivalent simulation.

The ‘Olympification’ of breaking was already a divisive issue in the hip-hop community. Poetry and architecture have also been Olympic events, but does anyone still think that was a good idea? It’s not just a simple question of “selling out”. Wouldn’t Olympic inclusion inevitably skew an event from the expressive and subjective to the technical and objective? Away from art and towards sport? If I want that, I’ve already got gymnastics and long jump and weight-lifting. I want dance! I want idiosyncratic human expression, not just virtuosic athleticism.

As my teenage interest in breaking waned, I developed a passionate dedication to a less symbolic form of combat, Japanese karate, in which I’ve now trained for nearly 40 years. Analogous debates in the martial arts community rage about Olympic participation. There are now two distinct forms of martial arts – sports, and traditional. The former trains for points and medals, and the later for real-life combat and self-defence. They can co-exist, but the sportification of combat arts means it’s far less likely now to encounter the authentic traditional version with its unique philosophy and spiritual discipline. The embarrassing spectacle of Olympic taekwondo is a stark example. There must still be serious, effective, taekwondo out there, but finding it would be a chore. Any form of combat competition needs to limit the realistic application of harmful techniques. However, the ineffectual jabbing punches and spasms of flicking feet in Olympic taekwondo, for example, demonstrate just how far an artform can be subverted by aspirations to popularise it as a sport. And in some ways, it also demonstrates the peril of moving from the margins to the centre.

Breaking has evolved, and will continue to do so, with or without the Olympics. Hopefully it gets richer and more diverse, rather than just more gymnastic and technically complex. The mock fighting, goofy freezes, and creative provocations of early b-boys and b-girls were an intrinsic part of breaking as an aberrant emerging dance movement. Rather than evidence of illegitimacy or fraud, Raygun hopping across the Olympic stage was a clear echo of the very first breakers’ put downs, of Rock Steady Crew burning the NY City Breakers in Beat Street’s battles, with mimed erections and mocking hip thrusts. In art, as in life, serious doesn’t need to mean unfunny.

I’ve long admired breakers who combined impossibly disparate approaches. Dancers like Bboy Lilou or a crew like Morning of Owl, dancers that disrobe or play with their shoes. Highly skilled and intensely inventive. No one, least of all Raygun, is claiming she should have taken home the gold, but in spite of all the fuss, she did represent an orthodox aspect of diverse breaking culture that wasn't otherwise showcased in Paris. If Raygun can be accused of anything (leaving aside her post-Olympic personal brand-building), perhaps it's the naivety of hoping the Olympics might welcome and reward her approach. Is it really that she doesn't represent legitimate aspects of breaking, or rather, that grassroots, countercultural art forms like breaking just aren't best represented by the Olympics?

Like many commentators, feminist editor Hannah Berrelli is having none of that: “This whole episode is demonstrative of the supreme selfishness of woke identity politics studies. Her little stunt diminishes Australia on the world stage. Hundreds of Australian athletes who will have dedicated their entire lives to athletic excellence will be forgotten, because Rachael wanted to bulk up her ResearchGate profile. Rather than their medals and efforts, this is what Australia will be remembered for.”

There are a lot of bold assumptions here. First and foremost, that Australia needs a quirky breaker to help diminish itself on the world’s stage. But more relevantly, that it was irrefutably bogus. Even if she was taking the piss, well that’s just part of the art. Anyway, surely only Raygun knows if it was genuine. Can anyone really be: “100% certain what she is doing here ... trying to make some subversive point she can later write journal articles about”, as Berrelli insisted? I understand the confusion, and even the offence, Raygun’s performance was well outside Olympic norms. But maybe we should save the absolute certainty for quantifiable Olympic sports, and leave Raygun and breaking alone.

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Jason Grant 2024