There are hundreds of videos on YouTube, Instagram, and elsewhere of kids doing the bopping dance. Englewood native DJ Casper created the famous “Cha Cha Slide” (which hit #1 in the U.K. Simply put, it’s fast, it’s mesmerizing, and it’s turnt up.īopping is the latest in Chicago’s long history of dance crazes.Ĭhicago producer RP Boo pioneered footworking in the ’90s, which would eventually lead to Chicago duo Dude ’N Nem’s seminal “Watch My Feet,” as well as the Teklife juke music crew.Ī lot of the slide dances you’ve heard at weddings and bar mitzvahs owe a lot to Chicago as well. Though not particularly tied down to specific moves, the dance is roughly based around butterfly leg movements and freestyle arm motions.

Somewhat reminiscent of footworking, another type of Chicago street dance, bopping is a frenetic mix of alternately smooth and jerking body movements. It is genuinely hard to describe the bopping dance with words. A lot of people listening to it for the first time won’t get it.” “You can never really understand what genre bop music is,” 20-year-old DLOW told me over the phone. Bopping is its own unique blend of DIY hip hop in a city with dozens of flavors of rap. Though bop dancers don’t exclusively dance to bopping music, it shouldn’t be confused with Chicago’s hardcore drill rap genre, nor Chicago’s storied ghetto house scene. Primarily created by local Chicago rappers, the music is upbeat, bouncy, repetitive, and full of auto-tuned vocals. DLOW and Kemo’s dance speciality is called “bopping,” which is both a style of music and a dance (and not the word’s previous incarnation, meaning more generally to dance).

Dlow shuffle part 1