Bite, to copy another person's dance. Ken Swift states, "it's against the law in b-boy culture, know what I'm saying? You don't do that [...] You can't hold back your personal creativity. You could imitate people, but at some point you want the music to pull everything out of you—to really start dancing the way you dance. So you could be not just like everybody else" .
Early use of the term is documented in Style Wars, including Lenny Len's, "they bit my turtle into a hop– Oh man, I coulda cried when I seen that..." . This view of biting, widespread already by 1981, differed from that of earlier dancers like Wallace Dee or Trixie, who recalls, "I didn't get upset or nothing, I loved it. That means I started a trend...that means everybody is dancing like me. Matter of fact cats are still doing my moves today" . For Trixie, "all it would do was make me change my moves [...] I didn't do the same moves over and over again. Cause you see me doing one move and the next week I come and you think I do the same move again?? It didn't work like that cause then it gets corny. You gotta come up with something new everytime" . In Trixie's environment—mainly Kool Herc's parties—copying someone else was as unremarkable as repeating oneself.1 The value of originality was properly located in the first performance. This value was also tied to recognition of the innovator, which was still guaranteed by the community. This situation disintegrated as the setting of breaking expanded, and it became possible for a move's reproduction to be regarded as the original. By 1984, Hager could define:
biter—someone who takes ideas from others and is unable to invent those of his own
The objection to biting reflects the importance of originality, as well as the context-dependent, material consequences of performing another's moves. Likewise for graffiti,2 DONDI describes, "there's like a graffiti... it's not really a law, but it's like, if a dude's using your style, you definitely know it, and everyone else knows it, you know? But in art class it seems like that's accepted or something... To use other people's ideas" . Cold Crush Four MC JDL is less subtle, quoted in the January 1982 East Village Eye: "Some of the real rappers aren't even exposed because they don't have a record; everyone is at each other's throats for first position. Promoters give other groups top billing and the best groups lose out . . . original groups are bitten (ripped off) by other MCs" . Storm maintains this dual character when, in 2022, he writes, "the negative term for people who just copy and profit from the creative work of others is 'Biter.' It is not just that one gets a reputation as a copier; it also means that one is not able to express himself by using his own thoughts and technique" . Ken and Lutz uncover something fundamental when they write, "due to how difficult it was to be original, and the work and discipline that it took to develop unique skills and ideas, many people took biting very personally" .
Ken asserts, "everybody has been inspired, from the beginning" . If imitation is forbidden, however, then the extensive aesthetic similarity within breaking, the chains of influence, and no less the so-called "styles," must involve improvement upon previous ideas; to "flip it." Willie Will recalls of the late 1970s, "we used to breakdance together [with other crews], they would show us stuff and we would show them. You know at that time everybody was biting. Nobody can front! Nobody can front.! It's not like I invented every move I ever did. If I saw a move that I liked.......like Crazy Legs said...if he saw a move that he liked he did that and flipped it his way....he put something into it that made it look a little bit different" . In Aby's account, "if it wasn't for biting, we wouldn't have different styles, and if it wasn't for different styles, we wouldn't have the evolution. So you had to have bit from somebody but changed it. So what we did was changed the dance, and the dance evolved. That's because of the biting. You make it your own, your own style changes, and then that's what evolves" . Originality has always involved both the individual and the viewers it engages. Jimmy Dee relates,
Jimmy Dee, who still saw the connection between not copying moves and not doing the same things as everyone else, applied the same principle to moves outside of breaking. The "foundation moves"—called "universal moves" by Focus —are no different. Storm writes, "in time, a practitioner will learn how to stamp their individual character on a guiding foundational move and make it their own" . Heist opined in 2000, "you can learn, but you have to use your own style and creativity if you see a move. You can't just come in and do, I wanna do flare, or I wanna do this. You gotta come in with your own style, your own flow," to which Megas added, "use foundation" . Graffiti writer DELTA offers, "I think biting is the way to get a style, the way style comes into being. You know, somebody makes something and another one bites it, and after that it becomes a style 'cause everyone takes it over and then it's not biting any more, it's just running a style" . This idea is confronted by Jeremy and Moy who ask, with some irony, "when does a move become bitten so much that it becomes part of the foundation?" . While it is doubtful that biting could exculpate itself merely through further biting, DELTA's account brings into focus the historical trajectories of styles and moves. Storm identifies that the airchair became widely used only after others used the move "not as a Freeze but as a position one can dance in" . Kujo notes that the six step, which "didn't just magically appear," gained its status after being "advanced" and "expanded on," and that six steps seen today are crucially not "the exact same six step"—he adds that "any move can be looked at in this same way" . All moves become part of foundation, as ideas that enter the consciousness of breakers, just as they are done. It is a move's elaboration, not its exact imitation, that simultaneously reveals what is fundamental in the move. The six step no longer demands the elongated movements of the CC Long, and the airchair is simpler than the Cobra Attacking the Eagle. Through experiment, its successes and failures, a move becomes better understood, and it becomes clear in its performance what is original and what is not. To instead canonize a set of moves that can be bitten puts breaking in a package for sale. Doing a "foundation move" without adding something new is biting—Thesis is probably correct when he says the accusation is "unnecessary" . For Thesis, "you can take a move, but that's the whole point of what we do. We learn moves to grow" . Storm also positions copying at an early stage of a larger process, remarking, "sometimes students copy what they see and leave it at that. This might be enough to make one a good technician or find work for choreographer, since they mainly look for dancers that execute well and follow orders, but will not gain the dancer much respect in the B-Boy world" . Poe One outlines, "I can see when somebody is acting like someone else. I understand if you are just beginning in the dance. Of course you are going to act like somebody you like. Thats how we all start. But after you learn about the dance you should be able to contribute who you are to it. You should be able to do things your own style, Flava" . This resembles Walter Bishop Jr.'s process of learning jazz, "it all goes from imitation to assimilation to innovation. You move from the imitation stage to the assimilation stage when you take little bits of things from different people and weld them into an identifiable style—creating your own style. Once you've created your own sound and you have a good sense of the history of the music, then you think of where the music hasn't gone and where it can go—and that's innovation" .
Yet Ken says, "I don't believe in everybody bites. That to me... it's definitely not from my era. Biting was very personal. You didn't take anybody's move [...] and if you were inspired by it, you found a way to flip it, to where it can become something that you get recognized for. Yes we can see the evolution of what something was, but taking someone's move directly is a bite, and that's not fair" . Spy recalls, "during my time..in the 1970ies...I had my own moves, you know what I'm saying? A lot of the moves that other B-Boys would do are mine 'cause they took mines and they developed it and did stuff with it.....to each his own. A lot of them also created their own moves which is beautiful" . There is justifiable suspicion that the categories of flipping, inspiration, reference, homage, parody, or the last resort "did it better," risk defining biting out of existence. By coincidence, flip has another meaning of buying and selling quickly to make a profit. Flipping is not mere difference, but the adding of something substantial that may itself be built upon. As Hegel writes, "people are commonly accustomed to understand by 'originality' only the production of peculiarities, proper precisely only to the individual, which would never enter anyone else's head," and in another accusation, "every one of them resorts to some specific folly, which no reasonable man will imitate, and in the consciousness of his folly calls himself 'original'" . Such originality could still carry force to the extent that the individual resembles the subject. Instead, the individual effect appears standardized, and subjectivity is reduced to the choice between identical products. What is the same is called new—its supposed uniqueness belies the fact that it can be replaced by anything else. Not biting has of course always meant to "be yourself"—Ken's "dancing the way you dance." Moy reveals what this entails when he outlines, "the beauty about breaking is that it represents individualism. It represents you, and what you create, and what you bring to the table" . This is not pure fancy, something effortless, readily won over by the latest trend, but involves the power of the subject to withstand objective conditions. For Junior, originality is "something kind of natural, organic, something that you get from your history," which, made concrete, is "naturally, just fighting, and trying to escape the fatalities" . History and technique are therefore not separate from originality—for Adorno, they are part of what "sets boundaries against the bad infinity in works" . Through repetition, however, the same old reinforces itself as inevitable. Heist calls attention to "people out there who copycat. They bite where it's not their own original moves. Like, they see someone do a move and they do it. And you're really faking yourself if you're in b-boying, [because] it's not your own personal expression. You're looking at someone else's style and someone else's creativity and you're taking it. And that, to me personally, is kind of what holds b-boying back, 'cause everyone just gets into flares, everyone just does headspins, and it becomes a repetitive routine" . Sameness is always also the lack of actual progress; "the machine is rotating on the spot" . Already in Kant, "fine art" is distinguished from "mechanical art," and "genius"3 from the "spirit of imitation" . Adorno echoes Schoenberg's motto4 "if you do not seek, you will not find" when he opines, "actually, art is now scarcely possible unless it does experiment," asserting, "even the camp followers of the new, whom everyone disdains, are more forceful than those who boldly insist on the tried and true" . Hegel's insight that "the task and aim of art is to bring home to our sense, our feeling, and our inspiration everything which has a place in the human spirit" meant not least that "the aim of art must therefore lie in something still other than the purely mechanical imitation of what is there, which in every case can bring to birth only technical tricks, not works, of art" . For Hegel, if one considers only the "correctness of the imitation,"5 then "the object and content of the beautiful is regarded as a matter of complete indifference" . Strict imitation, moreover, leaves what is bad unchanged. Kant writes, "imitation becomes aping when the pupil copies everything down to the deformities which the genius only of necessity suffered to remain, because they could hardly be removed without loss of force to the idea" . Wynton Marsalis remarks, "some people copy the worst licks of second-rate players" . This aspect of biting affects all identical moves, even of independent origin. Kujo points out, "no matter how original you try to be, there is a very good chance that someone has already done exactly what you're trying to do. And on top of that, whatever it is you're trying to do always stems from something else that's already been done" . While not properly biting, what is implicated is that the original becomes further obscured, and the move is, simply, nothing new. Alien Ness registers that biting looks "like something I've seen a million times" . Recalling the early environment of breaking, Moy says "if I even felt like someone else, I would change it up. I would change it up because I did not want to even feel like someone else. I wanted to feel like me" , while for Focus, "if I saw something similar being done that I was doing, I changed it, even though I might have come up with the idea first. If I saw somebody else do it, I didn't want to do it the same, I wanted to change it" . To avoid this, some bureaucratize biting with requirements for complexity, difficulty, length, and transitions in and out. These definitions forget what is bad about stealing. They reduce biting to a probability, creating an efficient algorithm to minimize false positives, suitable for the same mechanical thinking that benefits from non-detections, that ultimately has nothing to do with biting. At the same time, Ness is correct to consider the "entire run from top to bottom" . Originality resides in the detail as much as in the relation between parts and whole. The clumsy rounds composed solely of "truly" original moves end up being hopelessly the same. The reduction of breaking to what is in common with the past evacuates it of its content. It is precisely those impressed only by similarity that claim "nothing new under the sun." The attack on biting allies itself with biting when it buries all traces of the new. Ironically, accusations are leveled only at the most modern movements—the average, it is vainly hoped, is safe. To wrest movement from its context, sever its connection to the break, and demand its originality point-blank, is the same delusion that accepts originality as creatio ex nihilo. Foucault appraises this methodology, "to ransack history in order to rediscover the play of anticipations or echoes, to go right back to the first seeds or to go forward to the last traces, to reveal in a work its fidelity to tradition or its irreducible uniqueness, to raise or lower its stock of originality [...] these are harmless enough amusements for historians who refuse to grow up" . The false equation of past and present, however, has the disastrous effect of mythologizing what already exists into something timeless and unchangeable. It obliterates a move's historical specificity, those conditions and wills that shape every performance of a move, that is in fact what is original. It becomes impossible to discern "biting more than just moves" as Jeremy recognized, which for Thesis is, "if you take someone's style, someone's feeling [...] when someone had this feeling and was like, 'Oh I want to make this move because I felt this way,' and if someone takes that from you? That's a true bite" . The result, Jeremy reasons, is that "we just stay at this same level" . "Everybody bites" is a death wish for breaking.
Bite signs, movements that function as accusations of biting, remained uncommon until the early 2000s. They are typically used by participants in cypher or battle settings immediately after judging another to be biting, though they have also been incorporated into rounds. Examples are seen in film recordings of the 1999 jam Back 2 Da Underground, held in Toronto, the 2001 Bboy Masters Pro-Am in Miami, and the 2001 World Hiphop Festival in South Korea. Their development coincided with growing opinion that, in Bebe's view, "we have everyone out there doing the same generic material over and over again. They are soooooo stuck on biting moves they don't even realize they are BITING" . Bebe, in a 2008 polemic, considered the primary cause to be the ascendancy of large-scale competitions beginning in the late 1990s. He argues that "the motives are harshly askew. The goal becomes winning the contest," whose "contrived" conditions have the consequence that "originality got replaced by ABILITY" and "UNoriginality is encouraged" . Inventing criteria might aid transparency, but the moment that originality is separated from music and technique, made one element among others, its concept is distorted beyond all recognition. Bebe instead emphasizes that, "it's not just about winning contests 'cause all that is fleeting. The real glory is in your contributions to the art form by becoming an artist and seeing your contributions in yourself and others" . Likewise, Kujo would observe:
It is not only that these systems reinforce specific forms of breaking, but that the entire context and focus of breaking is changed. It is the approach, Moy and Jeremy suggest, that has been standardized, by "the climate of the scene and the current trends and what everybody is trying to do" . Originality, when it appears, is therefore rejected if it does not already fit into "the formula needed" . This self-administration occurs long before the contest rules come into effect, producing the pattern of similarity they call "subconscious biting" . Orb has identified as a contributing factor that "with the use of social media and the internet there is too much info out there. Too many people look the same" . In 2002, the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported, "biting has become the norm. The slow motion helps enormously in capturing the fast movements. This has led to a much higher standard. On the other hand, the videos have made breaking uniform" . This would be amplified by video sharing over the internet, where, as Focus describes, "today, you get tons of jams every single weekend, and instantly everything is online" . However, already in 1985 Banes would lament, "there's now more of a tendency to copy personal style directly instead of making one's own signature" . While those new to breaking, in Maurizio's account, were "trying to imitate the style and having fun trying to do the battle in the Beat Street" , even among the New York leaders one could see breaking petrified by new demands. One mechanism behind the copying of artworks was described by Goethe: "Clients as well as artists promoted this new genre, the clients because it was cheap, the artists because it was fast. Thus art deliberately debased itself by making copying a matter of principle" . What went underappreciated was the extent to which the art, its practice, and its perception would be affected. The decontextualized mass of repeated moves, always presented as cutting edge, at once reflected the state of breaking and reinforced it. Benjamin's claim that "before the screen it is unprofitable to remember traditional contents which might come to mind before the stage" becomes tenable if one instead considers the commercial spectacle versus its supposed alternative . Even in cyphers, already in the late 1970s when large prearranged battles emerged, moves would be hidden from potential biters instead of freely following the music, withheld until a worthy audience could be found, optimized according to market rationality rather than the dance's internal logic. Yet it must be recognized that hiding moves and bite signs, like earlier verbal and corporeal methods, indicate the lack of any other safeguards. State-enforced laws such as copyright are particularly ill-equipped to protect improvisational art (e.g. ). Thus, we see in the past that "the Hoofers Club community reacted to acts of infringement in a conspicuously corporeal manner, by interrupting the performance and rowdily shaming the copycat" , while later at the Savoy Ballroom, Leon James recalls that perpetrators would get "whipped up, tromped in the middle of the crowd by all the others" . Ellison would reflect, "because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it—how often do we see even the most famous of jazz artists being devoured alive by their imitators, and, shamelessly, in the public spotlight?" . The encyclopédistes deduced that any public commons "doubtless authorized plagiarism, if the one who does it always offered things as good as those he borrows from others; but for the most part this exchange is too unequal, and there is one who enriches himself and adorns himself with the spoils of others, who cannot from his own funds make them the least restitution, or give them the slightest compensation" . Many commentators—Dixon Gottschild, for instance —have since extended this to inequality in dictating the terms of exchange. Not uncommonly, breakers claim that not biting is about respect or recognition, either for the artists or the art. Indeed, biting accusations may defend both the tradition of not biting as well as the move. This respect, then, is aimed more at "protecting the integrity of the traditions and forms of life" in which members of groups can recognize themselves . Oddly, Beat Street illuminates this facet of biting: "Y'all be showin' people how you down with breakin, and that's bullshit, because you ain't down with nothin'. [...] You're just like all the biters. You just take a bite and leave the rest" .
Footnotes
- Trixie perhaps describes an ideal for the dance. Sasa recalls, on one occasion, taking advantage of precisely Trixie's "set of patterned moves" . Furthermore, Coke La Rock claims, "in my little neighborhood you would get beat up for copying a guy's moves" —however, this was less common until later in the 1970s, where Puppet Master informs us, "you might get stomped out for biting somebody's moves. You had to come up with your own original shit, you know!"
- Graffiti writers like SON ONE, KENO, and CHINO MALO are documented using the term "biting" in 1978 . Even earlier, RIFF 170 recalls STAFF 161 accusing him of biting, suggesting that the concept, if not the word, was in existence.
- For Kant, "genius is the innate mental aptitude (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art [...] originality must be its primary property" . Opposed to this is the "one who goes by the name of a block-head, because he can never do more than merely learn and follow a lead" . Adorno considered Kant's idea undialectical and elitist, among more fundamental criticisms.
- Robin also connected this idea with originality, keeping the more optimistic formulation of the source: "Who is searching – he will find" .
- Hegel's critique of imitation begins with the imitation of nature, but extends to technique in itself. He reasons, "this enthusiasm for copying merely as copying is to be respected as little as the trick of the man who had learnt to throw lentils through a small opening without missing. He displayed this dexterity before Alexander, but Alexander gave him a bushel of lentils as a reward for this useless and worthless art" .