Dance
How music makes or breaks street dance battles
A lot goes into soundtracking a street dance battle. Here, DJ and dancer Kieran Crowe explains the fine art of selecting music that will truly ignite the floor.
At the Australian finals of Red Bull Dance Your Style in Sydney, all eyes were on the two contestants facing off in battle. One by one, they’d take turns improvising their best street dance moves, responding on-the-spot to whatever song started playing.
Behind them, ever so slightly out of view, was the DJ. While it might be the two dancers facing off in battle at the centre of attention, the DJ’s role was a vital one. Contestants must improvise in the street dance style of their choice in response to whatever music starts playing. But to be able to dance well, they need something that can move them. That’s where Kieran Crowe comes in.
“The song absolutely does determine how you're going to feel in the battle, which is why I spend hours researching and collating proper playlists for the dancers – because I know when it is a track that you enjoy when you're out there, you're going to perform your best,” Crowe tells Red Bull.
Getting behind the decks at Red Bull Dance Your Style is a job Kieran is uniquely qualified for. Not only is he a skilled DJ, Kieran is also a longtime dancer – in fact, he’s twice been an entrant in previous years of Red Bull Dance Your Style. That means he intimately understands the relationship between movement and music, and how crucial the right song choice is.
“I've been in situations where I've been in a battle, and the DJ has played a song that just doesn't really hit the mark for anyone. And it leaves us all kind of dull,” he says. “That includes the audience as well – dancers feed off the audience. So if the audience isn't feeling the music, either, then it just makes it a lot more difficult for the dancer to really shine though.”
As Crowe puts it, there’s a lot of “filters” every song he chose for his playlist had to make it through. The first is genre.
Street dance was, of course, born out of music, with the street styles we know and love today all having roots in different genres of music. Just as breakdance came from hip-hop, house dance came from house music. Popping and locking were both born out of funk tracks, while waacking comes from disco. Crowe aims to give each dancer a track in their style of choosing early on in the competition.
But within those genres, there’s still music that's more appropriate for a dancer than not: “There’s certain BPMs and rhythms that are more tailored towards a [certain] dance. And some things might not be so suitable for a battle.”
For instance, Kieran chose the H-Town remix of Destiny’s Child classic ‘Bug A Boo’ for his playlist – a song that “gives [the dancer] a lot to play with in the music”.
“The BPM is nice and upbeat. It gives a hip-hop dancer a nice beat to ride on. But even within the song itself, it has accents in it that gives the dancer an opportunity to highlight certain moments in the music,” he explains. “So some songs might be pretty monotone, in that it's just the same loop or things over and over again. But for a dance battle, it's almost like what they're doing is having a conversation. And at the end of the conversation, you want to have exclamation points or accents within the actual dance itself.”
There’s other necessity when selecting tracks: “Above all, it has to be a vibe,” Crowe adds.
The added filter with Red Bull Dance Your Style is choosing songs the audience will know and love too. While other street dance battles tend to be soundtracked by more obscure song choices, Red Bull Dance Your Style favours better known hits.
“In a normal dance battle, you generally wouldn't hear commercial hits, for example – they're usually quite underground songs, very niche instrumentals and things, or there’ll be '70s and '80s funk music that you've never heard of in your life. So it's been a really fun balancing act finding music that I know the dancers will like, and that the audience will like.”
To get that balance right, Crowe likes to resurrect iconic music hits from decades’ past. His 2022 Red Bull Dance Your Style playlists include the likes of CHIC, Busta Rhymes, Grandmaster Flash and Salt N Pepa. But he also likes to dig out plenty of '90s and noughties favourites. For the final, he included ‘What's Your Flava’ by Craig David.
“It's got a great vibe, it's a throwback, it's a really good popping song. I think the crowd will be like, Oh my god, I haven't heard this in a while, and the dancer will probably feel the same way. But the dancer will also feel like, I can really smash this – I know it back to front and it’s got that pumping flavour to it.”
While Crowe tailors his song choice to the dancer on stage most of the time, for the very final song of the competition, however, he likes to mix it up. He decided that whoever made it to the final two, he would serve them '90s classic ‘Spice Up Your Life’ by the Spice Girls.
“It has got a tempo that is really good for someone who does waacking – they would absolutely annihilate this. A house dancer would do well for it as well because it’s got that beat behind it. And it’s got a good consistent beat behind it that poppers and lockers can go with too.”
But it was also a choice designed to challenge dancers, to “really show us who the best dancer is at that moment in time”.
Ultimately, though, Crowe wants the dancers and the crowd to have a good time, and to foster the intrinsic soul-to-body connection between music and movement.
“Dancers will perform their best when they're feeling good, if they really liked the song, and it's something that they can dance to, they're going to perform their best,” Crowe says. “At the end of the day, the music has to make the dancers dance.”