The Year Television Tried to Teach You Breakdance
There’s an educational video from 1984 in which German public broadcaster ZDF explains breakdance. The host is Eisi Gulp, a comedian and character actor whose entire register was lovably unhinged—rubber-faced, enthusiastic, cheerfully divorced from anything resembling cool. His students are equally enthusiastic. The instruction is earnest. Almost nothing about it is correct.
Breakdance in 1984 was still genuinely dangerous cultural territory. It came out of New York’s South Bronx, out of block parties and street corners and a creative response to having nothing—no money, no access, no platform. By the time it reached German public television with Gulp leading a tutorial, it had undergone the standard transformation: scrubbed of context, evacuated of menace, repackaged as wholesome youth activity. Which is funny. But the specific flavor of the funny is what gets me—the commitment of everyone involved, the total sincerity with which they approach something they don’t have the first clue about.
This is the perennial transaction between subculture and institution. The subculture produces something with an actual edge—musical, physical, social, political—and the institution notices it’s popular, concludes that it must be captured and distributed, and in the process of capturing it loses everything that made it worth capturing. The teenagers who invented breakdance in the Bronx were not doing it so that a ZDF camera crew could document Gulp’s approximation of the windmill. But here we are.
The video survives because it’s funny and a little poignant, the way all sincere failures are poignant. Nobody in it is being cynical or stupid—they genuinely think they’re doing something useful, bridging a gap between youth culture and the people who didn’t grow up with it. They’re just wrong about what that bridging requires. You can explain the steps but you can’t transmit the context, and the context is the whole thing.
The same transaction still happens constantly, just faster and at scale. Subculture becomes content becomes tutorial becomes obsolete, the cycle taking months now instead of years. At least Gulp’s version had charm. When ZDF was three years late to breakdance, they showed up with genuine effort and let it be captured on tape. There’s something almost admirable about that degree of earnest wrongness.