(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- This summer in Paris, breaking will be an Olympic event for the first time. Richard “Crazy Legs” Colón, an original member and president of the pioneering 1980s breaking and hip-hop group Rock Steady Crew, tells Businessweek how he built up the art form and his brand.
Rock Steady was about being different by presenting ourselves differently onstage. The way we showed up to a show was in our street clothes, but no one ever knew how we were going to be onstage. We made sure that each person in the group wasn’t just a duplicate of the person standing next to them. OK, we’ll do the moves and we’ll do the choreography, but please make sure your personal flavor of character and style exudes as you’re doing those things. You can see someone doing something amazing and visibly dynamic, but that’s not what you’re going to feel walking away.
We were absolutely robbed by the industry, taken advantage of. We signed a million-dollar deal in 1983. We each saw $7,000 from that deal. That’s when we learned the word “recoupment.” One minute you’re sitting and having Cristal, the next thing you know, we’re on the outside looking in. When you don’t set out to do something like that, you don’t realize that you have an opportunity to evolve into some sort of business. We were living the culture onstage, so our focus wasn’t really on the business. We were wild kids from the streets.
I would say I didn’t effectively do business until my second time around and never stopped since. In the early ’90s, I decided to look at what DJs were doing in terms of mixtapes. If I knew that my main lane was dance and breaking, I’m saying to myself, “Why is it that a DJ could put out a mixtape and maintain his relevance? Why can’t I do that with videos for dance?”
So I started putting out videos. I invested $5,000 and turned it into $60,000 within, like, a month by just making videotapes and putting them out and bringing in that young kid who might be interested in the remote area of Billings, Montana, who likes breaking but isn’t sure if it still is something to do because they don’t see many people doing it.
When I started doing events and competitions, that became the model for what a lot of the events eventually did, whether it be the Freestyle Session in California, the UK B-Boy Championships in London. So many of these events led to breaking being in the Olympics. Right now I’m gearing up for my annual festival, Puerto Rock Steady, which will showcase music and dance in New Jersey this August. You know, we don’t know our power until we exercise it. One thing I also learned: Negotiations never start until someone says no. And read those damn contracts.
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(Corrects an earlier version that referred to Colón as a co-founder of Rock Steady Crew.)
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