Transcription
[Music] Stephen Mark Nicholas Benson is my name, my whole name, my real name. Sker Rabbit is a locking name, and it was a guy named Sker Rabbit. Uh, he wasn't with the lockers, but he knew the lockers, and, um, he, uh, he's the one who made up the dance, Sker Rabbit, right? And so when I started liking, that was my specialty, doing the Sker Rabbit. I used to do all these different variations. It was his style, but I just started switching it and changing it. So everybody called me like Lil Sker Rabbit or Sker Rabbit Jr., and the name Sker Rabbit just stuck. So that's how I got the name Sker Rabbit.
You know, on '73, '74, uh, I started locking. I seen the lockers, and I started locking. And some of the lockers was from my neighborhood, which is, I stayed on the borderline of Compton and Watts. And, um, and so, you know, I would, I would see lockers all the time. So I, I liked to dance, so I would lock, but it was just, uh, it was a thing to do. I didn't, I didn't want to be a dancer, you know, I just, I just liked it, you know. I wanted to be a gangster, that's all I wanted to be, period.
I, uh, someone had told me about popping, but I had never seen it, you know what I'm saying? And, uh, and I lived in the Bay Area in San Francisco, and I, uh, I'd seen a, a few, uh, it, it wasn't called popping. I seen people dime stopping and and doing a robot and stuff like that, but I wouldn't, I didn't think it was anything different from what I was doing. But then, uh, my cousins came down from, uh, which is Boogaloo Sam, and his real name is Sammy Solomon, and, uh, Timothy Solomon, which is Poppin' Pete. Moved from Fresno, California to Long Beach, California, and we hooked up, and, uh, it was over for me, you know.
Uh, I'm in a group called Electric Boogaloo, um, started, created, founded by my brother Boogaloo Sam and Nate Johnson. Far as the, the group, the original group called Electric Boogaloo. Electric Boogaloo Lockers are from Fresno, California. Um, Sam started, uh, he created the style, popping and boogaloo, back in 1976, '75, '76. I mean, he was just doing a dance, you know what I'm saying? He was just doing this style that really had no name. And his uncle had had, uh, giv him the name Boogaloo, or said that you was doing something, uh, said, "Do that Boogaloo," or whatever. And, and the name Boogaloo, uh, kind of stuck with the style because, like I said, it was no name for what he was doing. And from, from there, he just started developing more stuff, and, you know, and then next thing you know, he started teaching other guys, and then they made a group called Electric Boogaloo Lockers. Then I became a member in 1978.
Uh, and from Long, we moved to Long Beach, California from Fresno, and that was in 1978. Uh, Sam had called me. Sam is, is my, my older brother, but we have different mothers, same father. But, um, he had called me up and said, "I got a style called Boogaloo and popping." And, and he was trying to explain to me over the phone, you know. I'm going like, you know. And I, when he was telling, he said, "Oh, you make your arm snap," and you, so when I get off the phone, I start going [Music] like, like, what? I mean, I couldn't understand, like, you know, you pop your arms, you pop your arms. I mean, you make him look. I'm going like, and I, I was going like, like, you know, I'm going to hide. So he, we was, that's when we had moved to Long Beach from Fresno. Sam came down to visit, and we picked him up from the bus station, and I like ran. I was 16 years old, and I got his bags. We got to the house, I ran the house actually before he even got in the house. "Let me see the dance, let me see the dance." He said, "No, I wait." So we, uh, we got into the apartment, to the house, and went to the bedroom, and what I seen him do, man, it changed my life. I had never, ever seen anybody move their body like that. And I had, um, I think that that night, I stayed, we stayed up eight hours. We stayed up almost all night. And my mom told was like, "Came room, go to bed," cuz I was in there just just doing this all night in a mirror. "Go to." And where I woke up the next morning, my neck was sore, my arms were sore, but I had to do this dance. And I practiced every day, hard.