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If you watched all the videos included in my recent B Side story on bopping—the playful, infectious, and increasingly popular dance movement heating up on the west side—you’ll notice a few faces that pop up in more than one. There’s Lil Kemo, aka Travon Biggs, the self-proclaimed “Bop King of Chicago” and the breakout star in the dance movement; there’s Dlow, aka Daryon Simmons, Biggs’s frequent dance collaborator and a bop star in his own right; and there’s Breezy Montana, aka 24-year-old Travaris Brown, who’s one of a small group of rappers providing a soundtrack for bopping. The last, a west-side MC, introduces Biggs and Simmons in the first video they made together, “Dlow and Kemo (Episode 1),” which also employs one of Brown’s earliest songs (“Ballout”), and he’s in the video for “Bop Like Me,” a tune he cut with M.I.C’s Lil Chris that’s on Chris’s recent Money Talks mixtape. Both “Bop Like Me” and “Ballout” are on Brown’s debut mixtape, Rise 2 Fame, which he dropped Saturday.
One of the earliest videos Brown uploaded shows Dlow dancing with a couple other boppers in a gas-station lot, their moves synching up with Brown’s “Havin Shit.” According to Brown, the video documents the beginning stages of Team Fiesta, the loose bopping collective that peaked at 500 members and dissolved a couple months ago. You can see Team Fiesta at its peak in the video for “Ballout,” which features Brown (and his collaborator on the song, Keyani) rapping among scores of kids who turned out to bop while wearing Team Fiesta’s red-white-and-blue bandannas. (Biggs and Simmons are in the clip as well.) While Simmons takes credit for starting Team Fiesta, Brown played an important role in building the collective into what it became, partially through providing the group with a fiesta-ready soundtrack.
Leor Galil writes about hip-hop every Wednesday.
