Unless you lived through it—ideally while wearing parachute pants—you might have a hard time fully grasping just how omnipresent breaking was in 1980s pop culture. There were movies based on it, like Beat Street, Breakin’ and its successor, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, whose subtitle has lived on for decades as a punch line for pretty much every sequel made. There were obligatory breaking scenes in movies—Cocoon, Revenge of the Nerds and countless others—that otherwise had nothing to do with breaking. The sitcom Alice had a breaking episode. Merv Griffin had a crew on his show. Barney Rubble showed off his moves in a commercial for Cocoa Pebbles. It was everywhere.
Naturally, politicians saw a popular trend and were eager to get in on the action. So it was that at his second inauguration gala, in January 1985, a tuxedoed Ronald Reagan watched as Jimmy Stewart introduced the New York City Breakers, prompting a nation of viewers to ask themselves, How the hell did we get here? The answer only makes the story stranger (and whiter and older): It was Frank Sinatra’s idea. “Frank was a hoofer,” says Michael Holman, who founded and managed the group. “He came from a tradition where you had to sing and dance. You couldn’t just be a singer. He loved us.”
