The Rise of Flex

The Brooklyn-based genre of dance music that has thrived since the ’90s is beginning to reach far beyond the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, which has housed dance competitions in the genre for years, and is breaking through to much larger audiences. Pitchfork has chronicled the history of flex music and its dancers, the “Volume” riddim and lazer effects that characterize its sound, and the growing number of hip-hop fixtures who originated in the scene (such as Boof, Nicki Minaj’s DJ).

Watch a clip of one of the Brooklyn Masonic Hall’s flexing competitions, The D.R.E.A.M. Ring, after the jump.

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Liz Wood is a writer and critic living in Cape Cod. She was a 2022 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow and a member of the NBCC 2023 and 2024 Greg Barrios Book in Translation Prize. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Words Without Borders, Electric Literature, and elsewhere.

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