Somewhere between the coffee shops and the tech offices, Cambridge has a hip hop scene, and nobody warns the tourists about it.
That is me up there under the name Relentless, on a stage that had no business hosting the energy that room brought. Boston does not get enough credit as a breaking city. It sits in the shadow of New York and gets treated like a college town that happens to also have dancers in it, but the local scene is deep, competitive, and has been building talent for years without much attention from outside the community.
I have written before about just how serious that competitive scene gets, most notably at the UDEF Breaking Tournament, which still holds the record for the largest prize purse ever put up for a breaking battle. Nights like the one in Cambridge are the other side of that same coin. Less about the prize money, more about the room deciding, in real time, whether you earned the floor or not.
You did, or you did not, and everyone in the room knows immediately which one it was. That is the whole appeal.
