Entry · catalog no. 1195
Crip walk
/ /krɪp wɔk/ /KRIP wawk
noun; also verb, to C-walk · South Central and Compton, Los Angeles; nationwide by video from about 2000 · 1970s
✓ Verified
1.
Fast, intricate footwork — heel-and-toe pivots, V-shaped shuffles, gliding steps — that at origin spelled out letters with the feet: the writer's own set, or a rival's name written and then scratched out. The function was signaling, marking, and celebrating, not entertaining, and among the people it came from it was read the way a signature is read.
“He hit the corner, C-walked four bars, and everybody on that side of the street knew exactly what had been said.”
2.
In its later and much wider life, a dance move detached from that meaning — done in videos, in end zones, on tennis courts, by people with no relationship to the origin. The detachment is the whole controversy.
“She C-walked for about three seconds and the sports pages talked about it for a week.”
Origin & Attribution
Crips in South Central and Compton, Los Angeles, in the early 1970s. This is not a fan-wiki attribution: ABC News reported in 2002 that no one disputes the dance originated with the Crips, that the gang appeared in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, and that the footwork was on display at gang celebrations more than twenty years before that reporting. It moved into national view through Los Angeles rap video in the early 2000s.
2001
Xzibit's Get Your Walk On video puts the footwork on national television; MTV is reported to have declined videos containing it
2002
Manual Arts, Crenshaw, and Washington Prep high schools in Los Angeles ban the dance; ABC News reports the story on 13 June
2012
Serena Williams does about three seconds of it after taking Olympic gold on 4 August, and draws a week of national commentary
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
South Central and Compton, Los Angeles; nationwide by video from about 2000 · 1970s
Spoken by
Crips in Los Angeles; later Black Americans nationally, often without the original reading
$CRIPWAThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady56 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
66/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1970
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Oliver Libaw, A New Forbidden Dance at L.A. Schools, ABC News, 13 June 2002
news · reported
■
Xzibit, Get Your Walk On, from Restless, 2000; single 2001
song · recorded
■
WC featuring Snoop Dogg and Nate Dogg, The Streets, Def Jam, 23 July 2002, dir. Chris Robinson
song · recorded
■
+ Cite a sourceCJ Mac, C-Walk: It's a Way of Living, documentary, 2003
film · documentary
See also