Beat Ya Feet Kings Say Goodbye to ABDC

If you're a fan of the guilty reality pleasure America's Best Dance Crew, you probably know by now that local dance ambassadors The Beat Ya Feet Kings were voted off this week. The group brought DC's indigenous go-go style to the stage, making it to a respectable 4 episodes. The five members managed to keep up with increasingly ridiculous challenges (seriously, martial arts?) before being losing out to all-girl LA outfit We Are Heroes.

What's ill about Beat Ya Feet Kings is not that they hung in for as long as they did, but that they were even on the show to begin with. While LA can claim krumping, NYC is the birthplace of breakdance, and the South has the ignominy of bringing the world everything from the tootsie roll to the Halle Berry, DC has never been known for its contributions to the dancefloor. For all y'all bamas who still don't know, "beat ya feet" is DC's own homegrown dance phenomenon. It originated in Southeast and features breakneck footwork set to crankin' go-go beats.

Go-Go as a whole of course, has famously failed to bubble over into the mainstream, despite countless attempts going back to the days of the ill-fated Trouble Funk movie "Good to Go" and Herbie Luv Bug jackin' beats for Salt-n-Pepa and Kid-n-Play. The Beat Ya Feet Kings may not be the ones to make our native sound blow up, but they have brought the DMV one step closer to taking our culture beyond the beltway.