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M: So to start out with, your name?
D: Damian Day

M: What's your ethnic background?
D: I'm Black and White, but I grew up one whole side of my family is Mexican, and a large portion of my family is Korean or like Japanese.

M: How did you start breakdancing?
D: I grew up around it, so it was pretty natural. My older brother and my cousins were all into it. So my whole family was into music and hip-hop and stuff like that.

M: Did you breakdance at school?
D: Yep. Recess was the spot. Stay in the lunchroom, move the lunch tables and go to lunch early just so you can break. In the hallways, [at] recess we had a flipping contest to see if we could do the most flips in a row or flip off the highest part of the jungle gym.

M: Do people realize how hard breakdancing is?
D: When we explain it to people that [haven't] seen it a lot, we define it as ballet on your head. [In] ballet you need a lot of balance, but we're doing half of the stuff they do upside down. You use every part of your body you never knew you had. It's very physical. It's amazing when you look at it. It looks so easy, but when you start breaking it down, you're like, "holy cow. I didn't know there was that much to it."

M: What other dance styles do you admire?
D: The group that I hang out with, we're pretty much open to anything. We'll watch anything from Cirque de Soleil to the Nutcracker. You just got to pull what you see from it and use it in your own interpretation. In our routines, we do a lot of stuff where we flip each other, and a lot of that stuff comes from circuses.

M: Was breakdancing bigger back in the day?
D: No, it's actually bigger now than it was back in the day, I feel. I mean it's huge now. It's everywhere from like Tokyo to the smallest Midwest town you'd ever think it was in.

M: How did it die the first time around? How did it go under?
D: It didn't necessarily die. I know a lot of kids that were in the old movies and what they told me was it got to a point where it was so large and so many companies were trying to buy into it and use it as a marketing scheme, everyone got kind of burnt out on it. But there's always been another generation out there that's been keepin' it alive. It kept growing throughout because there's kids over in Europe that were still doin' it. What's cool is here it's kind of on a newer theme. A lot more new moves, but you go to somewhere like London, it's like they still wear the old school gear and everything. adidas. It's fresh over there, I like it. And then Japan's on some like really crazy stuff. They do a lot of the martial arts stuff in it. There's one crew I saw in London. They had teams with straight-up swords and stuff.

M: Do you see breakdancing becoming more mainstream?
D: It's not mainstream in the sense of, like mainstream MTV, but within the community of underground hip hop it's really mainstream. Everyone knows about it. The compet-itions are crazy. Like the one in London that I missed a couple months ago. First place routine was $10,000. I mean if you go from competition to competition, you can literally live on it if you have the dedication to put the time and effort into it.

M: How do you feel when you see breakdancers hitting it big?
D: It causes controversy. One of my friends, the one that really got recognized, his name is Flow, he was in Will Smith's video. There's a lot of discussion about, is he selling out, or is he, you know, making a living doing what you wanna do. There's a whole section of kids that don't think [he] should do it. There's a whole other group that accepted it and is like, "that's a living," he's doing what he wants to do. Then there's the kids in the middle that really don't know how they wanna feel about it but they're still doing their thing because they love it. It's not like anyone hates each other for it. As long as it's being done for the right reason and you're not just doin' it to make a buck. And as long as you're doing it and you love it, it's fun. Everyone is starting to come together and get agents and get organized with it and come at it with more of a business sense instead of just, you know, letting people talk them into doing stuff and not getting paid for it. People watch out for each other a lot more.

M: Is there a lot of crossover with non-hip-hop activities, like snowboarding?
D: Yeah, there used to be a lot of events that got a lot of different people together. Lots of the skateboard kids and snowboard kids. I snowboard. I've been snowboarding like four or five years now.

M: What other kinds of activities are you passionate about?
D: I still do BMX trick bike stuff. I got into the snowboarding and now it's all about import racing.

M: You're talking about race cars.
D: Yes, that's where it is. The hot rods of the '90s are Hondas and Acuras and foreign cars. It's crazy. It's gettin' bigger and bigger.

M: It seems like two such different worlds, racecars and breakdancing.
D: I don't know. It's kind of different but it's cool. Everyone parks from maybe 10:30 until 11:00 or until they get kicked out. But you should see the cars. It's artwork, basically. The whole import racing scene is getting big. A lot of skateboard companies have cars now that go out and do the competition. In Japan, they have cars with, like, strobe lights on them.

M: What are your favorite clothes brands?
D: Ecko, Nine by Nine, Triple Five Soul. Those are the main ones I stick with. I'm always catching on to new ones because I go to these events and there'll be promoters there from all of these clothing companies and reps and they'll give us free samples. I got a closet full of stuff like you can't even get. I have like nickle shirts that were just like the trial ones, all faded because the color sucks. Then I see them in the store and it's like, "oh I saw that last year." Free T-shirts are never turned down. [With] T-shirts, anyone would be like, "yeah, I'll take it." I got 200 shirts in my closet, half of them I didn't pay for.

M: So, these brands do trend testing?
D: Yep. Before the show is over they'll open the trunk and be like, "pull it out wear it during the show. Here's my card. Call us up, we'll get you more stuff."

M: What are the big sponsorship brands?
D: Puma's been sponsering a lot of events lately. adidas kind of backed out. They basically said to some of the kids, "you're gonna wear it anyway, so why should we sponsor it?"

M: Did that make them stop wearing adidas?
D: It hasn't made anyone necessarily stop wearing adidas, which is kind of sad, but they don't promote it as much now. But I've always liked Puma.

M: What brands have been with it from the start, aside from Adidas and Puma?
D: Nine by Nine, King Pin. Basically, the graff writers started doing their own shirts, started doing shirts for other people and they made companies out of it.

M: Where does FUBU fit into all of that? What is their niche?
D: It's not really defined. To me it's the MTV hip-hop clothing. It's the mainstream; everyone wears it just to be cool. It's the "in" thing to wear. FUBU goes with trends. If you watch their clothing they go with whatever's "in" at that time. For a while they had all the sport jerseys, now they're all up into the dressy.

M: What about Stüssy?
D: We did a show at Nordstrom and we got a bunch of Stüssy gear. They gave it to us.

M: So, Nordstrom paid you to come in?
D: Yeah, to do a show. Mall of America Nordstrom. We got a hundred dollars worth of gear. Had a whole show, DJ, everything. It was cool. They gave us each almost $200 worth of clothes and we got to go through the thing and pick out what we wanted.

M: Are there any brands that you really don't like?
D: I dislike the major brands like Tommy Hilfiger. I just couldn't be a walking billboard. You can only wear red, white and blue so much; but then there's other companies like Nautica. I like their stuff, but I don't wanna pay $90 for a pair of pants that you spend $10 to make. Hip-hop clothing gets kind of ridiculous on their prices, but most of it is reasonable. It also depends on where you're buying it from. I've been out to Cali and New York and it's not as expensive, but here everyone jacks the price up cause everybody wants it and it's hard to find. The kids I know just wear what they like to wear, what looks good regardless. it's not about buying the latest hip-hop gear, it's just how you put it together and how you carry it.

M: Do you support sponsors?
D: Oh, yeah. It's known, if a company's gonna sponsor it, they're on the mike like, "yo this is who sponsored this. Thank 'em, you know, support them," and the kids do. As long as they're giving the love, then I'll support it. Like the thing in London that I went to, the UK championship, Sony Playstation sponsored that. It's crazy, they give the kids a lot of money, and they had video game walls set up and big screens so everyone could see. In the crowd alone there were 5,000 people, two floors, packed shoulder to shoulder. It was insane. That's the biggest event I've ever been to, I've never seen that many kids.

M: What other kind of companies have you seen come into the hip-hop scene that really aren't associated with it?
D: There's a yo-yo commercial [featuring] a crew from Canada. They're a bunch of poppers and they're using yo-yos. Trident [bubble gum] commercials, too. It's crazy, the stuff they did. It's like, "wow, Trident had breakers in it.'"It's a good commercial. It fit. It wasn't just thrown in there to grab the attention of people.

M: If you were gonna dress up, what kinds of brands would you buy?
D: I go for whatever I can put together that people are gonna be like, "whoa where'd you get that from?" Honestly, my mom sews clothes so that's what I'd go for.