Songoftheday 9/6/13 - Out in the street you don't survive by being weak, this is our time walls were made for us to climb...

Ollie & Jerry - "Breakin'...There's No Stopping Us"
from the album Breakin' (Original Soundtrack) (1984)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #9 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 11

Today's Song of the Day is from the movie that touted the biggest dance fad of the early 80s, breakdancing. Breakin' brought together acting novices Lucinda Dickey (a Solid Gold dancer) with breakdancers Adolfo Quinones (Ozone) and Michael Chambers (Turbo) for a low-budget film costing just over a million to produce, but so far has reaped over 50 million dollars to date. The soundtrack is bangin', with selections by Rufus and Chaka Khan ("Ain't Nobody", already a top-40 hit), the Bar-Kays, and an early appearance from rapper Ice-T. But the big hit from the set would be the theme song, performed by an R&B duo of drummer Ollie Brown and singer Jerry Knight, the latter who was part of Ray Parker Jr's group Raydio ("You Can't Change That") in the late 70s/early 80s. "Breakin'...There's No Stopping Us", written and produced by the pair, combined the skittish drum patterns emulating the scratched records breakdancers riff on, and Prince-like power-synths that dominated the music. Getting a remix by Madonna's then-squeeze Jellybean Benitez, and it's a classic beyond the "fad" (especially since it doesn't explicitly mention the dance)....

"Breakin'..." became the duo's sole top-10 hit on the American pop chart in August of 1984. It also spent a week on top of Billboard's Dance Club Play chart, and three weeks at #3 on the R&B chart as well. The single even did better in England, topping out at #5 on their singles chart.

However that would be the duo's last hurrah on the pop chart. As Breakin's sequel, Electric Boogaloo, did half the business while the title track from Ollie & Jerry only managed to stall just under the top-40 on the R&B chart and Dance chart. They split not much later than that, and Knight passed from cancer in 1997.

(Fun fact - I had such the crush on Chambers - Turbo - in this movie)

(Click below to see the rest of the post)


Here's a (badly preserved) clip of the duo on Soul Train...

Here's how the song looked in the opening credits of the movie...

...and finally, the #1 club remix by Jellybean Benitez for the track...

As a bonus....If you've got and hour and a half to kill, here's the full movie...

Up tomorrow: Those legs. That wig. The Acid Queen's shining moment.