The Rich, Black, Southern Heritage Of Hip-Hop Majorettes

“Beyoncé’s recent Netflix concert film Homecoming highlights her admiration for the hip-hop majorette style. Her iconic Coachella performance, which opens with a phalanx of majorette-inspired dancers clearing the way for Bey costumed as Nefertiti, arrives at an auspicious moment for majoretting. Advocates of this uniquely Southern performance style — a community that includes both Southern straight black women and femme gay black men — have been using digital media platforms over the past decade to formalize and institutionalize the genre as a dance discipline. The 2018 Beychella performance is a culmination of many cultural phenomena that have helped amplify the visibility of majorette dance, including the emergence of commercial dance through televised dance competitions, the continued popularity of dance reality programming like Lifetime’s Bring It! (which just aired its fifth season and has spawned a road tour that travels the South), and the work of amateur videographers who upload weekly game performance footage to YouTube, creating a digital archive of the dance form and making performances available for future study.”

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/frederickmckindra/marching-bands-hip-hop-majorettes-jsettes-prancing-elites