remembering cookie head jenkins

this past march was the 18th anniversary of the murder of a breakdancer named cookie head jenkins. it strikes me that with all the outpouring of grief over the loss of biggie and tupac, cookie head’s death in contrast has been largely forgotten. i mean you never see a chico mural of cookie head frozen forever in one of his famous stances? big pun? yup. big l? indeed. jam master jay? certainly. and all rightly so! but why did the death of cookie head, which occurred way back in 1987, not stick in the hip hop communities consciousness?

is it because unlike so many other rap tragedies the crime was actually solved? is it because breakers (the isolated period which yielded so much electric boogalooing excepted) have always gotten the short shrift in the rap game? (dancing today is wik-wik-whack at best. no rock steady crews at the party. not even so much as a scoob and scrap lover! to be fair though dancing must be pretty tough in a bullet proof vest.) or is as i suspect the little matter of cookie head being a fictional character?! considering the thousand metric tons of pure high grade fronting which hip hop has produced in it’s history that hardly seems fair. what follows is a short pictorial remembrance of cookie head and those involved (or not) with the whole sad affair.