Hip hop dances are often considered street dances, because of how they were formed and are being practiced.
Old school
Old school hip hop dances are those styles that evolved in the 1970s and 1980s and were primarily danced to funk and old school hip hop music. Breakdancing is the best known of all hip hop dance styles, and is considered a corner stone of hip hop culture itself. In the 1980s, many funk dance styles that originally evolved separated from hip hop, such as popping and locking, started to be incorporated with the hip hop culture as well, and could be seen danced together with breakdancing.
New school/new style
In the 1990s, as hip hop music evolved and grew further away from funk, it got slower, heavier and more aggressive. This gave birth to new styles of hip hop dance, most of them danced upright in opposite to breakdancing which is famous for its floorwork. New school hip hop dancing took inspiration from many of the older street dance styles and merged them into something new. Some more specific styles of new school hip hop are krumping, harlem shake, snap dancing, blood walk, clown walk, hill toe, booty popping, crip walk.
Classifying new school hip hop as a dance style of its own has grown common with larger street dance competitions such as Juste Debout, which includes new style as a separate category for people to compete in.
Many of the newer styles of hip hop are a common sight in today's youth-oriented music videos on television channels such as MTV.
Hip hop at dance studios
Today, many dance studios offer hip hop classes in which they practice elements of various hip hop dances, often mixing them with more structured dance styles such as jazz. As hip hop is such a broad genre it gives the choreographer much freedom and room for personal interpretation, allowing them to be more creative.