Why We Love Harlem Shake
By Kevin Robinson in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 14, 2013 6:40PM
In the two or so years that I’ve been doing the Afternoon Diversion for the site (or the “YouTube beat” as I like to think of it) there’s one thing that I feel confident declaring as a fact: People love to upload videos of themselves dancing.
A few years ago when LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem was the hit jam, there was a plethora of self-made videos of people shuffling in all sorts of places, from bedrooms to frozen food aisles. And let’s not forget the classic “Pony” by Genuwine, which has spawned it’s own Tumblr to catalog all the videos of people dancing, alone, in their own homes, to that hit.
And so, this week, Harlem Shake blew up the internet. You’ve likely heard the song, from someone’s headphones on the "L," or at a coworkers desk on a lunch break, seen it posted on Facebook or heard kids on the bus talking about it. In fact, according to YouTube’s own statistics, over 4,000 Harlem Shake videos are uploaded every day. That’s a staggering amount of DIY dancing going on, likely leaving the rest of us wondering what the hype is all about.
In a nutshell, a typical Harlem Shake video features about 30 seconds of Baauer’s song “Harlem Shake,” with one person in a group, usually wearing a mask, dancing awkwardly. When the break drops and the song says “Do the Harlem Shake” at about the 15 second mark, everybody flips out and starts doing the dance, which was actually popularized in 1981. This appearance of this zeitgeist can be traced all the way back to the last day of January, when a YouTuber called Filthy Frank posted a video of four dudes in spandex doing the Harlem Shake. Within days people were posting their own take on his video, and this century’s latest dance craze was born.
In short order all sorts of groups were uploading their own takes on the video, from a group of Firefighters, to the University of Georgia Men’s Swim team, to Chicago’s own Groupon (always one to jump on a bandwagon).
If everyone from office workers to CPS students to yes, even your parents are on to this trend, hasn’t the fad already passed? Well, yes and no. Like any good fad, the Harlem Shake will stop holding our interest shortly, if it hasn’t already. But the most amazing thing about this trend isn’t that it’s happening, but how it’s happening. For as long as there has been popular music dance crazes have happened. With the advent of the internet, we simply have a new media with which we transmit these ideas. So instead of heading to the Aragon Ballroom to do the Charleston, or buying Chubby Checker’s single 78 so we can Do the Twist or turning on MTV to figure out how to caterpillar, we’re yelling “Hey sexy lady” at weddings because we’ve all seen Psy on YouTube. And what’s even better is that we can upload a video of ourselves Shuffling in the grocery store, or even better, doing the Harlem Shake with our friends. Here’s to another 100 years of dance crazes, sweeping not just the nation, but the world.