What is harlem shake song

This video -- featuring four costumed dudes humping air -- claims to be the "original" Harlem video, but it lacks a few of the details particular to the meme. These include the following:. The "craze" again, oof has even made it onto Today. Whenever something that originated on the internet makes it onto a morning show, it is sure to become: 1. The Harlem Shake is dead, long live the Harlem Shake! That's when everything gets wild.

But this Harlem Shake is not quite like the original. Filmmaker Chris McGuire even went out on the streets of Harlem to get reactions to the videos. To quote one resident, "That's not the Harlem Shake at all.

That's humpin', and that's not the Harlem Shake. Get Help Now! The Harlem Shake is an internet meme that went massively viral in early It featured short videos of people wildly dancing to a song of the same name.

In January , internet personality Filthy Frank George Miller uploaded a comedy sketch to YouTube of himself and a small group of friends outrageously dancing to the song in funny costumes. After a few parodies went viral in early February, Harlem Shake spin-off videos mushroomed on the internet. According to YouTube Trends, users around the world were uploading over 4, Harlem Shake videos per day by February 10, , when the trend was at its peak.

Fun to watch and easy to make, Harlem Shake videos boasted ever more creative and elaborate variations as the craze ballooned. They typically follow a formula: The videos are about 30 seconds long. Over the course February , the Harlem Shake exploded into mainstream media worldwide, with countless celebrities, sport teams, corporations, politicians, and activists contributing their own takes on the Harlem Shake.

Minstrelsy also seemed to mark the beginning of a deliberate albeit, covert attempt by dominant white culture to appropriate Afro-Amerian cultlure through popular music, as a means of extending white hegemony through racist narratives that reinforced the status quo. Hegemony has been developed in the United States after many years of racial dictatorship.

The appropriation of the Harlem Shake falls in line with this pattern, because it continues the trend of a majority ruling over the minority based on race. As above, minstrel shows are the earliest example of cultural appropriation of black music, but allow me to present a more recent and still-celebrated offender: Elvis Presley.

Black musicians were almost always rejected because of the allegedly hyper-sexual, animalistic stereotypes surrounding them in the s.

However, when Elvis covered these songs and moved those famous hips, girls swooned and records flew off the shelves. This function — to experience the Other without having to actually immerse oneself in it — is another reason that Harlem Shake videos continue to be made, viewed, and shared. The people participating in this folklore — and I say people because it is hard to pinpoint one singular group that participates — wish to experience a taste of Harlem, as incorrect as that taste may be.

Brubaker, B. Philosophy of Hip-Hop. Hooks, B.