Why is everyone talking about the harlem shake

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! Let's enjoy these notable examples as we grieve its passing:. We'll notify you here with news about. Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest? Comments 0. With a little structure, though, our minds fill in the blanks. Anyone can sub their own variables into this equation, and practically everyone has.

Stick a camera somewhere, film part one, get everyone riled up, film part two, cut them together, add the slow motion effect. The end product is remarkably snackable. Worst-case scenario, you burned 30 seconds. If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. The Harlem Shake is a nearly perfect internet meme because it almost perfectly erases its origins.

If every imitation of "Gangnam Style" inevitably leads you back to the deceptively subtle, near-perfect original , the Harlem Shake does the opposite. Every imitation leads you to another imitation, the lower its fidelity the better. The videos themselves are quite literally viral. A YouTube search for "Harlem Shake" turns up 60,, with 45, uploaded within the last week. One person starts out with symptoms — dancing, a horse head, etc.

A few minutes after that, everyone who saw the video has the same idea, and the meme spreads further, a domino effect of cascading bass drops. Like the punchline of a joke, the archetypes propping up a folktale, or even its decades-old namesake dance , the Harlem Shake circulates without an author, needing no authority but its own deliberately stupid sense of fun.

Of course, this is a lie. Nothing moves without a mover, there are no children without parents, and no chickens without eggs. Likewise, there is no breakthrough meme that doesn't get its escape velocity from something that's making it go.

One of these prime movers will almost inevitably try to gather up and claim responsibility for the forces it's dispersed. But Filthy Frank's video itself culled from an earlier Frank jam carefully attributes the copyright to "Baauer or whoever is in charge" and serves up links to buy Baauer's "Harlem Shake" track on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, etc. On February 14th, "Harlem Shake" first broke through to number one on iTunes' best seller list. At the time of this writing, the iTunes charts put "Harlem Shake" at number one overall, in the US, Australia, Belgium, Canada, and Luxembourg, and in the top five in most of the rest of Europe.

In an interview with Billboard, a representative of Baauer's label, Diplo's Mad Decent records, describes the song as "the biggest thing we've released on Mad Decent as a label, and it's happened within six days.

This is real, filtering-upwards success. Even all those YouTube views, scattered across the dozens or hundreds of fan-made videos, add up. Baauer and Mad Decent have generally been happy to let a hundred flowers bloom, permitting over 4, videos to use an excerpt of the song but quietly adding each of them to YouTube's Content ID database, asserting copyright over the fan videos and claiming a healthy chunk of the ad revenue for each of them.

Hence the proliferation of the "Harlem Shake. After all, these Harlem Shake videos are just the last link in a chain of gently borrowed content. Before Filthy Frank, it was just a song, and not a terribly lucrative one.

Before that, the Shake was just a dance of uncertain provenance, something anyone could reference. But each step meant borrowing from something that already existed. Nobody involved was ever terribly keen on asking for permission.