harlem shake

Last year it was PSY's ‘Gangnam Style'. Now Baauer's ‘Harlem Shake' has gone viral. Since February 2013, we've all heard it played somewhere. The raucous composition had its rather bewildering fifteen-minutes-of-fame earlier this year, and appears still to be basking in the afterglow of Internet Celebrity for the many meme-architects who have refused to move onto the next ‘big fad'.

Not claiming to be any musical authority myself, I set out (like so many before me) to un-shroud the ambiguity surrounding the Harlem Shake. Released in early 2012, the song didn't actually receive any notable degree of worldwide acclaim until early 2013, when the recognizable videos featuring large groups of enthusiastic, vigorous dancers began to appear on Youtube. The Harlem Shake itself has become a widespread internet meme, almost irrelevant to the song itself. However, in some circles, it has been viewed in more serious eyes, under the technical microscope of music producers whose receptions of the whimsical tune have been mixed.

You cannot have gone through February without hearing about or seeing a Harlem Shake video. The phrase Harlem Shake has been everywhere over the last few weeks- TV, newspapers and of course all over the internet. But what exactly is it?

The name was first coined back in the 1980's when a new dance came out of Harlem in New York. As the dance became more and more popular, it was referenced by a number of different hip hop artists and songs in the early 2000's.

The current craze started to get going last year when American music produced Baauer released a song with the title ‘Harlem Shake'. However, it wasn't until the beginning of February 2013 when the first recognizable Harlem Shake meme video was posted on YouTube.

Initially, a number of video bloggers uploaded versions of the song and dance, each developing the concept a little at a time. Though they were all pretty popular, the first one to go truly viral was the video below uploaded by the staff of online video production company Maker Studios. Within its first week, it was watched by more than 7.4 million people.