The Harlem Shake (Dance-related)

yuichi

Apparently it's kind of a movement right now....

yuichi

"They look like they just smoked sum dust"

DOR

This meme was done last week. Shit goes fast.


Dude that did the song is gettin paid.

I still enjoy...

batmon

"That's West Fourf Street Dancin'"

yuichi

batmon said:

"That's West Fourf Street Dancin'"

I'm guessing it's a diss towards these people?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Fourth_Street_Courts

batmon

yuichi said:

batmon said:

"That's West Fourf Street Dancin'"

I'm guessing it's a diss towards these people?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Fourth_Street_Courts

West Village Gay Community.

finelikewine

a few days ago I've run into this at my university:

batmon

I cant stop watchin' this shit.

Grandfather

this meme got old fast but that seaworld thing is still awesome. The walrus doing situps gets me everytime.

vintageinfants

[/meme]

ppadilha

GatorToof

batmon said:

I cant stop watchin' this shit.

It's the new oh papa gangnam

OptimusLime

Doing the Harlem shake in Haarlem (where Harlem got it's name from) kind of won it for me.

Also this one is just completely bonkers.

El Prez

vintageinfants

yuichi said:

Apparently it's kind of a movement right now....

to say the least....

The-gaffler

then there was this yesterday

Baauer's 'Harlem Shake': Gentrification Goes Viral
February 19 2013, 10:52 AM ET
by Brandon Soderberg

http://www.spin.com/blogs/baauers-harle ... goes-viral

Trap-rave track games system, exploits Internet goodwill, blows up, grates nerves, inspires Azealia Banks

Baauer's "Harlem Shake," that squeaky, wubby trap-dance instrumental that has, over the past few weeks, gone full-on viral thanks to endless videos of people dancing to the song, is a moderately interesting slab of post-drop dubstep or EDM. But the Harlem Shake is already a dance. A once-popular and very loaded dance, at that. A few decades old, it rose to the mainstream in 2001 thanks to Harlem rapper G. Dep (???Let's Get It??? and ???Special Delivery???) and later on, in a slightly mutated form, as the Chicken Noodle Soup via DJ Webstar's 2006 song of the same name. And the actual Harlem Shake ??? a joyful, free-for-all rhythmic vibration of one's body ??? is quite different from the meme dancing found in these "Harlem Shake" videos, which is just kind of people wilding out in front of a camera.

Appropriately, the television show Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell, a post-Chappelle, Ego Trip-torch-carrying show on FX, cleverly reminded viewers of this fact by posting their own Harlem Shake video. It begins with the staff of the show dancing to Baauer's production, but it ends with a single dancer doing the Harlem Shake properly, and Bell giving him the thumbs up. Then, there is Harlem MC Azealia Banks' rap over "Harlem Shake," which is perhaps the only well-advised thing she's done as of late. Typically, Banks would soon ruin the goodwill of putting some actual Harlem into ???Harlem Shake??? by calling Baauer a "faggot" ??? and releasing a video for the song in which she doesn't do the real Harlem Shake, either ??? but the voice of someone from Harlem usurping this song for a few days felt vital.

However obvious, ???That ain't the Harlem Shake??? grousing is important. And it helps unpack many of the problems with the song and meme. Who knows and who cares how Banks vs. Baauer began, but a recent interview with The Daily Beast has the Brooklyn producer explaining that he had asked Banks not to release her rap over his song, but she did it anyway. Welcome to 2013, Baauer! So, here's a song by a dude from Brooklyn called the ???Harlem Shake??? that exploded thanks to Internet support and share-culture pilfering who is now attempting to control its dissemination, while it goes viral. There's a level of calculation here that seems to belie the free-culture Internet ethos it's exploiting. That matters.

And coupled with ???'Harlem Shake': The Making and Monetizing of Baauer's Viral Hit,??? a Billboard interview with many of the people involved with marketing ???Harlem Shake,??? it becomes apparent just how heavy YouTube monetizing is involved in this campaign. In short, every time someone throws up a video featuring Baauer's ???Harlem Shake,??? the owners of the song, Mad Decent, can remove that video, or if they want, monetize it. So, they have a monetary stake in these videos they are encouraging people to produce. Not that it matters too much, because only the illusion of an ???organic??? campaign matters here (and it's all about gaming the system, anyway), but this is a very 2013 cash-out version of going viral. The whole goal of going viral hinges on making money later on, but here, it's the proliferation of the video/song ??? the viral-ness of the thing ??? that brings in money.

Yesterday, FADER observed that the ???con los terroristas??? sample which kicks the song off comes from T&A Breaks 3: Moombahton Loops & Samples, and has its roots in a 2010 remix by DJ duo the Philadelphyinz (one-half of the duo, Skinny Friedman, has been covered on this blog). When asked in a Reddit session where he got the sample, though, Baauer said he ???found it on the innerweb.??? And while that is not necessarily untrue, it does seem disingenuous. What would be the reason for not citing one's sample source here? Once your song is embraced by dancing middle schoolers, it seems pretty bizarre to try to maintain some integrity about sampling. It's a small detail, but it's one more way that ???Harlem Shake??? should rub people the wrong way, at least a little bit.

Harlem Shake as a viral campaign also brings to mind Diddy's ???Get Off??? contest from 2006. Back then, Diddy hit MySpace and encouraged fans to shoot videos of themselves dancing to then-Press Play single ???Get Off.??? It was a more innocent time for the Internet, for sure, and going viral was, if one could contrive it, just some free, fun advertising. There were not yet YouTube companies to hunt down every person using your song and slap some advertisements on it. The campaign didn't ever take off because ???Get Off??? wasn't much of a single (it was relegated to a bonus track on Press Play eventually), but also because it seemed like everybody sensed they were being hustled by Diddy. We're far more trusting of the Internet now. Though maybe the most significant thing to take away from Diddy's ???Get Off??? contest, in contrast with ???Harlem Shake,??? is that here was a rapper from Harlem, pretty much doing a Harlem Shake contest of his own, with the good sense to keep the term ???Harlem Shake??? out of it!

The gentrification of the song is important, even if it just seems like more ???SMH white people??? craziness. Just a few weeks ago, I wrote something about why the dance subgenre of ???trap??? differs from trap-rap enough that no one could mix up the two. That's still true, but the web success of Baauer's ???Harlem Shake??? does illustrate how having the right resources can Google-bomb something else out of existence. Try searching ???Harlem Shake,??? even with a telling, early 2000s-related second term and the result will be overwhelmingly skewed towards Baauer. Even ???original Harlem Shake??? yields videos from the early days of this campaign. This is not the co-opting of a style or dance the way that say, New Orleans bounce, Baltimore club, or even trap-as-EDM (which retains the elements of trap-rap and just rearranges them) have penetrated hipster enclaves. What's happening here is one kind of thing being turned into another thing entirely. ???Gentrification??? almost feels too kind here. This feels more nefarious, even if it is being enacted by people who don't seem to know any better.

One way to maybe feel a bit less depressed about this is to consider this tweet from user Gordon Voidwell: ???The evolution of the harlem shake is the evolution of harlem, nyc, itself." So, Baauer's ???Harlem Shake??? reflects the unavoidable shift and evolution of hip-hop culture and its elements, particularly in a whitening, increasingly cozy New York. While we're at it, here's one more important ???Harlem Shake???-related tweet from Atlanta producer DJ Burn One: "To truly get the full experience of cracker trap make sure you listen while making a mayonnaise sandwich or kissing your dog in the mouth."

pcmr

the burn-one tweet is hilrious

rootlesscosmo

"Stuff ___ people say."

vintageinfants

Baauer's 'Harlem Shake': Gentrification Goes Viral
February 19 2013, 10:52 AM ET
by Brandon Soderberg

http://www.spin.com/blogs/baauers-harle ... goes-viral

There's a level of calculation here that seems to belie the free-culture Internet ethos it's exploiting. That matters.

no. no it doesnt.

why not turn the macarena into an allegory for latin americans catholic guilt, and how the rest of the world exploits it.



EDIT: how does releasing a somewhat long-winded article explicating the popularization of a dance as the dissemination of a whole culture differ from releasing a video of you yourself doing that dance?

The_Non

I could watch walruses doing situps all day
Still, this shit is dumb

rootlesscosmo

vintageinfants said:

Baauer's 'Harlem Shake': Gentrification Goes Viral
February 19 2013, 10:52 AM ET
by Brandon Soderberg

http://www.spin.com/blogs/baauers-harle ... goes-viral

There's a level of calculation here that seems to belie the free-culture Internet ethos it's exploiting. That matters.

no. no it doesnt.

why not turn the macarena into an allegory for latin americans catholic guilt, and how the rest of the world exploits it.



EDIT: how does releasing a somewhat long-winded article explicating the popularization of a dance as the dissemination of a whole culture differ from releasing a video of you yourself doing that dance?

yeah I'm with you.

this piece and teh NY Times piece are both bad.

ppadilha

the problem with internet memes is that they're only fun until people start dissecting it.

Harlem Shake is obviously nearing the end of its life cycle - Hasselhoff getting on board is one of the latter stages of any meme, people writing dissertations on it is the death knell.

The-gaffler

i can't believe someone was actually writing that and their editor thought, "Yeah, this is important."

DJBombjack

The-gaffler said:

i can't believe someone was actually writing that and their editor thought, "Yeah, this is important."

And it has all the makings for a sketch in 'Portlandia'

rootlesscosmo

The-gaffler said:

i can't believe thousands of people around the world decided to take time out of their lives to assemble large groups of their friends or coworkers, choreograph and perform an inane routine and then edit and upload the video of their embarrassing timewaste, only to compete with similarly-minded idiots across the globe for a few precious views.

vintageinfants

rootlesscosmo said:

The-gaffler said:

i can't believe thousands of people around the world decided to take time out of their lives to assemble large groups of their friends or coworkers, choreograph and perform an inane routine and then edit and upload the video of their embarrassing timewaste, only to compete with similarly-minded idiots across the globe for a few precious views.

I get why it was funny the first few times. people have a hard time understanding that internet culture (used wuite loosely) starts to devour itself the very instant it materializes. there's about a 6 second window to be part of a phenomenon before everyone's just standing around in 'who farted?' t-shirts

vintageinfants

........dolubbel

innersource

http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2013/02/harlem-shake-meme-obscuring-dances-history-critics-argue.html

Hotsauce84

Lots of people mad, doggie.

DOR

Man. People take shit way too seriously. This reminds me of people who debate what the actual first "forbidden dance" was. When we all know it was the damn Waltz. Take that you tango lovin' bastards!!!


Ain't nobody got time for that!

Jonny_Paycheck

sometimes white people make me sad