“I can’t believe what the whites did to the harlem shake,” a post from Tumblr user fquemark reads.
After an explosion of replications of the “Harlem Shake” meme, in which a locked camera shot records a lone dancer and then cuts to many dancers waving their arms and improvising dance moves, the SchleppFilms YouTube channel added a video (with much higher production value than any of the Harlem Shake videos to date, I might add) called “Harlem Reacts to ‘Harlem Shake’ Videos.”
Most of the people responded with disbelief, annoyance and anger.
At the end of the video, a few of the residents performed the actual Harlem Shake, a complicated dance involving controlled, isolated upper-body muscle movements.
“The dance in the video, to the extent that it’s a dance at all, isn’t the actual Harlem Shake, which has been an uptown staple for more than a decade. (See most of the videos by the former Bad Boy rapper G. Dep for a tutorial.),” Jon Caramanica, a New York Times critic, said in a review of Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop” and Baauer’s “Harlem Shake.” “The explosion of this song, and its accompanying videos, threatens to all but obliterate the original dance’s claim on the name.”
The Harlem residents in the SchleppFilms video reacted with similar frustration with the Internet’s bastardization of the dance. A few older reactors shook their heads and expressed their contempt for the people who turned a cultural phenomenon unique to Harlem into a cash cow.
They’re spot on.
According to an interview with Baauer in The Daily Beast, Baauer has been basking in the fame of the runaway hit after his song hit No. 1 on iTunes.
“That’s not the Harlem Shake at all, that’s humping,” one man said.
“I think they’re misinformed,” another said.
“They look like they just smoked some dust.”
“I feel like they trying to disrespect us.”
“They don’t live in Harlem. They don’t come from Harlem. They come from a strange planet.”
“It’s an absolute mockery.”
“It’s injustice.”
“That’s a bunch of idiots.”
“It’s just a shake,” one woman said, “but it ain’t the Harlem Shake.”
“That represents Jersey, California,” a woman said. “That is not Harlem.”
The makers of the video asked people what they would like to tell everyone who made a Harlem Shake video.
“Stop, please.”
“If you’re going to make one of these videos, please do the Harlem Shake, not just waving your arms doing the SpongeBob.”
“Stop that s---.”
The final frame of the video read, in white block letters, “Please use the Harlem Shake responsibly!”
Baauer said in the interview his song is not a homage to Harlem, which makes sense — the 23-year-old DJ only lived in Harlem for two years and then moved to Brooklyn.
He explained he named the track “Harlem Shake” after a phrase from a beat he sampled in the song.
Baauer spent most of his teen years on the mean streets of Connecticut, and his first DJ gig was at the Toquet Hall Teen Center.
Nope, that’s not a joke; the guy who single-handedly pissed off everyone in Harlem is just a white boy who grew up in a state after Martha Stewart’s own heart and who now lives in a part of Brooklyn where scenes from HBO’s “Girls” are filmed.
Of course, in two weeks, when the pop culture machine belches out some other horrible trend for people to go nuts over, the Harlem Shake will be forgotten. In twenty years, when VH1 does an “I Heart the 2010s,” some comedians will reminisce about the silly, flash-in-a-pan dance. But the people who grew up with real hardcore Harlem hip-hop won’t forget the punk who misappropriated their decades-old dance.
Chloe Finch is a journalism sophomore at UF. Her column runs on Thursdays. You can contact her via opinions@alligator.org.
