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 60,000, with 45,000 uploaded within the last week. One person starts out with symptoms — dancing, a motorcycle helmet, etc. — and within moments, someone else is infected. 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.
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 chickens without eggs. Likewise, there is no breakthrough meme that doesn’t get its velocity from something that’s making it go. And so it is here: a nine-month old, three-minute song called “Harlem Shake,” by a nearly-unknown artist named Baauer, whose freshly-scattered thirty-second fragments of awkward dancing have peppered the video memescape since video blogger / comedian Filthy Frank established the template in a 34-second February 2nd video called “Do the Harlem Shake” that’s already gathered 10 million YouTube views.
It’s Filthy Frank and his dancing posse that everyone’s been imitating and 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. It’s also crossing over from digital: “Harlem Shake” debuted at number 3 on the BBC’s radio charts on February 17th. 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.” Baauer also sold out a February 15th show at New York’s Webster Hall, based almost entirely on the song’s popularity.
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 4,000 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. All this happens more or less automatically through Mad Decent’s partner INDmusic, There’s no pressing need to herd fans to a Facebook page or rig the YouTube search to drive “Harlem Shake” queries to an “original”: all of the videos can make the artist and his label a little bit of money. 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, it was just a sample, a young Jayson Musson saying, “do the Harlem Shake” on 2001’s “Miller Time,” a track an even-younger Baauer probably mixed as a Philly-area DJ. 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. Why would they be? For the most part, neither the borrowers or the lenders even noticed what was happening.
But that open spirit has a limit, and embracing most of the song’s copies doesn’t mean it’s a free-for-all. When hip-hop artist and Harlem native Azealia Banks tried to upload her own remix of the track, Baauer had SoundCloud take it down. When she asked why, his response was simple enough: “It’s not your song.”
As long as it’s Baauer’s song, he’ll decide who can remix, and who else can appear on it. There’s real money and real control at stake here. This means the Shake gets to be open culture and it gets to be big business. But for most people the business, just like the original dance, just fades away.
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