Harlem Shake (dance craze)

The Harlem Shake was born in Black Harlem party culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s, built by neighborhood dancers, DJs and video producers who turned a loose shoulder-and-torso shake into a recognizable style, a party ritual and a visual language on Black television and DVDs. When the name was reused in 2013 for a viral internet meme with mostly non-Black performers, the dance’s origin in Harlem’s Black nightlife and its specific creators were largely erased, and the style was miscast as an anonymous ‘random wobbling’ rather than a form with a history, a neighborhood and authors. ## Origins in Harlem and Black Party Culture The Harlem Shake emerged in the mid-to-late 1990s in Harlem, New York, in the context of block parties, basketball tournaments, and club nights where DJs and dancers experimented with high-energy, upper-body-heavy moves over East Coast rap beats. Local oral histories describe the move as an improvisational shoulders-and-chest shake that circulated among young Black men in Harlem, often attributed in neighborhood telling to a dancer known as “Al B” who performed a version of the shake at the Rucker Park basketball courts in the early 1990s, where it became a sideline spectacle for crowds and players. By the early 2000s, the Harlem Shake had spread beyond the courts into clubs and parties, codified by dancers who layered personality, syncopation and jokes onto the core motion, and by DJs who selected records and tempos that suited the move, turning it into a recognizable style rather than a single stunt. ## Codification on Video and Black Television The dance entered national visibility through Black-centered media, especially hip-hop DVDs and music videos, which captured party footage in Harlem and surrounding neighborhoods and distributed it through street vendors, independent video companies and cable channels like BET. Dancers featured in these recordings — frequently unnamed in credits — refined the Harlem Shake into repeatable sequences, creating an informal canon of variations that partygoers across the East Coast, and then nationally, could imitate and modify. Rap artists and video directors used the Harlem Shake to visually signal “uptown” or New York authenticity; the move’s appearance in early-2000s videos and street DVDs turned local dancers into uncredited choreographers of mainstream hip-hop imagery, even as official credit typically followed the recording artist or director rather than the neighborhood innovators whose bodies carried the style. ## Neighborhood Authorship and Erasure in Official Telling Within Harlem, the dance’s authorship was understood as collective: neighborhood dancers, DJs, and videographers who built a shared style and visual language around the shake, and the informal party infrastructures — promoters, rental halls, street vendors — that sustained the spaces where it evolved. The official record of early-2000s pop culture, focused on charting artists and corporate labels, largely failed to name or document these originators, treating the Harlem Shake as a “trend” rather than a creation with identifiable authors and a specific Black neighborhood context. This gap reflects a larger pattern in which Black party cultures generate new forms — dances, fashions, slang — that are widely copied before they are credited, while contracts, rights regimes and mainstream media archives follow the recording industry’s paperwork rather than the communities whose labor produced the style. ## The 2013 Meme and Misattribution In 2012–2013, producer Baauer released an electronic track titled “Harlem Shake,” and a viral video format spread in which groups performed abrupt, chaotic movements to a clipped portion of the song, typically featuring non-Black college students, offices and military units. The meme’s movements bore little resemblance to the original Harlem Shake dance as practiced in Harlem; the use of the name without reference to the neighborhood, its Black originators or the early-2000s style recast the term as a generic label for random physical comedy. Mainstream coverage of the meme often treated it as a new phenomenon, erasing the prior decade of Black creative work and reinforcing a false impression that the Harlem Shake was born on the internet rather than at Black block parties, basketball courts and clubs in Harlem. ## Correcting the Record: Credit and Context To credit the Harlem Shake accurately, the record must locate it in Harlem’s Black social world: dancers like “Al B” and their peers, the Rucker Park performances, the neighborhood clubs and parties, and the Black-owned or Black-focused media outlets that first captured and broadcast the style. The archive treats the meme-era appropriation as a second, derivative event that borrowed the name and some of the cultural cachet of Harlem while discarding the originators and diluting the dance into a non-specific joke, a pattern consistent with broader histories of Black cultural forms being repackaged without credit. Preserving oral histories, street DVDs, and Black press accounts is essential to protect the legacy of the Harlem Shake’s creators and to ensure that future tellings of early-2000s dance culture recognize Harlem’s role not only as a backdrop, but as an author of global popular culture. ## Legacy in Black Dance and Internet Culture Even as the meme misrepresented the original move, Black dancers and choreographers have continued to reference the Harlem Shake in homages, critiques and recombinations, keeping its lineage alive in internet videos and live performance. The dance stands as part of a continuum of Black neighborhood-born styles — from earlier uptown line dances to later viral challenges — that demonstrate how local Black social worlds have repeatedly created the movements, images and rhythms later taken as “internet culture” or “youth culture” writ large. In documenting the Harlem Shake, the archive holds its originators as authors of a significant chapter in the story of how Black Harlem once again made something that the world copied, and insists that the name stay anchored to the neighborhood and people who built it.

The family archive is admissible here. Photographs, letters, deeds, church programs, funeral bulletins, business records, recordings — the things that were kept when no institution was keeping them. A keeper reviews everything before it is admitted, and your name stays on it.

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