# Harlem Shake (dance craze) *The Harlem Shake dance craze of the 2010s rode a viral meme built on a name and gestures taken from a 1980s Black Harlem dance, while sidelining the Black originators and the street culture that authored it.* > Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life. > Portal: The Culture · Status: In review · Revised: July 23, 2026 · Revisions: 1 > Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/harlem-shake-dance-craze-a88c ## Questions this record answers - What is the real origin of the Harlem Shake, and how does it differ from the viral meme? - Who created the original Harlem Shake dance in Harlem, and how was it practiced? - Why did the 2013 Harlem Shake internet craze erase the Black dance it was named after? - How has Harlem’s own memory of the dance been preserved in Black media and oral history? ## Summary The real Harlem Shake is a Black street dance that emerged in Harlem in the late 1980s and 1990s, rooted in neighborhood performance, hip‑hop culture, and a distinct rhythm of shoulder‑heavy, improvisational movement; the 2013 viral “Harlem Shake” meme borrowed the name and some caricatured motions while largely ignoring the original dance and its creators. The archive holds the Harlem Shake as a Black-authored cultural practice whose credit and meaning were stripped when the internet craze detached it from Harlem’s people, music, and spaces. ## Origins in Harlem’s hip‑hop and street culture The Harlem Shake grew out of the physical language of Harlem block parties, basketball court sidelines, and hip‑hop shows in the 1980s and 1990s. Dancers combined jerking shoulder movements, chest pops, and loose, rhythmic arms with a kind of playful swagger that marked the dance as unmistakably local, a style you learned from watching crews on corners and in schoolyards. Local pioneers—often known by nicknames in the neighborhood rather than in national media—developed the moves as a way to perform joy, resilience, and comic attitude in the face of economic and policing pressure. Black youth used the Harlem Shake to turn street space into a stage, a way of saying that Harlem’s rhythm and humor would not be reduced to statistics or headlines. ## From street to screen: early documentation Before the meme era, the Harlem Shake entered wider awareness through music videos, underground DVDs, and footage from battles in Harlem and other New York venues. Hip‑hop artists whose fan bases were rooted in Harlem highlighted the dance in their visuals, often featuring local kids and crews performing the Shake on stoops, in parks, and in clubs. Black‑owned media outlets and local cable shows documented these performances, framing the Harlem Shake as part of a broader continuum of Black social dance that included b‑boying, party dances, and freestyle. These recordings treated the dancers as artists, not props, and kept the dance linked to its community context, its slang, and its sound. ## The 2013 meme: a name without a lineage In early 2013, a new EDM track titled “Harlem Shake” sparked a wave of short, surreal videos in which groups of mostly non‑Black participants performed spastic, often random movements after a jump cut. The meme spread globally, celebrated in mainstream tech and entertainment media as a quirky internet phenomenon, while using the term “Harlem Shake” as an all‑purpose label for chaotic dancing. The motions in these videos bore little resemblance to the original Harlem Shake; the connection lay almost entirely in the name. Few of the largest viral clips featured Harlem itself or acknowledged Black originators; instead, the craze turned a Black neighborhood’s dance vocabulary into a generic joke format. By the time many viewers heard of the Harlem Shake, what they saw was the meme, not the Harlem dancers who had authored the style decades earlier. ## Neighborhood critique and demands for credit As the meme peaked, Harlem residents, dancers, and Black commentators pushed back through interviews, blog posts, and local coverage, pointing out that the viral trend misrepresented and erased the actual dance. Some original practitioners demonstrated the real Harlem Shake on camera, contrasting its controlled, rhythmic shoulder work with the flailing of the meme. Black‑authored commentary framed the meme as part of a broader pattern: Black cultural creations get named, commodified, and circulated without proper credit or context, while their communities are stereotyped or ignored. The critique did not deny that people could enjoy the meme; it insisted that enjoyment should not erase the authorship and meaning of the source material. ## Authorship, naming, and the archive’s position The archive holds that the Harlem Shake belongs first to the Harlem dancers and communities who invented and practiced it as a local Black art form. The internet “Harlem Shake” craze is a separate cultural event that misused the name and performed a distorted version of the movements without honoring their origin. Where official record and mainstream media largely document the meme, the archive centers the original dance and its authorship, drawing on Black memory, local footage, and community testimony. The Harlem Shake’s story stands as an example of how Black street culture builds global reference points while its creators are too often left unnamed—something this record is designed to correct. ## The archive's standing The Harlem Shake is one of Harlem’s signature contributions to the vocabulary of Black social dance, a style that carries the neighborhood’s wit, rhythm, and refusal to be flattened into stereotype. The archive holds its originators—often known only by neighborhood names—as authors whose work shaped hip‑hop performance and youth culture, even without formal credits. The 2013 meme made the phrase “Harlem Shake” globally famous while stripping away the dance’s lineage and Black creators; this record restores the balance by treating the meme as derivative and the original Harlem Shake as the primary referent. In the archive’s judgment, the dance stands as evidence of Black communities’ power to create culture that the world imitates, even when it forgets where it came from. ## Sources 1. Thomas F. DeFrantz, "Hip-Hop Dance and Body Politics," in Black Performance Theory, Duke University Press, 2004. 2. Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta, Verso, 1998. ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/harlem-shake-dance - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/block-party - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/tap-dance - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-stand-up-comedy - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/catchphrase --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Harlem Shake (dance craze)," revised July 23, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/harlem-shake-dance-craze-a88c Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.