# Harlem Shake (dance) *A Black Harlem street dance created in the 1980s by Al B., later stripped of its origin in a 2013 viral meme that reused the name while discarding the culture.* > 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 ## Questions this record answers - Who created the original Harlem Shake dance, and how did it become disconnected from Black Harlem in the 2013 viral craze? - What is the difference between the Harlem Shake street dance and the 2013 meme? - How did Harlem’s Black dance culture shape early hip-hop and street style? - Why do viral trends so often erase the Black creators of the names and moves they use? ## Summary The original Harlem Shake is a Black street dance that emerged in Harlem in the 1980s, created and popularized by a local dancer known as Al B., long before a 2013 internet meme borrowed the name but not the culture. In its true form, the Harlem Shake is a jittery, rhythmic upper‑body dance rooted in Harlem’s hip‑hop party scene, not the random flailing that went viral decades later. ## The archive's standing The archive holds the Harlem Shake as a work of Black creative authorship: a named street dance born of Harlem’s own performers, parties and neighborhoods, not a diffuse internet gag. Its stature lies in how a single, idiosyncratic movement vocabulary became a neighborhood signature, entered rap videos, and helped define how the world pictured Harlem in hip‑hop’s rise. The 2013 meme sits downstream as evidence of how mass culture strips names from their makers; the record restores Harlem and Al B. as the point of origin. ## Origins in Harlem’s Hip-Hop Street Culture The Harlem Shake emerged in the late 1980s in Harlem, New York, in the orbit of local block parties, basketball courts, and neighborhood hip‑hop performances. Dancers describe it as a fast, tremoring upper‑body movement, with shoulders, arms and torso shaking in rhythm while the legs often keep a looser bounce. Early accounts from Harlem residents and performers identify a dancer called Al B. as the originator: he reportedly began doing the move at local events, and it was adopted and elaborated by peers as a recognizable "Harlem" style. Oral histories gathered from Harlem dancers and community members in the 2000s and 2010s consistently locate the dance in this period and in this geography. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Harlem Shake had spread beyond neighborhood parties into rap videos and stage performances, carried by Harlem and New York artists who treated it as a local calling card. The dance appears in visual culture around acts such as G. Dep and others from the Bad Boy era, and in live performances by Harlem rappers who used it to signal home territory. In this phase the Harlem Shake functioned not just as a move, but as an emblem of Harlem’s contribution to hip‑hop dance language. ## Naming, Authorship and the Black Archive Within Harlem, the name "Harlem Shake" attached to a specific movement vocabulary and to Al B.’s distinctive way of performing it. Neighborhood testimony, interviews in Black‑authored hip‑hop media, and recollections by dancers treat Al B. as the person who "made up" or "put on" the dance, even as later performers refined and varied it. In the absence of formal choreography credits or dance patents, the archive recognizes this testimony as primary evidence of authorship. The dance did not arise everywhere at once; it circulated outward from a small set of parties and performers whose names are preserved in local memory. The written record is thin because street dance has rarely received institutional documentation, and because Black neighborhoods’ creative practices were seldom formalized in mainstream dance histories or archives. Black press coverage and hip‑hop magazines of the early 2000s mention the Harlem Shake as a Harlem‑born dance more often than they quote its originator by name, which is itself a form of partial erasure. The archive therefore centers oral sources—from Harlem dancers, video interviews, and community testimony—as the core record of who built it. ## The 2013 Meme and the Stripping of Origin In early 2013, producer Baauer’s track "Harlem Shake" soundtracked a viral video fad in which groups of mostly non‑Black participants performed short clips of chaotic, often comedic movement labeled "doing the Harlem Shake." The meme used the name of the older dance but generally showed random, uncoordinated flailing rather than the structured upper‑body shaking style created in Harlem. Popular coverage of the trend made little or no reference to the dance’s Black neighborhood origins, to Al B., or to Harlem itself, treating "Harlem Shake" as an arbitrary meme label rather than the name of a specific cultural practice. This disconnection between name and movement is central to the archive’s beat. A titled, authored Black dance was repurposed as an aesthetic shell—its words, not its technique—by a viral cycle that rarely credited the community that built it. The erasure was not merely omission; it flowed from a pattern in which Black street culture provides names, sounds and gestures that are repackaged without their makers whenever they reach mass attention. ## Lineage, Influence and Protection of Credit The Harlem Shake belongs to a broader genealogy of Black street and hip‑hop dances—such as the Milly Rock, the Dougie, and the Crip Walk—that begin in specific communities with identifiable originators and then circulate globally, often losing credit along the way. In that lineage, the Harlem Shake is an early example of a named neighborhood dance whose title traveled far beyond the people who invented it. Its influence can be seen in later dances that similarly emphasize stylized upper‑body isolation and in the role it played in visualizing Harlem’s energetic, improvisational style in music videos and live shows. Protecting the Harlem Shake’s authorship matters because it is a case study in how Black cultural work moves from hyperlocal practice to worldwide brand without its makers. Al B. and the Harlem community built a dance that marked their neighborhood and contributed to hip‑hop’s visual language; a later media cycle borrowed the name and stripped away that specificity. The archive restores the line: the Harlem Shake is first and foremost a Harlem street dance authored by Black creators, and any later use of the term sits downstream of that fact. ## Sources 1. Moncell Durden, "Dance History and the Harlem Shake," lecture materials and interviews, Collected in Street Dance Oral History Project, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. 2. Mark Katz, "Hip Hop Dance and the Visual Culture of Rap," in Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ, Oxford University Press, 2012. ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/electric-slide-dance - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/block-party - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/soul-train - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/double-dutch - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/hip-hop-dance --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Harlem Shake (dance)," revised July 23, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/harlem-shake-dance Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.