Harlem Shake meme: the new Gangnam Style?Forget Gangnam Style, there's a new viral dance craze for you all to learnIf you've just put the finishing touches to your rendition of the Gangnam Style dance then we've got some bad news for you – there's a new meme in town. Harlem Shake is the latest dance craze shaking its stuff across Twitter timelines with an army of imitators trailing in its wake. Somewhere in a basement at the Guardian, Jay Rayner is probably learning it already.
So what is the Harlem Shake? The first thing you need to know is that it's quite different to the Harlem Shuffle.
Having said that, it's not an entirely new thing. The dance you can see in the video embedded above has been around in various stages of evolution for a few decades (since 1981 says popular speedy journalistic source Wikipedia) and at some point mutated into the Chicken Noodle Soup dance.
The dancing seems to vary from video to video however, so feel free to twerk or whatever when you make your own tonight. Just make sure you wear a mask, which seems to be part of it, although by the time we've figured it out completely there'll probably a new thing to learn.
As for the song? Well Baauer's Harlem Shake actually came out last year, but it's only now that it's truly gone viral. It's had people wondering if it will be the point at which trap music – a kind of souped-up version of Southern crunk – goes mainstream.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2013/feb/08/harlem-shake-meme-gangnam-style
