The Ethiopian dance meme, particularly as it relates to the "Harlem Shake," is a fascinating intersection of cultural roots, viral phenomena, and appropriation concerns. Understanding its origin requires delving into the historical context of various dances and their evolution over time.
The "Harlem Shake" meme, which gained immense popularity in the early 2010s, has roots that trace back to a dance with legitimate origins in the Manhattan borough of Harlem. However, the meme's infectious strength was so intense that it consumed a tradition that preceded it by more than 30 years.
The original Harlem Shake dance was created in the early ’80s and met pop culture in the 2000s when P. Diddy, Lil’ Bow Wow, and Missy Elliott used it in their music videos. Sharp shoulder thrusts, meandering hands, and wobbly legs became hip-hop music-video staples.
Ask most people today to do the Harlem Shake and they’ll drop their head back, jump around, and flail their arms wildly. They may let out a lion’s roar or shout that Dutch house synth riff that graces “Harlem Shake’s” chorus. They might even move like Bernie or teach you how to Dougie.
The Harlem Shake is a dance that originally began in Harlem, New York. Since its beginnings it has spread to other urban areas and became popular in music videos. The announcers at the Entertainer's Basketball Classic at Rucker Park claim that the modern day Harlem Shake was started by a man by the name of "Al B" (nickname Sisqo or Cisco). Al B was an alcoholic who would perform the dance upon request.
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Though starting in 1981, the Harlem Shake became mainstream in 2001 when G. Dep's music video appeared. The Harlem Shake is commonly associated with a similar dance move called The Chicken Noodle Soup.
It has its roots in an Ethiopian dance, "Eskista." You can check out what it looks like on YouTube. The Harlem shake has been referenced in various songs over the years, including one by Brooklyn-based producer Baauer (Harry Rodrigues). That's the song you're hearing in all forty million "Harlem Shake" videos, even though participants may not actually be dancing the Harlem shake. We all on the same page so far? Yup? Good.
Let's take a closer look at Eskista.
Eskista: The Ethiopian Root
The Ethiopian name “Eskesta” actually means “Dancing shoulders” and it is often practiced in the Northern parts of Ethiopia (Amhara group) where the indigenous tribes of Amhara, Wollo, Gondar etc. are still performing the dance of Eskesta. The motives and characteristics of the dance are often interchanged during the dance by the performers of the variety of war songs, hunting songs, Shepherd songs, love songs and work songs.
It also is said that this dance was invented because of the snakes. Ethiopian people were often observing the “dance”/movements of the snake, shaking in the same way their neck. Furthermore, other symbols and rituals that can be described are these connected with the costumes which each dancer wears.
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Dance performed both from men and women with their head, neck, chest and shoulders, shaking in specific ways; the music played during the dance is often produced with the traditional Ethiopian instruments like krar, flute, drums and mesenko. The dancers sometimes sing or in some places of the dance utilize the silence in order to stress out some prevailing moments of the dance.
The statement that the Harlem Shake was inspired by the Ethiopian Eskista dance helps raise awareness of that traditional African dance. For that reason, even though I think it's not entirely accurate, I'm okay with the statement that the Harlem Shake is based on the Eskista dance.
I italized the words "modern day" to highlight those words because I wonder if there were African American dances and/or Caribbean dances that emphasized shoulder popping or shoulder twisting decades before the early 1980s or even decades before the popping and locking Hip-Hop dances of the 1960s & 1970s. For instance, were the shoulder movements in the once very popular Jazz dance "truckin" which first emerged in Harlem around 1927 similar to the Harlem Shake shoulder movements? I'd love for dance historians to add some input about this.
The Harlem shake is a dance move that involves pivoting the shoulder out while bringing the other shoulder out at the same time.
The Harlem Shake is commonly associated with a similar dance move "The Chicken Noodle Soup".
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The Harlem Shake is dead, long live the Harlem Shake!
The motives and characteristics of the dance are often interchanged during the dance by the performers of the variety of war songs, hunting songs, Shepherd songs, love songs and work songs.
Do the Harlem Shake!
The "Harlem Shake" meme seemed to innocently enough take on a life of its own and, in the process, appropriated the tradition for fake internet points.
A representation of the Harlem Shake meme.
Viral Phenomenon and Cultural Appropriation
In February 2013, a song named "Harlem Shake" (due to a sampled line referring to the Harlem Shake dance), originally released by Baauer in May 2012, went viral and became an Internet meme after featuring in a YouTube video by DizastaMusic, primarily known as Pink Guy or FilthyFrank at the time, who is now known as Joji.
The videos feature the song Harlem Shake by electronic musician Baauer, and a dancing style not to be confused with the original Harlem Shake. Normally, each video begins with one person (often masked) dancing to the song alone for 15 seconds, surrounded by other people unaware of the dancing individual.
There’s lots to say about the Harlem Shake, including questioning its humble origins - the meme originators, The Sunny Coast Skate, are prolific video creators documenting their skateboarding exploits, not just the college slackers they portray in their videos. There’s an excellent essay about the ways in which The Harlem Shake co-opts “trap music“, a drug-savvy Dirty South style that mixes hiphop and dance culture.
It’s worth noting that The Harlem Shake is a real dance, popular in NYC for decades, with roots in an Ethiopian dance called Eskista.
But what I wanted to talk about is the way that the Harlem Shake meme seems perfectly designed for the workplace. Some of the very best remixes, like the Norwegian Army’s, and San Antonio’s Sea World’s, involve people at their place of work, going about their activities until the bass drops.
The essential joke of the Harlem Shake is a song so catchy that it compels a whole room of people to freak out. There’s no place like the workplace to show the contrast between ordinary and extraordinary behavior, right? If firefighters can turn into costumed superheroes, surely turning your internet marketing firm into a dance party will be a laugh riot!
A surprising number of the top Harlem Shake videos tracked by YouTube appear to have been filmed by the group of people who work together in an office, perhaps because it’s not hard to take two hours and film a reasonably compelling clip, or perhaps because this is a way for different companies to signal that they’re the sort of cool place where employees can take some time off to make a viral video.
But before Beyoncé danced the Sattriya and prior to Perry’s geisha get-up at the AMAs, that viral hit song “Harlem Shake” had us all appropriating - and ultimately corrupting - a dance that has legitimate roots in the Manhattan borough.
The Harlem Shake (the meme) is not the Harlem shake (the dance), but the meme’s infectious strength was so intense that it consumed a tradition that preceded it by more than 30 years.
So was this viral sensation an egregious case of cultural appropriation? It might’ve been.
There’s no question, though, that the lyrical sample Baauer used was a direct reference to the original Harlem shake, an identifier with distinct cultural and geographic roots.
Our society is in a crisis of cultural appropriation. JK Rowling’s History of Magic in North America injected still-very-active Navajo traditions into her fictional world of wizardry as carelessly as The Life of Brian rewrote the Bible. Katy Perry’s inane and convenient adoption of Native American, Egyptian, and Japanese culture makes her a prime example of how pop stars capitalize off the marginalized. Perry’s comments to criticism - “I guess I’ll just stick to baseball and hot dogs…” - show Trump-like insensitivity and misunderstanding. Even Coldplay and Beyoncé failed to see the difference between celebrating and exploiting another culture when they made themselves the centerpiece of India’s Holi festival in their “Hymn for the Weekend” music video.
Writing in Forbes, Anthony Kosner sees the Harlem Shake as proof positive that we’re moving into Present Shock, a new reality projected by Douglas Rushkoff where time moves so fast that we can’t see beyond the current moment.
Miley Cyrus performing at the VMAs.
Brock University - Harlem Shake [OFFICIAL]
Twerking: Another Dance with Deep Roots
The consensus is that such dances cognate to twerk - as indicated by their names and presence among Bantu-language-speaking slaves - are Central African in origin. The historically proximate precursors to twerk are as seldom cited as its analogues.
Twerk emerged from earlier movement styles, like 'the up-and-back hip-swinging bowed-legged movements of a dance called the Tootsie Roll' and p[ussy]-popping (Gaunt 2006, 285). As Miller notes, 'it is likely that P-Popping constitutes an expression of what Chadwick Hansen identified in the late 1960s as "a long tradition of erotic shaking dances in America", which "have clearly been continuous within the Negro community"' (Miller 2012, 98). Some of the earliest footage of such moves may be seen in clips of the legendary Joséphine Baker.
Other 'serpentine' dances that presaged twerk are the Georgia crawl and 'the sensuous grind' called ballin' the jack, both with their heyday in the nineteen-teens (Gaunt 2012, 108; George-Graves 2009, 59; Oliver 1999, 107-108). In the same period, 'From Florida came the Swamp Shimmy, in which vigorous undulations of body, hips, and limbs made up for lack of forward movement' (Oliver 1960, 149).
The historical record indicates that dances like twerk date to the antebellum period in the American South. Enslaved people performed sinuous snake hip and fish tail dances on plantations during festivals and special gatherings, such as celebratory dinners.
The diffusion of the dance phenomenon began earlier via local parties and eventually strip clubs often associated with mainstream rap music and video production aired by video cable television shows that featured rap music and R&B music.
Twerking first received national recognition in the United States in the early 2000s, when the song "Whistle While You Twurk" (2000), by Southern hip hop duo Ying Yang Twins, peaked at number 17 on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs component chart. It was later referenced in their later track "Say I Yi Yi" (2002), in which the lyrics "she got her hands up on her knees and her elbows on her thighs / she like to twerk and that's for certain I can tell that she fly" are heard.
R&B and pop girl group Destiny's Child was the first mainstream American girl group to use the word in a song in their song "Jumpin' Jumpin'". It became the number one "what is" Google search that year as those outside the culture questioned the popularity of the dance.
In 2007, the song "Pop, Lock & Drop It", by American rapper Huey, reached number six on the US Billboard Hot 100. In November 2018, the City Girls released a song called "Twerk" featuring rapper Cardi B which peaked on the US Billboard Hot 100 at number 29.
The popularity of the video, along with parodies and responses made by fans, influenced the song's re-emergence on the Billboard Hot 100. Miley Cyrus's "Wop" video would go to become viral.
By April 9, 2013, copies of the video had amassed over 4 million views on YouTube. The clip was shared by users over 100,000 times, becoming a trend for the community and users created their own responses and parodies featuring the song, collected under the hashtags "#dontdropthat" and "#thunthun".
The viral popularity of the Vine clips led to an unexpected increase in sales for the song; prior to the posting of the "Twerk Team" clip, only 4,000 copies of the song had been sold; in the following weeks, sales went up to 34,000, then to over 72,000.
Both "Wop" and "Don't Drop That Thun Thun" have been cited as examples of how viral and user-created videos can bring renewed interest to songs; Spin writer Jordan Sargent considered "Wop" to be rap music's "Harlem Shake moment", but not a meme to the same extent as it.
In April 2013, American rapper Danny Brown released the song "Express Yourself", inspired by music producer Diplo's song of the same name. In the music video for Barbadian singer Rihanna's single "Pour It Up", which was released in May 2013, the singer can be seen twerking.
In June 2013, American rapper Busta Rhymes released a Jamaican dancehall-inspired single titled "Twerk It", featuring Nicki Minaj, who has been featured on several other "twerking songs", including "Shakin' It 4 Daddy" by Robin Thicke, "Dance (A$$)" by Big Sean and "Clappers" by Wale. Minaj can be seen twerking in all four of the aforementioned songs' respective music videos.
In early September 2013, a video titled "Worst Twerk Fail EVER - Girl Catches Fire!", began circulating around online; the video went on to become viral with over 9 million views, and received media coverage. Also in September, "Twerk" from the MTV VMA show was named the Top Television Word of the Year (Teleword) of the 2012-2013 TV season by the Global Language Monitor.
In October 2013, Valerie Dixon who was 27 years old, was arrested in Lake County, Florida, because she was twerking and speaking foul language in front of a school bus.
Booty dances have threatened the status quo by emphasizing group membership, the free movement of forceful Black bodies, and Afro-Diasporic counter-narratives. The Colombian mapalé, or baile negro, is a case in point.
