Some of the students are in dance crews of their own. He mobilized seven teenagers from the after-school dance program where Crazy Boyz members teach. When the Breakfast Club, a radio show on Power 105.1 FM, wanted a video for its Web site that would be a history lesson on the real Harlem Shake, it called Mr. “Whatever move you do, you just do it, but you make sure you stay consistent with the beat.” “It’s just how you’re feeling at the moment,” Mr. They said their style was simply a way to express freedom, which in that way makes the two dances one and the same. The Harlem Shake is a dance that has been around for a long time and will always be around.”įor the Crazy Boyz, who also work in construction, the constant stream of Harlem Shake videos and the related media coverage have stoked interest in them and the original dance. “The question is, is it the Harlem Shake? It’s not the Harlem Shake. “It gives people their 30 seconds of fame,” Mr. based in New York, sees the Harlem Shake parodies, like the recent waves of Gangnam Style and “Call Me Maybe” videos, as harmless. For people to make a mockery of it, what are you saying to us? Don’t offend us with that nonsense you’re calling the Harlem Shake.”īut Michael Minott, a former D.J. “Harlemites put their own little twist on it. Caesar, 49, who works in Manhattan as a secretary. That interview footage so far has more than seven million views.Įlaine Caesar, who grew up in Harlem and now lives in the Bronx, shares the heated sentiments of some in the video. But others express anger, especially at videos in which people don costumes and simply parade around. In a YouTube video titled “Harlem Reacts to ‘Harlem Shake’ Videos,” some residents laugh at the controversy. Strayhorne, 30, said of the buzz around the imitation version on the Internet, “because the name is bringing the Harlem Shake back up.”
The crew eventually took the dance to the hip-hop world in music videos for artists like Eve and Diddy, only to watch its popularity fade.
The Crazy Boyz said they combined their “shake” - spastic arm and chest movements - with Al. “We looked up to a lot of his style, and the way he moved,” said another crew member, Jesse Rutland, known as Smiley. He and his friends honed the dance in the late ’90s at the Skate Key roller rink in the Bronx, where they hung out and flirted with girls, and at Rucker Park, where they watched Al.
“But it’s bitter in the sense of, it’s like they’re disrespecting the whole style of dancing.” “I’m not a hater,” said Maurice Strayhorne, who is known as Motion and was part of Crazy Boyz. While some in Harlem today have taken offense at the rebranding and posted videos of their own in response to the YouTube onslaught, members of the crew see another shot at stardom, the kind that burns brighter and longer than a 30-second parody. B.’s moves to the next level, popularizing them enough for the mainstream. Many give credit to one four-man dance crew, Crazy Boyz, for taking Al. would entertain the crowd with his own brand of moves, a dance that around Harlem became known as “The Al. During halftime at streetball games held in Rucker Park, a skinny man known in the neighborhood as Al. The real Harlem Shake, a much more raw, technical, fluid, frenetic dance, was born in New York City more than 30 years ago. The thing is, this worldwide dance contagion is not the Harlem Shake. There is a Harlem Shake puppy edition, a grandma edition and a stripper edition, inspired by a song from the producer Baauer that is currently in its second week atop the Billboard Hot 100 - thanks largely to this deluge of videos. Search YouTube for the Harlem Shake and more than 200,000 results pop up: a group of sky divers thrust their pelvises and pump their fists in a wild dance move while falling amid the clouds members of the University of Georgia men’s swim-and-dive team do similar moves in their trunks underwater Norwegian Army officers stand stoically in camouflage and berets before breaking into their version of the dance, all set to an electronic groove.