On Monday night Matt Johnson – the keyboardist for indie duo Matt & Kim – got up in front of a few thousand fans in Troy, New York, prepped the song "Harlem Shake" by Baauer, and gave his audience his master plan.
"I just started the camera behind me. I'm going to start this song, and when this song drops I want you all to get as fucking freaky weird crazy as you can," Johnson announced. "I'm going to upload this shit to the internet tonight and we're going to try to make this shit go viral tomorrow."
It did. In just under two days the video (above) got more than 1.5 million views – not to mention 1,200 upvotes on Reddit, and a tweet from BuzzFeed claiming that the clip "just won the Harlem Shake." (It's currently close to 3 million views.)
"We put it up and I didn't know which way I expected it to go, then the next day my mind was just blowing watching the YouTube counter then our Twitter blew up too," Johnson told Wired. "Obviously these things are called 'viral' for a reason, but man seeing it climb over a million in 30 hours was mind-boggling."
But really, Matt & Kim are just one of many groups to tap the "Harlem Shake" craze – a meme that has seemingly erupted overnight to become the thing that everyone with some free time, a video camera, and the internet is doing. Although the the dance itself dates back to the 1980s, it's hard to pinpoint just exactly where the meme started, though most signs point to this video. Currently, YouTube estimates more than 4,000 new Harlem Shakes are being uploaded each day and, in a blog post Tuesday, noted that there are some 12,000 videos already on the site that have amassed some 44 million views.
The premise for a Shake video is pretty simple: One person (preferably in some inexplicable headgear) begins dancing to the song while those around them seem to not notice and do other common tasks. (Fun fact: in the Matt & Kim version, Kim Schifino is responding to a text from a friend about a recently discovered grey pubic hair. Schifino's response? "That's why I keep that shit waxed!!!") Then, when the beat of the song drops, the video cuts to a whole bunch of people going crazy dancing to the song. They're rarely more than 30 seconds, and so easy to do even offices have gotten in on the craze.
The University of Georgia's men's swim and dive team did one under water. The Norwegian army did one. There are (at least) two Star Wars-themed Shakes. There's also now a Harlem Shake Roulette single-serving site that will pull a series of the videos one right after the other, Chatroulette-style. This is the stuff of internet dreams, people.
"One of the unique directions the trend took rather early was spawned by the staff of Maker Studios, who created what's currently the currently most-viewed version from their office," YouTube trend analyst Kevin Allocca wrote in the video-sharing site's blog post about the phenomenon. "While it could have just remained a college-kid fad, Maker's version helped signal that the trend was something any organization or office could be a part of."
To that end, every tech office from Break, to BuzzFeed to College Humor has gotten in on the action. And, while they're not exactly offices, both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have engaged their staffs and audiences in Harlem Shake videos. But perhaps none of them have pulled the numbers that Matt & Kim did when they got an entire concert venue to do the Harlem Shake. And for a web-smart band with a young audience, it only seems right that they would pull together one of the biggest Shakes yet.
"What our band's always done has always been about having fun and enjoying what we do and the audience enjoying it," Johnson said. "So it made a lot of sense in the end for us to be a part of this whole thing."
