Overview
For a few weeks in February 2013, the internet collectively decided that the funniest possible thing a human being could do was stand calmly in a room, wait for a bass drop, then cut to everyone thrashing around like the office printer had become sentient.
That was the Harlem Shake.
Not the actual Harlem Shake dance, which had its own history long before YouTube got hold of the name. This was the other one: the 30-second meme format where one person danced alone while everyone else ignored them, then suddenly the whole room turned into a low-budget disaster film with costumes.
It was stupid. It was easy. It was everywhere.
And for one very specific month in internet history, that was enough.
- FIRST SEEN January 2013
- PLATFORMS Facebook, X (Twitter), YouTube
- POPULARITY At peak (Feb–Mar 2013): 12k+ uploads / 44M+ views by Feb 11; ~40k uploads / 175M views by Feb 14; 1B+ views across versions within ~40 days.
- FIRST KNOW CREATOR George “Filthy Frank/Joji” Miller (seed video on DizastaMusic); Early format codifier: TheSunnyCoastSkate (TSCS).
- HASHTAGS #HarlemShake
The Basic Format Was Ridiculously Simple
The viral Harlem Shake meme followed a near-perfect template.
For the first 15 seconds, one person — usually wearing a helmet, mask, or something that suggested they had lost a bet — danced alone to Baauer’s “Harlem Shake.” Everyone else in the room acted completely normal.
Then came the drop.
Suddenly, the video cut to the same room, except now everyone was dancing, flailing, dry-humping the air, wearing animal heads, waving props, standing on desks, or doing whatever seemed funniest in the five minutes before filming.
That was basically it.
The whole thing usually lasted around 30 seconds, which made it perfect for YouTube sharing in the pre-TikTok era. Long enough to have a setup and payoff. Short enough that nobody had to commit to watching actual content.
The formula was:
- One quiet room
- One weird dancer
- Everyone else pretending not to notice
- A bass drop
- Immediate visual nonsense
- End before the joke gets tired
A lot of internet trends are hard to explain years later. The Harlem Shake is not one of them.
It was a jump scare, but with office workers in morph suits.
Where the Harlem Shake Meme Actually Came From
The meme’s origin point is usually traced to January 30, 2013, when YouTuber George Miller, better known then through his Filthy Frank / Pink Guy era, uploaded a video called “Filthy Compilation #6 – Smell My Fingers” on the DizastaMusic channel. The opening segment featured costumed people dancing to Baauer’s track, and that little bit became the seed of the format.
Then came the version that helped turn it into a replicable internet activity. A group of Australian teenagers posting as TheSunnyCoastSkate uploaded their own take, titled “DO THE HARLEM SHAKE (ORIGINAL),” on February 2, 2013. That version stripped the idea down into something anyone could copy: one dancer, bored room, beat drop, everyone loses it.
That mattered because the best memes are not just funny to watch. They are easy to join.
You did not need choreography. You did not need editing skills beyond one hard cut. You did not need a proper camera. You just needed a room full of people willing to look ridiculous for half a minute.
Which, as it turned out, described a worrying amount of the internet in 2013.
Examples
YouTube – DizastaMusic (Filthy Frank): “DO THE HARLEM SHAKE (ORIGINAL)” (Jan 30/Feb 2013). YouTube
YouTube – TheSunnyCoastSkate: “The Harlem Shake v1 (TSCS original)” (Feb 2013). YouTube
YouTube – hiimrawn/Maker Studios: “Harlem Shake v3 (office edition)” (Feb 7, 2013).
YouTube – Matt & Kim: “Harlem Shake (Matt and Kim Edition)” (Feb 11, 2013). YouTube
Miami Heat (team video): Players’ Harlem Shake (widely covered Feb 28-Mar 1, 2013). SB Nation
Wait, So What Was Baauer’s “Harlem Shake”?
Before the meme, “Harlem Shake” was a 2012 track by American producer Baauer, released through Mad Decent. It had already been floating around dance and trap music circles before the wider internet turned it into a global participatory gag.
The song itself was built around big bass, clipped vocal samples, and the now-famous command: “Do the Harlem Shake.”
One odd detail: the track’s vocal samples had their own layered backstory. Reports at the time noted that one sample came from Héctor El Father, while the “do the Harlem Shake” line came from Plastic Little’s 2001 track “Miller Time.” Baauer later said he had found one of the samples online, which became part of the post-viral rights conversation around the song.
The internet, of course, cared less about sample clearance and more about whether someone could fit a banana costume into a staff meeting.
The Original Harlem Shake Was Something Else Entirely
This is where the meme gets messy.
The Harlem Shake existed as a real dance years before the 2013 meme. It was associated with Harlem dance culture and had roots going back decades, with some accounts tracing it to Harlem’s Rucker Park scene in the early 1980s.
The viral meme, however, had almost nothing to do with that dance.
That disconnect became part of the backlash. People in Harlem were filmed reacting to the meme and pointing out, fairly, that the internet version was not really the Harlem Shake at all. It was just people convulsing in costumes under a borrowed name.
Which is extremely internet: take a phrase with history, attach it to a completely different joke, then watch everyone argue about whether the joke even knows what it is referencing.
How Fast It Spread
The Harlem Shake meme moved at a speed that felt strange even in 2013.
By February 11, 2013, around 12,000 Harlem Shake videos had reportedly been uploaded to YouTube, pulling in more than 44 million views. YouTube’s own trends blog said uploads were running at more than 4,000 videos per day around that point.
A few days later, the numbers got even more ridiculous. By February 15, reports cited around 40,000 spin-off videos and more than 700 million views across versions of the meme.
The Verge captured the scale on February 18, 2013, noting that a YouTube search for “Harlem Shake” returned around 60,000 videos, with 45,000 uploaded in the previous week.
That is not a normal trend curve. That is a content stampede.
For a rough timeline:
- January 30, 2013 — Filthy Frank’s video includes the early version of the format.
- February 2, 2013 — TheSunnyCoastSkate uploads a version that helps define the template.
- February 10–11, 2013 — YouTube is seeing thousands of uploads per day.
- Mid-February 2013 — Schools, offices, sports teams, TV shows, military units, and brands all start joining in.
- February 20, 2013 — Billboard adds YouTube streaming data to the Hot 100 formula, and Baauer’s track debuts at No. 1.
- March 2013 — The meme is already starting to feel overdone, which is exactly how these things go.
The whole thing had the lifecycle of a mayfly with a GoPro.
The Original Harlem Shake Was Something Else Entirely
The Harlem Shake worked because it had almost no barrier to entry.
A lot of viral videos are things people watch but cannot easily reproduce. The Harlem Shake meme was different. It was basically a group activity disguised as content.
It worked for offices because it looked like workplace rebellion without requiring anyone to actually rebel.
It worked for schools because it gave students a reason to be loud in a hallway.
It worked for sports teams because athletes already had costumes, locker rooms, and a healthy appetite for public stupidity.
It worked for brands because it was the rare meme format where a company could participate without needing a social media manager to understand seven layers of irony.
At its best, the format gave people:
- A ready-made script
- A clear punchline
- A reason to rope in everyone nearby
- Just enough chaos to feel spontaneous
- A video that could be filmed in under an hour
You could do it in a bedroom, a newsroom, a fire station, a university lecture hall, a military barracks, or a corporate office where somebody in HR was about to have a very long afternoon.
The Meme Became Mainstream Almost Immediately
Once the Harlem Shake crossed from YouTube weirdness into mainstream participation, the list of people making videos became absurd.
There were versions from sports teams, TV shows, newsrooms, musicians, universities, offices, and even military personnel. Notable participants included Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, the Miami Heat, the Dallas Mavericks, members of the Norwegian Army, Matt & Kim, and plenty of others who saw the meme and apparently thought, “Yes, this meeting room needs a horse mask.”
YouTube itself joined the joke too. Searching “Do the Harlem Shake” on YouTube triggered an Easter egg that made the page elements dance around, because in 2013 even websites wanted to be in the meme.
That was part of the fun, but also part of the expiration date.
Once a meme reaches the point where every workplace, TV show, and official brand account is doing it, the cool kids start quietly backing away from the dance floor.
Billboard Changed the Rules — And Harlem Shake Went No. 1
The strangest legacy of the Harlem Shake is not that lots of people made silly videos.
It is that those silly videos helped change music chart history.
In February 2013, Billboard began incorporating YouTube streaming data into the formula for the Hot 100. Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” became the first major beneficiary of that change, debuting at No. 1 on the revamped chart.
That was a big deal. The song was not a traditional radio smash first. It was not built through the usual pop machinery. It was dragged to the top by a tidal wave of short, ridiculous user-generated videos.
The Guardian reported at the time that the track reached the top after Billboard changed its rules to include YouTube views.
In hindsight, this was a preview of the next decade of music culture: songs becoming hits because people used them, clipped them, danced to them, memed them, looped them, and turned them into formats.
Before TikTok made that normal, the Harlem Shake did it with YouTube and a room full of people pretending to be normal for 15 seconds.
The Internet Was Different Then
The Harlem Shake belongs to a very particular internet era.
This was 2013, before TikTok, before Instagram Reels, before YouTube Shorts, and before every viral sound had a built-in remix ecosystem. Vine existed, but the dominant place for this kind of global video trend was still YouTube.
That made the meme feel oddly communal. People were not just scrolling past endless versions inside one app. They were searching, sharing links, embedding videos, watching compilations, and sending them around offices and group chats.
It also meant every version had to be uploaded as its own little event. A university Harlem Shake. A newsroom Harlem Shake. A military Harlem Shake. A family Harlem Shake. A “grandma edition.” A sports team version. A version filmed somewhere someone probably should not have filmed one.
The format was repetitive, but that was the point.
You watched not to see what would happen, but to see who would commit to the bit.
Why People Got Obsessed
The obsession was not really about the song, or even the dancing.
It was about the reveal.
The first half created tension in the dumbest possible way: one person acting weird while everyone else ignored them. Then the cut released all of it at once.
That made every video a tiny before-and-after joke:
Before: normal workplace.
After: someone in a Spider-Man costume is standing on a filing cabinet.
The best versions understood the contrast. The more boring the first shot looked, the funnier the second shot became. An office was good. A lecture hall was better. A serious institution was excellent.
The Harlem Shake meme also arrived at the right moment for internet participation. People were getting used to the idea that online culture was not just something you consumed. It was something you copied, remixed, and added yourself to before the trend moved on without you.
And it moved on quickly.
The Backlash Came Almost As Fast
Like most viral trends, the Harlem Shake went from funny to unavoidable to annoying in record time.
By mid-February 2013, some outlets were already treating it like it was past its sell-by date. That sounds harsh, but it also made sense. When thousands of near-identical videos appear in a matter of days, burnout is part of the package.
There were also real-world consequences. Some students got in trouble for making versions at school, including a reported case at Milford High School in Michigan, where more than a dozen students were suspended after a suggestive Harlem Shake video.
Then there was the cultural criticism around the name itself. People pointed out that the meme had very little connection to the actual Harlem Shake dance, and that a piece of Harlem culture had effectively been flattened into a global goof.
So the backlash had two flavours:
- “This meme is already annoying.”
- “This is not actually the Harlem Shake.”
Both were fair, in their own way.
The internet heard those criticisms, briefly nodded, and then uploaded another 4,000 videos.
The Azealia Banks Side Quest
Because it was 2013, the Harlem Shake also came with a Twitter-adjacent music industry argument.
Azealia Banks released her own version of the track, but it was taken down after a dispute with Baauer and his team. Pitchfork reported that Baauer said they had previously discussed a version with Banks, but did not want her remix released in that form. Banks, naturally, was not thrilled.
This was one of those very early-2010s moments where internet virality, copyright, artist control, and Twitter beef all collided in public.
The meme itself was silly. The business around it was not.
Why It Burned Out So Quickly
The Harlem Shake was designed to expire.
That is not a criticism. It is part of why it worked.
The joke was incredibly repeatable, but it did not evolve much. Once you had seen a few versions, you understood the full menu:
- Someone dances alone.
- Beat drops.
- Everyone acts feral.
- Repeat in a new location.
The only real variables were costumes, props, setting, and how much dignity the participants were willing to sacrifice.
That gave the meme a massive burst of growth, but not much long-term depth. It was perfect for a short, intense viral cycle. It was not built to become an ongoing culture.
By the time mainstream brands and TV shows were doing it, the original internet crowd was already looking for the exit.
The Harlem Shake’s Real Legacy
The Harlem Shake now feels like a relic from a slightly older internet, but its influence is easy to spot.
It helped prove that a song could become a chart-topping hit because of user-generated video, not traditional radio. It showed how a simple format could turn millions of people into participants. It also foreshadowed the way TikTok would later turn music clips into repeatable social templates.
The difference is that TikTok industrialised the process.
The Harlem Shake still felt handmade. Messy. Local. Slightly embarrassing. Usually filmed in one room by people who had 20 minutes and access to a motorcycle helmet.
That is why it remains such a perfect snapshot of early-2010s internet culture. Not polished. Not subtle. Not built for longevity.
Just 30 seconds of escalating nonsense.
And for one strange month, that was enough to take over the world.
