Harlem Shake — Baauer (2013)

Harlem Shake was a template before it was a video. Baauer's trap instrumental had been released in mid-2012 and gone largely unnoticed. On 2 February 2013 a YouTuber called Filthy Frank posted a thirty-second clip using it, and within days a fixed structure had crystallised: one person dances alone while everyone else ignores them, the bass drops, hard cut, everyone is convulsing in costume. Same song, same runtime, same edit point, infinitely variable content.

That rigidity is why it exploded. Previous memes required imitators to be funny; Harlem Shake required only that they show up and follow a formula that guaranteed a usable result. Production time was under an hour. At its February 2013 peak, roughly 4,000 Harlem Shake videos were being uploaded to YouTube every day, and the aggregate was pulling over 100 million views daily. Office teams, sports squads, army units, news desks, submarine crews and one Norwegian army platoon all filed versions within the same three-week window.

It also broke the charts. Billboard changed its Hot 100 methodology in early 2013 to incorporate YouTube streams, and Harlem Shake was the immediate beneficiary, debuting at number one — the first song to reach the top primarily on the strength of user-generated videos rather than sales or radio. Baauer earned a number-one single from a track most of his listeners could not name.

The name was a problem the meme never resolved. The actual Harlem Shake is a Harlem street dance dating to the early 1980s, and residents filmed responses pointing out that the viral version bore no resemblance to it whatsoever. The episode became an early, widely circulated example of internet culture flattening a specific Black cultural practice into a costume.

The template is the legacy. Harlem Shake proved that the most efficient viral unit is not a video but a reusable format with a fixed audio track — precisely the mechanic Musical.ly and then TikTok built an entire product around. Every TikTok sound page is a descendant. The meme itself died within a month, as template memes always do, and its combined view count across the canonical uploads sits near 1.2 billion, a 4x expansion on the 300 million counted when the wave broke.