Evolution of Dance (2006) - The Story Behind Mzansi's Viral Memory

Judson Laipply was a motivational speaker who closed his talks with a six-minute routine that ran through decades of popular dance, from Elvis through the Twist, the Hustle, MC Hammer, the Macarena and beyond. In April 2006 he uploaded a recorded performance to a platform that was barely a year old.

It became the most viewed video on YouTube and held that position for around two years, which in the timeline of the platform is an eternity. It was the first upload to prove that YouTube could make something enormous without any television involvement.

The video passed 300 million views on the original upload. At the time YouTube had a fraction of today's audience, so that figure represented a huge share of everybody who used the site at all.

It also travelled by email, on office intranets and on CDs, meaning the true audience is meaningfully larger than the counter suggests. Plenty of people saw it years before they ever created a YouTube account.

Dance is not a side interest in South Africa. From pantsula to kwaito routines to gqom and later amapiano, movement is how a lot of local culture actually gets transmitted. A video that treats dance as a history lesson was always going to land here.

South African viewers also enjoyed spotting which moves had reached Mzansi and which had not. Many of the routines were familiar from local school socials and church concerts. It was watched competitively, with someone in the room always claiming they could do it better.

Laipply continued speaking professionally and made follow-up versions of the routine, though none matched the original. He has been open about not wanting to build his whole life around one performance.

In 2026 the video sits on his channel as a historical record. It is the clearest surviving example of what early YouTube rewarded: one long take, no editing, and a person doing something genuinely difficult in front of a real audience.