Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Harlem Shake - How humping the air means group-think and lost meaning

It’s been a while since anything has inspired me to write. Of course “Harlem Shake” would. I’m inspired to write this because of what the video symbolizes to me – a performance of the way we culturally consume in the postmodern, internet, era. And, the meeting of lenses among our social commentators and critics. It's weird, but things have been weird for a while.

I’m fascinated with what is going on IN the videos themselves. Each one begins with a singular, goofy, character bobbing around to the intro, followed by a barrage of physical bodies gyrating, shaking, twerking, and tweaking about in a back and forth fashion when the song “drops”… props of animals, toys, and tools all around for disposal. Bodies are dispersed across the entire frame, like a medieval landscape painting. This sequence imitates the “drop” that EDM-dervied-dubstep has popularized, a physical representation of all hell breaking loose when the bass and song are in full swing. And that rush is over just as the first measure is over thirty seconds later. What does this mean? Why this? 
  
A theater performance of social media, hipsterdom, and millennial group-think

Opening scene: a singular force introducing something to the rest of us… we screw, gyrate, jump, and dance to its impact in ways incongruent to the roots or intention. Then POP! We lose interest and cut scene as quickly as it came… this has been the nature of our pop culture for some time; viral videos, quick tickers on CNN, 140 characters or less… being the first, the quickest. A friend of mine just told me that he is sad because he knew about Harlem Shake WAY when Baauer had only 700 followers… the fact that it’s popular makes it obsolete, even if the song hasn’t changed – or the genre of Trap – hasn’t either. It’s a cultural Kleenex that lost its value as soon as we spewed it out.

In certain ways, it’s an acknowledgement of our current state of postmodern groupthink… quick consumers, quick responders, we don’t analyze or question… but react with no regard of context. Yet, EVERYONE does it – Black, White, Hip, Mainstream, Latino. 

 Titled "Black Version"
 Titled "Mexican Edition"

We get off on being part of something that everyone else is doing, a quick jolt of social connection, we are all doing the same thing together and IT’S GREAT!! However mundane and unproductive it is, we know YOU and your cousin, and your friend are doing it. When I go to a party, I can come quick with a “isn’t it annoying” or a “let’s do a Harlem Shake video” ready to go at the drop of a dime. We like the 2D commotion because we can glance and look around the screen, in its “diversity” of gestures and colors, rather than looking at a singular event of someone getting kicked in the balls, or some person on a rant… we are given several videos within a video, en masse and ready for our “multicultural” melting pot. I’m not surprised about the rise of EDM tribal culture in all this, a new version of the countercultures we love of the past.

Is it Group-think? More like Group-react without the think part. It’s hot and sexy, and soon as someone walks in with the next great thing… we’ll be ready to gyrate over and over and over and over again.

Harlem Shake – an incomplete meaning for race and a Post-Dubstep/Chopped N’ Screwed/Trap sampling era

If you read the story behind the production of the song… its not that complicated. A guy sitting on his computer has a bunch of samples taken from the internet and uses them for markers that are commonly understood from the Dubstep aesthetic. A signal for the intro “con los terroistas” and “do the Harlem Shake,” a signal on when the drop is going to take place… A Skrillexian template (which actually is a UK template) applied to a very Southern Hip Hop vibe. Instead of Skrillex’s hyped up screams, they are pitched down vocals that are derived from Chop n’ Screw. Plus, the track is on a Trap vibe, but the samples are Latino and NYC.  And yet, this Trap is not the same Trap that T.I. and Atlanta put on the map years back. You see where I went with this? UK > Houston > Atlanta > Latino > New York… So, whom does it belong to?

Then there is Davey D going in on how it’s not cool as the word Harlem Shake was a dance, slang for nodding junkies in Harlem, and so forth. I get it and respect the man for bringing us the history behind the name. Yet the entire song… from structure to samples… is a riff off everyone. I do see it as another paragraph on the continued relationship of removing cultural pieces from the hands of their creators, remaking them, and setting it out as a “new” thing… this is not new. As a Latino, I’m kinda disgruntled on the whole “Con los terroristas” bit. But I think it is important to include the race piece, with the sampling piece, with the disfigurement of Trap and Chop n’ Screw, with the Spanish sample to the analysis. Take it all in because each part is connected in its absurdity, to the others. This is postmodernism, the song is homeless, and wearing the clothes of every cultural signifier that is hot at the moment… yet its not new to me at all.

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