Harlem Shake (song)
"Harlem Shake" is a song recorded by American DJ and producer Baauer. It was released as his debut single on May 22, 2012, by Mad Decent imprint label Jeffree's. The uptempo song—variously described as trap, hip hop or bass music—incorporates a mechanical bassline, Dutch house synth riffs, a dance music drop, and samples of growling-lion sounds. It also samples Plastic Little's 2001 song "Miller Time", specifically the vocal "then do the Harlem shake", which is an allusion to the dance of the same name. Baauer added a variety of peculiar sounds to the song so that it would stand out.
This article is about the song. For the meme using the same song, see Harlem Shake (meme). For the dance, see Harlem shake (dance)."Harlem Shake"
The single did not begin to sell significantly until February 2013, when a YouTube video set to its music developed into an Internet meme of the same name. The media response to the meme helped increase the single's sales, as it charted at number one for five consecutive weeks on the US Billboard Hot 100. It also reached number three in the United Kingdom and number one in both Australia and New Zealand. During the song's chart run, Billboard enacted a policy that included video streams as a component of their charts.
"Harlem Shake" was well received by music critics, who viewed it as an appealing dance track, although some felt that it was more of a novelty song. After the song became a hit, Mad Decent label head Diplo reached an agreement with the artists of the song's samples, which had not been contractually cleared before its release. However, according to Baauer, he has not received any of the money the song made because of the legal issues from not having properly cleared the samples. American rapper Azealia Banks released a remix to "Harlem Shake" on her SoundCloud page, which was subsequently removed at Baauer's request and led to a dispute between the two.
Music and lyrics[edit]
"Harlem Shake" features harsh snares, a mechanical bassline,[8] samples of growling lions,[6] and Dutch house synth riffs. It has a high tempo characteristic of hip hop and a dance music drop.[4] According to Andrew Ryce from Resident Advisor, "Harlem Shake" is a hip hop and bass song,[8] while both David Wagner of The Atlantic and Khal from Complex described it as trap, a musical subgenre with stylistic origins in EDM and Southern hip hop,[9] featuring Roland TR-808 beats and drops.[10] Ryce felt the song's music "represents the hip-hop contingent of" bass music, which is typified by rolling snares and jerky basslines, finding it "particularly symptomatic of a growing strain of music obsessed with 'trap'".[8] By contrast, Jon Caramanica from The New York Times argued that it "isn't a hip-hop song, but it is hip-hop-influenced."[11]
"Harlem Shake" begins with a sample of a voice shouting "con los terroristas", a Spanish phrase which translates to "with the terrorists" in English.[12] Although listeners assumed it was a female voice,[12] the sample was taken from a remix of the 2006 reggaeton single "Maldades" by Héctor Delgado, who often used the line as a refrain on his other songs. In 2010, the recorded phrase was used by Philadelphia DJs Skinny Friedman and DJ Apt One, on a remix of Gregor Salto's dance track "Con Alegría". Baauer said he found the vocal sample from an unidentified source on the Internet.[13] The sampled voice is followed by building synths and snares, and a syncopated sub-bass sound before another voice commands listeners to "do the Harlem shake".[4] The line was sampled from Plastic Little's 2001 hip hop song "Miller Time",[5] which Baauer sampled after having a friend play it for him and "[getting it] stuck in my head for a while".[3] Plastic Little member Jayson Musson said his line was inspired by a fist-fight that he ended by performing the harlem shake dance move: "This was my first fight and I didn’t know how to properly 'end' a fight, so I just smiled at him and did the Harlem shake, blood gushing from glass cuts on my face. The other kid, I guess not wanting to fight anymore, or maybe not wanting to fight someone who just danced at him, got on his skateboard and took off without his shoes."[5]
Critical reception[edit]
Pitchfork journalist Larry Fitzmaurice labelled the song "Best New Track" upon its release in May 2012 and called it a "disorienting banger" with an "irresistible appeal" that "owes almost everything" to its "menacing, world-smashing bassline". Fitzmaurice wrote in conclusion, "Along with this purely visceral pleasure, it's hard not to marvel at how awesome those growling-lion samples sound."[6] Randall Roberts of the Los Angeles Times said that he liked the song and viewed it as a "syrupy instrumental" that foreshadows "the convergence of hip-hop, dance and rock".[35]
Andrew Ryce of Resident Advisor gave "Harlem Shake" a rating of three-and-a-half out of five and found its musical climax "admittedly satisfying—that is, until it resumes flailing like a novelty track", writing that "it's not hard to see why the track is well-liked, but its snowballing ubiquity is a bit of a head-scratcher, simply because it's not all that interesting."[8] Similarly, Jon Caramanica of The New York Times said that, after hearing a minute of it being played during Power 105.1 FM's mixshow, the song "felt more like a novelty than like part of a strategy." Caramanica felt that its success, along with that of Macklemore's 2012 song "Thrift Shop", reflects a "centerless future" for hip hop and stated, "Depending on your lens, this reflects a tremendous cultural victory for hip-hop or the moment when hip-hop, as a construct, begins to lose meaning."[11]