After the world exhausted the famous song Gangnam Style by Korean rapper Psy, it was swept away again by a new trendy dance called “Harlem Shake.” This new meme should not be confused by the real “Harlem Shake” dance portrayed in P-Diddy’s music video back in 2001. The dance involves a single person with people in the background not paying any attention to this individual. The dance starts and the individual (usually masked or in some type of costume) starts to dance to the song. The beat drops and the scene switches to the inattentive people in the background in the previous scene joining the individual in their version of a crazy dance (usually a stroke-like dance). Each video is 30 seconds long and has been uploaded to YouTube by colleges all over the world. Harvard med students have done and CUNY had its own unofficial “Harlem Shake” challenge with Baruch, Hunter and many other CUNY colleges uploading their own version.
As many of the fun things that Baruch does, the dance as a group activity was used to release stress. It would be interesting to investigate who came up with the idea. Who organized and advertised that they were going to do the dance and how the making of the dance was used to advertise the new major at Baruch: Digital Marketing.
As possible sources I could interview the maker of the advertisement, the person who organized the dance and the students who participated as well as members of the Undergraduate Student Government who are in charge of organizing events like these.
