The next year, he débuted his complex “Superman” dance-cross your feet, lift your knee, bounce laterally, among other things-in the video for his song “Crank That.” Way was a clever marketer who would intentionally mistag his songs on MP3-sharing sites so that users would hear his song “Crank That” instead of the popular songs they were looking for. In 2006, well before the rise of the term “YouTuber,” he started recording videos of his life for his fans, like the time he uploaded one of himself and friends promoting a new CD at a local fair. But whereas moves used be regionally locked-it took the better part of a decade for 1983’s “Wild Style” to give breakdancing nationwide exposure-the Internet now scales their popularity with dramatic speed, and also that of the songs they’re attached to.ĭeAndre Way, better known as Soulja Boy, pioneered this method of the digital dance craze. As New York’s cultural dominance of hip-hop waned in the nineties and the early aughts, regional dances like Miami’s Tootsie Roll, Atlanta’s Pool Palace, and even Memphis’s jookin supplanted more traditional breakdancing in the local rap imagination. In the mid-seventies, breakdancing by New York City youths evolved as a core element of early hip-hop culture, parallel to d.j.ing and rapping choreography took place during rhythmic interludes (“breaks”) looped by the d.j.s. The video, which shows both of them “Shoot” dancing across Memphis, has more than two hundred million views on YouTube.ĭance songs certainly aren’t new: America was doing the Charleston to jazz records a century ago, and Chubby Checker had the country doing the twist in the early sixties. In February, Drake generously hopped on BlocBoy’s single “Look Alive,” which promptly shot up the charts. In January, BlocBoy uploaded an Instagram video of himself on a dance floor with Drake. BlocBoy told The Fader that he and Drake connected after the Canadian rapper posted a clip of a “Shoot” performance to his Instagram.
Drake, who is always scouting black regional trends to extend his relevance, quickly took BlocBoy under his wing.
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By December, professional dancers such as the YouTube duo Ayo and Teo began incorporating the “Shoot” dance into their routines. Soon teen-agers, professional football players, and-awkwardly-grade-school teachers were uploading videos of themselves mimicking the dance while BlocBoy JB chirped the song’s chorus: “Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot.”Īs BlocBoy’s fans continued to record themselves imitating the dance, he started reposting the videos on Instagram with the hashtag #shootchallenge, encouraging them to post more. Though the rapper had already built up a following in his home town through modern rap’s traditional path of mixtapes, SoundCloud singles, and gritty low-budget music videos, those three seconds of the video for the song “Shoot” were what broke him nationally.
Last July, in a video for the up-and-coming Memphis rapper BlocBoy JB, the director Fredrick Ali shot the rapper bouncing back on one leg while kicking the other back and forth, with his kick-side arm then jerking forward in a hammering motion. 1 record!” (The video for “ In My Feelings,” released earlier this month, features both Smith’s clip and an extended cameo by Shiggy himself.) This was Drake’s second viral dance breakthrough this year, and the embrace of so-called challenge videos by a rapper of his stature and social-media acumen marks a new turn for dance as an essential part of rap’s marketing and cultural mechanics. The next day, Drake uploaded his own Instagram video, of a jubilant Shiggy, and giddily shouted, “Man got me a No. On July 16th, seventeen days after Shiggy’s post, the song reached the top of Billboard’s Hot 100, where it remains. He hashtagged it with a challenge, for his followers to #DoTheShiggy, and so many people did the Shiggy that Will Smith, unable to resist, performed it atop a bridge in Budapest. The day that Drake dropped his latest album, “Scorpion,” the Internet comedian Shiggy uploaded an Instagram video of himself in a pink sweatsuit pantomiming the lyrics to the single “In My Feelings”-“Keke, do you love me? Are you riding?”-with literal hand-heart and wheel-steering gestures.