Baauer – Harlem Shake

From the soundtrack to every damn social media link you’ve avoided clicking this year…

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[4.60]Jonathan Bogart: I have a weakness for the sort of garish, cartoonish dance novelties that make serious appreciators of electronic music feel ill, but even I have my limits. Maybe if there were more than a couple of ideas woven throughout instead of merely stitched together in an uneven hodgepodge. But after three minutes I’m good and sick of that sine-wave hook.
[4]

Crystal Leww: At the beginning of 2013, this would have been an [8]. It’s a fun dance track that is easily integrated well into DJ sets with a couple of fun build ups and drops. But alas, it is now the end of February, and a couple hundred million YouTube views of people humping the air, a gross interview where Baauer praises “hood” and “ghetto” sounds, and a Billboard #1 later, I am left feeling angry every time I hear this song about the gross lack of awareness, appropriation, and profiting by white people of black culture. There are a couple of positives that have come out of this mess though: 1) we get this awesome video of The Original Harlem Shakers doing the Harlem Shake (the tempo change in the remix does tip you off to the fact that it is impossible to do the real Harlem Shake to the bad “Harlem Shake”) and 2) G. Dep is in the news again for something other than murder.
[2]

Patrick St. Michel:
SUBJECT: Attention Harry Rodrigues, Urgent News From The Future
BODY: Hello Mr. Rodrigues, my name is Patrick St. Michel and I live in the future, February 2013 to be exact. This is not a scam. I don’t want to give away how I’ve managed to send you this message from the future (Google might be watching), but attached is a photo of today’s paper and a copy of the Billboard Hot 100. See anything exciting on the charts? Yep, your “Harlem Shake,” which you’ll release tomorrow, is on top! Congrats, you deserve it! “Harlem Shake” is a great bit of dance music, taking the best aspects of modern-day EDM… the drop, mainly… and merging it with non-headache-inducing noise. Plus, that lion roar, good idea man. You’ve created the evolution of “Barbara Streisand,” and you shall get the critical attention you deserve. Unfortunately, you don’t want to know how you end up at the top of the charts…a s well as on all the wrong Tumblr tags. I urge you CHANGE THE NAME OF YOUR SONG. Call it “Harlem” or “Shake” or fucking anything else man, trust me, you’ll save everyone a lot of stress. If you are worried about any financial gains you might miss out on, I leave you one tip… Joe Flacco, Super Bowl MVP, bet big my friend.
[7]

Alfred Soto: If this phenomenon had boasted M.I.A.’s name and voice, it would have made for an arresting 45-second opening.
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: Pretty much four minutes too long, as many have realised. There’s too little variation — even when some seems forthcoming it doesn’t really go anywhere — and that leaves too much room for enjoyment to turn to boredom, and maybe even then irritation. Oh.
[5]

Frank Kogan: Don’t know enough about “trap” to know if this belongs in the category or not, but this seems to take everything nerve-wracking and appealing about the form and quadruples it: a big propulsive bass but a song that pulls the floor boards out from under us before we can get footing enough to be propelled; a demanding pang-filled voice that’s perpetually cut short, never permitted to coalesce into its own emotion. Draws you in and slices you up. She’s sampled from the ’00s, right? But she (who Reddit thinks is a he, but that’s not what my ears tell me) feels as if she’s back at the dawn of disco, the Chakachas, disembodied voices as a soundtrack to late nights in airport lounges or seedy dives on 23rd Street that call themselves “The Starlight Disco.” In a way, the song says it all in the 31 seconds of the viral video meme. But I like it this way, on the single, going on, not developing, going on, not developing, going on, not developing…
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: This is my first time hearing “Harlem Shake,” despite being in a line of work where it probably helps to know the No. 1 song in the country. (Other lines of work that fit: Witness Protection for middle schoolers; hip vice principal; prop bet junkie; campus catfish.) I’d been avoiding it because I hate all of the following: memes; memes that supplant actual culture by flooding Google’s algorithm with money and wacky; college frosh tastes as monoculture; brosteppified trap; phenomena with headlines like “How Four-Person INDmusic is Monetizing the ‘Harlem Shake’ Meme for Mad Decent”; seemingly plausible chart changes that, on paper, only Luddites could argue against but that turn over a significant portion of the Hot 100 to tallying who’s got the most clickbots (computer or preteen) and how many different rowing teams used an audio snippet to flail around someone’s iPhone. But now here we are, with a No. 1 song nobody’s heard more than 30 seconds of, by an artist that most non-trap geeks (i.e. most people) care about roughly as much as O-Zone or Psy’s back catalog, soaked in fake importance. What strikes me most is how, as Robert Myers points out, the thing’s essentially unfinished— it is a demo missing its vocalist. Which isn’t itself a criticism — instrumental genres and vocal genres play by different rules, and no way unfinished pop demos haven’t charted in droves anyway — but makes for a track you really can’t listen to more than 30 seconds of, unless you’re recording yourself freestyling over it. If only that was the meme.
[4]

Brad Shoup: The song is five-trick junk wherein only one works (the pause before the bass), but our Billboard robot overlords have done something great with the chart changes. All apologies to the incomparable Chris Molanphy and Jody Rosen, but I yearn for more than a little chaos in the charts. Just imagine: Reddit, 4chan, Popjustice and the Bodybuilding.com forum all duly promoting their nonsense to the tippity-top of the pops. The mind reels at the fuckery possible, all the great and terrible songs that will have to be considered on the always-dubious merit of “achievement” until we stop giving a shit about numerical ordering or Billboard pares its criteria. I pray for a million Harlem Shakes on the CVs of one hundred thousand unworthies.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: Huh, so it turns out hundreds of videos of people dancing around like twats does not make a song more interesting or pleasurable to listen to, but it does makes it worthy of a lot of sales and people going around in circles discussing the context on social media until I want to bomb Tumblr to make the pain go away. If you want to know why a lot of earnest critics long for the days when record stores flourished, imagine millions of people giving enough of a shit to go down to HMV and actually spend a few bucks on a CD single of this over… and you’ve just imagined a world with a better #1 single than this. It has to be.
[2]

Will Adams: It loops itself so you don’t have to.
[4]