Bo­bie-lee Dixon

Last year it was South Ko­re­an rap­per Psy's Gang­nam Style that swept the globe with over one bil­lion YouTube hits.

This year it's the Harlem Shake that has gone vi­ral. A slew of YouTube videos show peo­ple and groups around the globe do­ing their own ren­di­tions of the pop­u­lar "dance."

On Mon­day the T&T Guardian vis­it­ed the UWI St Au­gus­tine cam­pus, where scores of stu­dents gath­ered to watch the film­ing of a ver­sion of the Harlem Shake, done by a group of stu­dents from dif­fer­ent fac­ul­ties.

The video is al­ready avail­able on YouTube.

The dancers dressed in var­i­ous cos­tumes and took to table­tops, chant­i­ng and jump­ing up and down, "wild­ing out" to the of­fi­cial Harlem Shake song, a dance track by Brook­lyn-based DJ Baauer.

Harlem shake hits Trinidad

The or­gan­is­er of Mon­day's "shake­down," Denith Mc­Ni­colls, said he and a friend de­cid­ed they should cash in on the ac­tion while it was still hot, plus it would be fun to do a pre­sen­ta­tion of the pop­u­lar dance.

"We cre­at­ed a group last Fri­day on Face­book and by Sun­day morn­ing we had about 500 peo­ple say­ing that they will take part in to­day's shoot," said Mc­Ni­colls.

"The more spon­ta­neous...ran­dom, the bet­ter."

De­scrib­ing him­self as a per­former who loves the stage, Mc­Ni­colls said he felt the shoot was the per­fect op­por­tu­ni­ty to bring the cam­pus to­geth­er.

"Cam­pus is usu­al­ly so di­vid­ed, so I feel to­day was a great op­por­tu­ni­ty for all stu­dents to get more ac­quaint­ed with each oth­er and to have fun be­ing a part of the same ac­tiv­i­ty," he ex­plained.

There are al­so oth­er Tri­ni ver­sions of the Harlem Shake on YouTube, like the Gulf City Toi­let Harlem Shake (yes, it's filmed in a toi­let), the Syn­er­gy TV Harlem Shake and the most pop­u­lar, the Queen's Park Sa­van­nah Harlem Shake, di­rect­ed by pho­tog­ra­ph­er Dami­an Luk Pat.

The Queen's Park Sa­van­nah ver­sion, which has a de­cid­ed­ly Tri­ni flavour, and in­volves a co­conut ven­dor, re­ceived more than 26,000 hits on the day it was post­ed on YouTube.

Speak­ing to the T&T Guardian, Luk Pat said the idea was to make it more lo­cal than the uni­ver­sal ver­sions.

"We used pieces of cos­tumes from Car­ni­val, and a typ­i­cal scene of peo­ple buy­ing co­conut wa­ter around the Sa­van­nah to pro­duce our ver­sion of the Harlem Shake.

Near the end of the video you will al­so hear Su­perBlue's Fan­tas­tic Fri­day–again, we want­ed to make it more lo­cal," said Luk Pat.

He said they even got a Red Bull truck to sup­ply the pow­er for the mu­sic played in the video.

Will the Harlem Shake make the one-bil­lion mark or even break Gang­nam Style's record? It pos­si­bly could. Maybe a new Harlem Shake video is be­ing up­loaded to the in­ter­net as you read this.

WHAT IS THE HARLEM SHAKE?

Wikipedia says the Harlem Shake, orig­i­nal­ly called the al­bee, was start­ed in Harlem in 1981 by a man named Al B. It was based on an Ethiopi­an dance called the Es­kista and in­volved main­ly shrug­ging the shoul­ders. It was res­ur­rect­ed and went main­stream in 2001 when rap­per G Dep fea­tured the dance in his mu­sic video Let's Get It. More re­cent­ly it was brought to life a third time when four Aus­tralian men post­ed a video of them­selves in a bed­room do­ing their ver­sions of the Harlem Shake.

And this video is what start­ed the craze that's now gone vi­ral. All it has in com­mon with the orig­i­nal Harlem Shake is the name. The 30-sec­ond videos fea­ture an ex­cerpt from the Harlem Shake by elec­tron­ic mu­si­cian Baauer. They be­gin with one per­son–of­ten wear­ing a mask– danc­ing alone for 15 sec­onds, sur­round­ed by oth­er peo­ple who are work­ing or go­ing about nor­mal ac­tiv­i­ties while ig­nor­ing or obliv­i­ous to the dancer. Af­ter 15 sec­onds, when the bass drops, the en­tire crowd is seen do­ing a crazy dance while wear­ing sil­ly cos­tumes and bran­dish­ing out­landish props.