Think globally, act virally. Like a cartoon thought bubble, that notion seems to hang in the mild afternoon air here, as school lets out early on parent-teacher conference day at Alexander Hamilton High School. At two o’clock precisely, students flood from a 1930s brick building evocative of Andy Hardy movies. If you are 130 years old, you will get that reference. If you are not, let’s just say that they were Hollywood films in which perky and resourceful teenagers had a tendency to put on shows in somebody’s barn.
And isn’t the Web, in its wildly do-it-yourself essence, a technological update on the Andy Hardy narrative? And isn’t this partly why the students hanging out on South Robertson Boulevard have become huge stars on the Internet, their fame conjured out of home-grown YouTube videos of jerking — a new dance with its own quickly evolving music and a style of dress?
Julian Goins, the 15-year-old leader of the Ranger$, a five-member jerking crew, hops onto the tips of his sneakers — the Tippy Toe — and then swivels his body ground-ward, legs crossed at the ankle. He pops up like a jack-in-the-box, spins and bounces, gliding backward in the Reject, a move that resembles nothing so much as the Running Man, an 1980s dance-floor step but in reverse.
The other kids in the schoolyard pay scant attention to the star in their midst. Until his Ranger$ schedule exploded and his mother decided to home-school him, Julian was just another student.
Goofy, gentle, nimbly amateurish, jerking was little known outside certain precincts of this sprawling city until a year ago. But in the last nine months or so, jerking began an unexpected run as an Internet phenomenon.
When the New Boyz — two teenagers who had been playing high school auditoriums — released You’re a Jerk, the song raced up the Billboard ladder, sold 750,000 copies on iTunes and another 400,000 ring tones, provided the duo with a base for a national tour and, of course, gave rise to untold copycats.
“Jerking started off in LA as just a little inner-city dance,” said one of the New Boyz, Earl Benjamin, 18, known as Ben J. “We used to search for it on YouTube and we noticed it had potential to be bigger than it was. It was like when you first saw break dancing: it has so many different parts, and when you get the dance down pat, you wanted to do it all the time. It reminded you of how fun hip-hop used to be.”
Warner Brothers/Asylum and Interscope were among those that quickly signed jerking crews — the Bangz, the Cold Flamez, the Rej3ctz and Audio Push. In late spring, Shariff Hasan, 30, a filmmaker, began filming a feature, Jerkin’, simultaneously developing a documentary and a jerking reality show for MTV.
Sneaker manufacturers like Vlado got in on the act, sponsoring the Ranger$, whose offhand way of mashing up fashion influences — punk, 1980s pop, skater culture, Daisy Age hip-hop and goth — breathed life into the weary proposition that fashion’s most compelling innovations often come from the street.
Seen in formal terms, said Sally Sommer, a dance historian who teaches at Florida State University, jerking may merely be a cousin to the “lambada or the twist.” It is certainly, Sommer said, less physically demanding than krumping or vogueing or the other highly skilled and innovative urban forms of dance. But the lambada was a fad. The twist was a fad. And jerking, its adherents say, has a cultural resonance that goes beyond the Reject and the Tippy Toe.
RSS