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$, whose offhand way of mashing up fashion influences — punk, 1980s pop, skater culture, Daisy Age hip-hop and goth — breathed life into the weary proposition that fashion’s most compelling innovations often come from the street.
Seen in formal terms, said Sally Sommer, a dance historian who teaches at Florida State University, jerking may merely be a cousin to the “lambada or the twist.” It is certainly, Sommer said, less physically demanding than krumping or vogueing or the other highly skilled and innovative urban forms of dance. But the lambada was a fad. The twist was a fad. And jerking, its adherents say, has a cultural resonance that goes beyond the Reject and the Tippy Toe.
“Jerking is a movement, almost like in the 1980s when rap started,” said Tammy Maxwell, the manager of the Ranger$ and the mother of Julian Goins. “There’s a style to it, and a music and a lifestyle and all the kids have really jumped on it.”
Of course, it is altogether possible that jerking will live out its cycle and vanish as quickly as it appeared. But for the moment, there is no arguing with the millions of views the Ranger$ and other jerking crews have racked up for videos and music recorded on bargain equipment and set to beats created with software that seems to prove that anyone with a laptop can be a star.
“Jerking is very ground up,” said Todd Moscowitz, the president of Asylum Records, who added the Rej3ctz, the New Boyz, the Bangz and the Cold Flamez to the label’s roster this year. “It’s sprouting up everywhere you look,” said Moscowitz, who noted that when the New Boyz appeared this month at a mall in Flint, Michigan, the police were called to control a crowd of 1,500 in a space designed to accommodate a fraction of that.
Teenagers there had apparently gotten jerking’s fashion memo, the one that calls for skinny jeans, fat gold chains and T-shirts featuring characters like SpongeBob SquarePants and Oscar the Grouch. Jerking, said Hasan, the film director, is “like this huge communal collage, all these teenagers coming together to collaborate.”
It may be, as he suggested, that certain elements of this collage originated in gang culture, and that some of jerking’s dance moves amount to little more than riffs on well-established gangsta steps like the Crip Walk or the Hoover Stomp. But the overall spirit of the movement is far from criminal. And its rebellious disregard for the conventions of urban style and music (old school hip-hop artists are referred to as “baggy daddies”) is, as Moscowitz said, “the good, clean commercial kind.”
Perhaps the most compelling thing about jerking, suggested Randall Roberts, the music editor of the LA Weekly, is how handily its practitioners manipulate the Web, scouring culture of historical context, freely deploying any tool that comes to hand. “It’s like they’re dipping back and forgetting that things like gangsta rap ever happened,” he said.
There is much to admire, Roberts suggested, in the vision of teenagers of all sorts united in pursuit of a music that blends computerized pop syncopations with hip-hop beats, that obliviously blurs racial boundaries and that encourages sartorial experimentation of a kind that, Hasan said, would have marked him in high school as a hopeless nerd.
For Caesar Ruiz, one of the members of Team Dummy, a Latino jerking crew based in Long Beach, California, jerking at first seemed cordoned off from young Latino dancers. “We were like, we want to do this but we’re Mexican and, not to be racist, but this was a black dance,” he said.
But what attracted him to jerking, he added, were the same things that make so many jerking videos contagious: its fresh neo-punk style, its simple beats and the sense that anyone with a degree of coordination can learn the dance. “We just decided for ourselves that there’s no color in jerking,” he said. “If you feel it, go get it and show them you’re straight with it.”
Team Dummy altered its look from the oversize T-shirts and khakis that are standard issue in gang-dominated parts of Southern California. They began dancing and posted videos on YouTube, and according the mysterious Web laws that can send a laughing baby video global, these unknowns quickly attracted thousands of viewers.
Their online metrics, while respectable, were nothing when compared with those logged by the u.c.L.A. Jerk Kings, whose oddly titled White Boys Jerking has drawn over 2.7 million views, or the Ranger$’ Jerkin in JerkVille, which has more than three million.
As school let out last week, the unlikely superstars from the Ranger$ preened their moves against the stolid backdrop of Hamilton High.
“Let’s go mess with the Pink Dollaz,” said David White, a limber 15-year-old Ranger$ member with a winning smile and his nickname, Spotlight, tattooed across his abdomen.
White was referring to Camera and China Walker, 16-year-old twins from a girl group that first posted YouTube videos of salacious home-recorded jerking songs like Tasty just seven months ago. The Pink Dollaz were being picked up that afternoon from school to join the English rap star M.I.A. at a recording studio.
Batting their false eyelashes, the Walker twins giggled at White’s antics and the way the Ranger$ — Jacorey Williams, Julian Goins, Langson Higgins and Dashawn Blanks — amiably corkscrewed and did clumsy back flips on the grass.
“It is the kids who are really pushing this narrative along,” said Roberts of the L.A. Weekly. Yet as with so much else on the Web, there is some mysterious alchemy involved. Ask the Pink Dollaz, astonished as anyone at their overnight success.
“When this whole jerking thing first started happening and it blew up, we were like, ‘No way! Shut up!’” said Camera Walker.
“To be honest,” her twin sister, China, added, “we really had no idea this was all going to get out.”
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