More than a decade ago, a guy named Jayson Musson, then a Philly art student, got into a bloody fight with a guy who’d been painting over his graffiti around town. He wrote a song about the fight, and last year, it was sampled into a new song, called “Harlem Shake.” This month, piggybacking onto an idea hatched by a weirdo video blogger, thousands of people uploaded clips of themselves dancing along with “Harlem Shake.” It’s a lot to take in, so here’s the whole story of how Musson’s lyric made it into a producer named Baauer’s hands, and how Baauer’s song ended up in a million videos.

It's the opposite of Gangnam style -- rather than one video, it's thousands of videos.

Fascinating since it pretty much exploded overnight a few weeks ago.

Since the beginning of February, people have been sharing 30-second videos soundtracked by Baauer’s track “Harlem Shake” (coincidentally, premiered on this site last May) at an astonishing rate. Reportedly, as many as 4,000 videos have been uploaded in a single day, and in two weeks, more than 12,000 videos have been created, generating more than 44 million total views. In a “Harlem Shake” video, a person, usually masked, thrusts along with the music while others mundanely go about their day-to-day. Then, when the *drop* drops, action explodes: people change costumes, remove their shirts and generally lose it. If you haven’t seen them already: here’s FADER Label’s Matt & Kim wilding with fans at a concert and the UGA swim team flopping around underwater."

I still don't get why all the dance videos came out this month.

The song came out almost a year ago!