Photo+Journalism
Jerkin’, Jerking, the Stanky Leg dance. Look it up on youtube.
It’s not dirty, I promise.
It seems that “Jerkin” is the newest mass fad dance sweeping across high school and college campuses. Jerkin appears to be a combination of dance styles, often to its unofficial anthem by New Boyz: You’re a Jerk. Picture the typical top rock (what breakdancers do when they’re not doing headspins), add some additional head bobs, pop-n-lockin, cross-stepping, knee wiggling, arm flailing, dips to the ground, and you’ve got a good idea of what jerkin’ might look like. You can also picture me at a dance party around 1am, which can be pretty close.
In some ways jerkin’ has replaced the void the soulja boy- crank that dance left behind after saturating youtube for months in 2007. But unlike Soulja Boy’s Crank That, I can’t seem to figure out the source of Jerkin.
The Soulja Boy dance was born in a sort of meta-music video environment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpocrqvP2Yg In the video, the dance already exists and has been diffused through internet videos: Mr. Collipark watches them on his laptop and teen girls watch on a cell phone. (The music video brings up a chicken-egg dilemma that I don’t exactly want to get into right now.) However the source of the Soulja Boy dance is ostensibly the music video and the song itself, which both instruct viewers on how to perform the dance and the meaning of the gestures.
So where the heck did jerkin come from?
I took it upon myself to turn to the real authorities and do some (of course) wiki-research.
Unfortunately, the Jerkin’ page is thin on information and heavy on typos. Wiki says that the dance originated in Los Angeles in 2008 and quickly spread, especially via the Internet, across the country in 2009.
After a shorthand search of Youtube, the information seems to be accurate. The oldest jerkin’ video I could find was from August 27, 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qvLaLqca4Y Some guys at UCLA have also started a Jerkin’ crew: the UCLA Jerk Kings (putting the hipster in hipster-hop). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39azflIuKWI
I perused some comments to see if anyone had a solid idea of who started the Jerkin’ “movement” (all meanings intended). I thought KillaKev206 put it best when he commented: “nahh The fuck Jerkin is WAY WAY older then 3 years ago bruh. Thats liek sayin Kanye invented the Shutter Shades or T pain INventing The autotune. Its just Old Fads brought back to life by younger Generations. Modern jerkin is jsut a colleciton of Dances Mainly Dipping and Reject Dancing which are theyre own dances but Put together to make jerkin. Like Putting 2 Birthday Cards in one Enevelope u Feel? but Jerkin is Raw shit”
So perhaps jerkin’ is some sort of Frankenstein of dance: a synthesis of movements borrowed from other dances. And now it’s riding on the same internet airwaves that made Crank That popular.
All the more power to YouTube.
Just wrote a post on jerkin…come over and leave us a comment