Hong Kong Sevens | A craze befitting the Sevens

It kept mushrooming on YouTube and multiplied like some weird alien amoeba, but like it or hate it the Harlem Shake will be shaking down Hong Kong Stadium this weekend.

It’s the dance anyone can do; you can’t do it right, and you can’t do it wrong. It gives people with two left feet the chance to look like they have the moves. It gives hope to people like me who dance worse than blow-up human-like forms that flutter in the breeze outside used-car lots and trade shows.

In Chinese New Year week, the Harlem Shake took root around the world. In the Year of the Snake it will weave its way around So Kon Po and the stadium like a Mexican wave.

Its origins are about as far away from Harlem as you can get. And like Gangnam Style, it’s been parodied from Poland to Pittsburgh. More people watched it in the first week than the population of Australia. A week later, there were 175 million views.

The dance for the Harlem Shake is like the definition of jazz … four musicians all playing a different tune. Yet it reflects the Hong Kong Sevens... 40,000 people doing their own thing, living their own Sevens, supporting their own team but somehow with a collective conscience of rugby nirvana.

It has skyrocketed into orbit the song by Brooklyn DJ Baauer. Last summer, he posted the song on YouTube with no visuals.