Brian Harkin for The New York Times
Joseph "No Bones" Collins danced what is known as the original "Harlem Shake" at a teenage dance night at the Union Settlement Association Community Center in Harlem.
Search YouTube for the Harlem Shake and more than 200,000 results pop up: a group of sky divers thrust their pelvises and pump their fists in a wild dance move while falling amid the clouds; members of the University of Georgia men's swim-and-dive team do similar moves in their trunks underwater; Norwegian Army officers stand stoically in camouflage and berets before breaking into their version of the dance, all set to an electronic groove.
There is a Harlem Shake puppy edition, a grandma edition and a stripper edition, inspired by a song from the producer Baauer that is currently in its second week atop the Billboard Hot 100 — thanks largely to this deluge of videos.
The thing is, this worldwide dance contagion is not the Harlem Shake.
The real Harlem Shake, a much more raw, technical, fluid, frenetic dance, was born in New York City more than 30 years ago. During halftime at streetball games held in Rucker Park, a skinny man known in the neighborhood as Al. B. would entertain the crowd with his own brand of moves, a dance that around Harlem became known as "The Al. B."
"He would dance, and twist his shoulders," said his mother, Sandra Boyce, who is 69 and lives in Harlem. Al. B., whose real name was Albert Boyce, died in 2006 at 43. He spent much of his life dancing, his mother said, "to every rhythm, and every beat, and every song," and he created his own popular style at the park. "The Al. B. from there," she said, "became the Harlem Shake."
Many give credit to one four-man dance crew, Crazy Boyz, for taking Al. B.'s moves to the next level, popularizing them enough for the mainstream. While some in Harlem today have taken offense at the rebranding and posted videos of their own in response to the YouTube onslaught, members of the crew see another shot at stardom, the kind that burns brighter and longer than a 30-second parody.
"I'm not a hater," said Maurice Strayhorne, who is known as Motion and was part of Crazy Boyz. "But it's bitter in the sense of, it's like they're disrespecting the whole style of dancing."
He and his friends honed the dance in the late '90s at the Skate Key roller rink in the Bronx, where they hung out and flirted with girls, and at Rucker Park, where they watched Al. B. during those basketball games. "We looked up to a lot of his style, and the way he moved," said another crew member, Jesse Rutland, known as Smiley.
The Crazy Boyz said they combined their "shake" — spastic arm and chest movements — with Al. B.'s style to produce the Harlem Shake. The crew eventually took the dance to the hip-hop world in music videos for artists like Eve and Diddy, only to watch its popularity fade. "It's also sweet," Mr. Strayhorne, 30, said of the buzz around the imitation version on the Internet, "because the name is bringing the Harlem Shake back up."
"They made us relevant again," said a third member of Crazy Boyz, Joseph Collins, 32, who goes by No Bones.
The crew is rounded out by Kirkland Young, or Dirty Kirt. Two of the members grew up in Harlem. But none remembers how the dance got its name. "I called it the Funky Dance," Mr. Strayhorne said. Still, there is obvious pride in the dance in a neighborhood known the world over for its culture and style.
In a YouTube video titled "Harlem Reacts to 'Harlem Shake' Videos," some residents laugh at the controversy. But others express anger, especially at videos in which people don costumes and simply parade around. That interview footage so far has more than seven million views.
Elaine Caesar, who grew up in Harlem and now lives in the Bronx, shares the heated sentiments of some in the video.
"We take our dance seriously," said Ms. Caesar, 49, who works in Manhattan as a secretary. "Harlemites put their own little twist on it. So their dancing is an art. For people to make a mockery of it, what are you saying to us? Don't offend us with that nonsense you're calling the Harlem Shake."
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 28, 2013
An earlier version of a photo caption that appeared with this article misstated the name of a member of the Crazy Boyz dance crew. It is Jesse "Smiley" Rutland, not Jesse "Smile" Rutland.
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