HOT CHOREOGRAPHER JALAIAH HARMON
The most popular dance on TikTok is the work of a teenager who almost didn’t get credit for it
THE MOST INFLUENTIAL dancer in the world isn’t Beyoncé or J. Lo or anyone on Dancing With the Stars: It’s a 14-year-old girl from the Atlanta suburbs. Jalaiah Harmon is the creator of the Renegade, a simple yet infectious dance set to a once-little-known song called “Lottery,” by Atlanta rapper K Camp. TikTok dance challenges, which have only grown in popularity since the world went into lockdown, are likely the most ubiquitous cultural product of this strange moment. And Harmon’s Renegade is, without question, the most recognizable.
To understand this particular TikTok dance, you need to understand a lot of TikTok dances. Harmon’s choreography is an amalgam of other popular moves found on the video-loop platform — among them the wave and the omnipresent woah — combined at dizzying speed and performed with a winning smile. “I had no idea it would become viral,” Harmon says. “Creating dances is what I did all the time.” She hastily recorded the moves before a dance class and posted the video on Instagram last September. Since then, Renegade videos on TikTok have garnered 1.8 billion views.
Everyone from Lizzo to Millie Bobby Brown to Kourtney Kardashian has done the Renegade. TikTok celebrities took to it especially quickly; Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae, two of the biggest names on the platform, made it a phenomenon. Harmon, a black teen with nowhere near the follower counts of the influencers riding the Renegade wave, was suddenly watching her dance take off without her. “I would comment under the videos to let people know I created it,” she says. “Without being a huge influencer, I really thought that’s all I could do.”
It’s a cycle that plays out over and over again online: A young black creative makes something cool, which is then quickly co-opted by white influencers with larger followings. Harmon doesn’t blame TikTok celebs like D’Amelio for this dynamic — “I’m happy for her. She’s talented and very nice,” she says — but it wasn’t until Harmon started taking credit for her choreography in press interviews that she began to see some of the attention (and financial benefits) coming her way. “When everyone learned about my story and started saying I missed out on opportunities because the credit was given to someone else, it made me think a lot about how important it is to speak up,” she says. “I think it’s important that people know we understand how things work, and how they will continue if we don’t stand up for what’s right.” EJ DICKSON