The original Renegade steps up
14-year-old created one of the biggest dances on the internet – but nobody really knows that
JALAIAH Harmon, is coming up in a dance world completely reshaped by the internet.
She trains in all the traditional ways, taking classes in hip hop, ballet, lyrical, jazz, tumbling and tap after school at a dance studio near her home in the Atlanta suburbs.
She is also building a career online, studying viral dances, collaborating with peers and posting original choreography.
Recently, a sequence of hers turned into one of the most viral dances online: the Renegade.
There’s basically nothing bigger right now. Teenagers are doing the dance in the halls of high schools, on sports grounds and across the internet. Lizzo, Kourtney Kardashian, David Dobrik and members of K-pop band Stray Kids have all performed it. Charli D’amelio, one of Tiktok’s biggest star, with nearly 28 million followers on the platform, has been affectionately deemed the dance’s “CEO” for popularising it.
But the one person who hasn’t been able to capitalise on the attention is Jalaiah, the Renegade’s 14-year-old creator.
“I was happy when I saw my dance all over,” she said. “But I wanted credit for it.”
The Viral Dance-iearchy Tiktok, one of the biggest video apps in the world, has become synonymous with dance culture. Yet many of its most popular dances, including the Renegade, Holy Moly Donut Shop, the Mmmxneil and Cookie Shop, have come from young black creators on a myriad smaller apps.
Most of these dancers identify as Dubsmashers. This means, in essence, that they use the Dubsmash app and other short-form social video apps to document choreography to songs they love. They then post (or crosspost) the videos to Instagram, where they can reach a wider audience. If it’s popular there, it’s only a matter of time before the dance is co-opted by the Tiktok masses.
“Tiktok is like a mainstream Dubsmash,” said Kayla Nicole Jones, 18, a Youtube star and music artist. “They take from Dubsmash and they run off with the sauce.”
The Renegade dance followed this exact path. On September 25, Jalaiah came home from school and asked a friend she had met through Instagram, Kaliyah Davis, 12, if she wanted to create a post together.
Jalaiah listened to the beats in the song Lottery by Atlanta rapper K-camp and then choreographed a difficult sequence to its chorus, incorporating other viral moves like the wave and the whoa.
She filmed herself and posted it, first to Funimate (where she has more than 1 700 followers) and then to her more than 20 000 followers on Instagram (with a side-by-side shot of Kaliyah and her performing it together).
“I posted on Instagram, and it got about 13 000 views, and people started doing it over and over again,” Jalaiah said. In October, a user named @global.jones brought it to Tiktok, changing up some of the moves at the end, and the dance spread like wildfire. Before long, Charli D’amelio had posted a video of herself doing it, as did many other Tiktok influencers. None gave Jalaiah credit.
After long days in the ninth grade and between dance classes, Jalaiah tried to get the word out. She hopped in the comments
of several videos, asking influencers to tag her. For the most part she was ridiculed or ignored.
She even set up her own Tiktok account and created a video of herself in front of a green screen, Googling the question “who created the Renegade dance?”in an attempt to set the record straight. “I was upset,” she said. “It wasn’t fair.”
To be robbed of credit on Tiktok is to be robbed of real opportunities. In 2020, virality means income: creators of popular dances, like the Backpack Kid or Shiggy, often amass large online followings and become influencers themselves. That, in turn, opens the door to brand deals, media opportunities and, most important for Jalaiah, introductions to those in the professional dance and choreography community. Obtaining credit isn’t easy, though. As writer Rebecca Jennings noted in Vox, in an article about the online dance world’s thorny ethics: “Dances are virtually impossible to legally claim as one’s own.”
But credit and attention are valuable even without legal ownership.
“I think I could have got money for it, promos for it; I could have got famous off it, get noticed,” Jalaiah said. “I don’t think any of that stuff has happened for me because no one knows I made the dance.”
Scares of the Share Economy Cross-platform sharing – of dances, of memes, of information – is how things are made on the internet.
Popular tweets go viral on Instagram; videos made on Instagram make their way on to Youtube. But in recent years, several large Instagram meme accounts have faced backlash for sharing jokes that went viral without crediting the creator.
Norms, particularly around credit, are still being established. But for Dubsmashers and those in the Instagram dance community, it’s common courtesy to tag the handles of dance creators and musicians, and use hashtags to track the evolution of a dance.
It has set up a culture clash between the two influencer communities.
“On Tiktok they don’t give people credit,” said Raemoni Johnson, a 15-year-old Dubsmasher. “They just do the video, and they don’t tag us.”
On January 17, tensions boiled over after Barrie Segal, head of content at Dubsmash, posted a series of videos asking Charli D’amelio to give a dance credit to D1 Nayah, a popular Dubsmash dancer with more than 1 million followers on Instagram, for her Donut Shop dance.
Tiktok Room, a gossip account on Instagram, picked up the controversy and spurred a sea of comments.
“Why is it so hard to give black creators their credit,” said one Instagram commenter, referring to the mostly white Tiktokers who have taken dances from Dubsmashers and posted them without credit. “Instead of using dubsmash, use Tiktok and then people would credit you maybe,” a Tiktoker fan said.
At this point, if a Tiktoker doesn’t initially know who did a dance, commentators will usually tag the original creator’s handle. Charli D’amelio and other stars have started giving dance credits and tagging creators in their captions.
And the creators who are flooding into Tiktok from Instagram and Dubsmash are leading the way by example.
“We have 1.7 million followers, and we always give credit whether the person has zero followers or not,” said Yoni Wicker, 14, one half of the Thewickertwinz. “We know how important it is. That person who made that dance, they might be a fan of ours. Us tagging them makes their day.”
Jalaiah continues to post a steady stream of dance videos to Funimate, Dubsmash, and Instagram. She said she doesn’t harbour any hard feelings against Charli D’amelio for popularising the Renegade without naming her. Instead, she hopes she can collaborate with her one day, which they did this week, posting the video on Tiktok and receiving more than 25 million views.
“We’re all inspired by other people,” Jalaiah said. “We make up a dance and it grows.”