#TBT: The Evolution of Dance

You may have watched the "Evolution of Dance" on a clunky desktop computer in 2006. Here’s the story of the original viral YouTube star. 🕺

First Youtube video to ever reach 100 million views


Judson Laipply was perhaps the first YouTube star. The inspirational comedian’s clip, “The Evolution of Dance,” has over 306 million views — that’s 1,836,210,534 minutes, 30,603,509 hours, 1,275,146 days or 146 years. Laipply was inspired by a comic who spoke about popular songs at weddings that have very specific dances. As Laipply continued his Skit, national conferences used the dance as an outlet for kids. After performing at a leadership conference, he was asked to post the dance on MySpace so kids in the audience could practice it. He carried on with his career, unaware of his growing popularity online and I was like OK this little weird.


“Could you still tell me what songs being played? There's no there's no song to go with the floss. There's no song to go with all of the fortnight dances. There's no song to go with twerking. So those never made it in. So, the newest song that's in the last song that happens is “Hotline Bling.” So, when when he was just like dancing around in a circle like that some adults don't get it. The Stanky Leg,” “The Bernie.” “Single Ladies.” “Gangnam Style.” There's a “Call Me Maybe”s in there per second. There's a tiny little bit of a “Wrecking Ball” which always gets a good laugh. And so those are kind of the ones that have come in in the last 13 years. Yeah it's gotta everybody's gotta know what it is without hearing the song,” Judson Laipply states.


The viral video landed Laipply on The Today Show, Ellen, Oprah and Good Morning America. He says his video’s success is partly due to the universal unifying language of music. Now, the Evolution of Dance is 8 minutes long. New songs are added on one precise condition: The way dances make it into the mix is if you saw the dance with no music.


Brut.


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Brut.