# Twerking Twerking is a hip-shaking squat dance that grew out of Southern hip hop in the 1990s before homemade YouTube videos pushed it online around 2009. It later became a mainstream news fixture in 2013 after Miley Cyrus and a Jimmy Kimmel prank video turned the word into one of the most searched dance terms on the internet. ## Origin The dance predates the meme by more than a decade. Twerking circulated in Southern hip hop and crunk scenes through the 1990s, and the slang version of "twerk" was logged on the Online Slang Dictionary by a user named Brandon on April 6, 2002[5]. Urban Dictionary followed almost exactly a year later, on April 7, 2003, with a definition from user Robin describing it as working one's body, especially the rear end[4]. The online meme phase traces most directly to the Twerk Team, a group reportedly started in 2005 by three 14-year-old girls in Atlanta, Georgia[2]. The official OfficialTwerkTeam YouTube channel went live on June 5, 2009, and became the reference point many later articles pointed to when explaining the dance[6]. From there the format was less about a single creator and more about an endless feed of amateur clips, which is why the "creator" of twerking as an internet thing is best labeled as unknown rather than attributed to any one dancer or label. - **Platform:** Southern hip hop (dance origin) / YouTube (viral spread) - **Creator:** Unknown - **Date:** 2009 ## Overview Twerking is a dance built around rapid hip and glute movement, usually from a low squat with the dancer bent forward. The word itself is thought to be a blend of "twist" and "jerk," possibly reworked from "footwork," and sits at the intersection of Southern hip hop, crunk, and bounce music from New Orleans[1]. Early rap tracks like Ying Yang Twins' "Whistle While You Twurk" and Bubba Sparxx's "Twerk a Little" put the term into recorded music well before it had a Google trend line[2]. As a meme, twerking is less a single joke than a format: a short vertical clip of a dancer, often filmed in a bedroom or hallway, with the camera low and the beat loud. The humor online tends to run in two directions, either sincere showcase clips posted by dedicated dancers, or chaos edits where the dance is interrupted by a parent, a pet, or something catching fire[2]. By 2012, the word was so searched in Australia that it landed at number seven on Google's "how to" list for the year, even though the Google spokesperson quoted in the story admitted he had never heard of it[1]. The tone shifted again once mainstream pop grabbed hold of it. After Miley Cyrus performed a routine built around the move at the 2013 MTV VMAs, blog posts, tutorials, and parody clips started treating twerking as shorthand for pop controversy rather than a regional dance[3]. Urban Dictionary entries from this era joke that twerking "is something that Miley Cyrus should never ever do," which captures the pop-culture whiplash fairly well[4]. ## How It Spread The jump from Atlanta dance group to global search term happened over about four years. The Twerk Team's YouTube channel racked up roughly 76 million views and 258,000 subscribers in under three years, while their Twitter account passed 114,000 followers[2]. In September 2011, the aggregator site YouTwerk launched, pulling YouTube twerk clips into a single catalog. Reddit joined in on February 28, 2012, when the /r/twerk subreddit was created as a voting feed for twerk videos[8], and a month later the Twerk Olympics Tumblr started posting curated GIFs on March 30, 2012. 2013 is when the dance stopped being a niche YouTube category and became a running news story. On June 3, 2013, Miley Cyrus released "We Can't Stop," and the following day her Facebook team announced that the music video would include fan-submitted twerking clips tagged #FanMade[2]. Three months later, on September 3, 2013, a YouTube user calling herself Caitlin Heller uploaded "Worst Twerk Fail EVER - Girl Catches Fire!" in which a handstand twerk ends with the dancer tipping into a table of lit candles. Within a week it passed 9.8 million views and was picked up by the Huffington Post[9], the New York Post[10], and E! Online, which flatly called it "the worst twerking fail ever"[11]. The fail turned out to be staged. On September 9, 2013, Jimmy Kimmel aired an extended cut on his show revealing that "Caitlin Heller" was stuntwoman Daphne Avalon and that he had orchestrated the whole clip, running in at the end with a fire extinguisher. The reveal spread almost as fast as the original, with write-ups at the Daily Dot[12] and The Atlantic framing it as a case study in how fast viral content can bypass basic skepticism[13]. Earlier that year, in March and April 2013, a far darker twerking video also went viral: a 30-second clip of a father whipping his two teenage daughters with cable after finding a twerk video they had posted to Facebook, which reportedly passed two million views on WorldStarHipHop and drove calls for child protective services[14]. ## How to Use A typical twerking clip is short, vertical, and shot in a cramped room with the camera placed low enough to catch the full movement. Dancers usually squat, plant their hands on knees, a wall, or the floor, and bounce the hips in time with a trap, bounce, or crunk track. Common video conventions include a tight bedroom frame, a looping song clip, and a reveal, often a parent walking in, a sibling filming without permission, or in the most-shared cases, something going badly wrong on camera[7]. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Twerking? Twerking is a squat-based dance focused on rapid hip and glute movement, rooted in Southern hip hop and crunk music from the 1990s[1]. ### Where did Twerking come from? The dance grew out of 1990s Southern hip hop and bounce scenes, with early recorded references in Ying Yang Twins' "Whistle While You Twurk" and Bubba Sparxx's "Twerk a Little"[2]. ### What does Twerking mean? The word is thought to be a blend of "twist" and "jerk," possibly reworked from "footwork," describing a provocative hip-shaking dance[1]. ### How do you use Twerking? Online, a typical twerk clip is a short vertical video shot low to the ground in a bedroom or hallway, set to a trap or bounce track, often with a surprise interruption or fail at the end[11]. ### Is Twerking still popular? Twerking is still a staple of club dancing, music videos, and short-form video platforms, though its peak as a stand-alone news story was 2013 around Miley Cyrus and the Jimmy Kimmel prank[13]. ### Who are the Twerk Team? The Twerk Team is an Atlanta-based dance group reportedly started in 2005 by three 14-year-old girls, whose YouTube channel helped push the dance into online pop culture[2]. ### What was the "Worst Twerk Fail EVER" video? A September 3, 2013 YouTube clip in which a handstand twerk ends with the dancer knocking over candles and catching fire; it was later revealed to be a Jimmy Kimmel hoax starring stuntwoman Daphne Avalon[15]. ### How did Jimmy Kimmel prank the internet with twerking? Kimmel orchestrated the viral "Caitlin Heller" twerk fail video, then revealed the hoax on his show on September 9, 2013, with an extended cut showing him running in with a fire extinguisher[13]. ### How did Miley Cyrus affect twerking's popularity? After "We Can't Stop" dropped on June 3, 2013, Cyrus's Facebook page solicited fan-made twerk videos for the music video, pulling the dance into a mainstream pop news cycle[2]. ### What was the first subreddit about twerking? /r/twerk was created on February 28, 2012, as a Reddit voting feed for twerk-related videos[8]. ## References 1. [https://www.theage.com.au/technology/do-you-know-how-to-twerk-or-even-what-it-is-20121213-2bbrp.html]() 2. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/twerking]() 3. [https://www.eonline.com/news/456177/this-worst-twerk-fail-ever-youtube-video-is-actually-the-worst-twerk-fail-ever]() 4. [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Twerking]() 5. [http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/twerk]() 6. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl2067vJiIY]() 7. [https://nypost.com/2013/09/06/girl-catches-fire-while-recording-herself-twerking/]() 8. [https://www.reddit.com/r/twerk]() 9. [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/caitlin-heller-twerking-fail-fire-video_n_3880395]() 10. [https://nypost.com/2013/09/06/girl-catches-fire-while-recording-herself-twerking/]() 11. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mYqNh9cYlo]() 12. [https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/jimmy-kimmel-worst-twerk-fail-ever-fake/]() 13. [https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/09/how-jimmy-kimmel-tricked-internet/311268/]() 14. [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2303028/WARNING-GRAPHIC-CONTENT-Disturbing-video-shows-teenage-daughters-beaten-father-posting-sexually-suggestive-twerking-video-online.html]() 15. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpVLe6FHEh8]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/twerking Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library