The Whip

About

The Whip, (not to be confused with Ghost Riding the Whip), is a choreographed dance which involves raising a knee, dropping it and making a car-driving gesture with the opposite-side arm. The dance is often associated with the hip hop tracks "Watch Me" by Silento^[1] and "Nasty Freestyle" by T-Wayne.^[3]

Origin

The term "whip" (slang for "car") was originally popularized in the San Francisco Bay Area hyphy subculture. On August 21st, 2014, YouTuber King Imprint posted a video titled "New Dance #Whip," in which several young boys perform the dance to the 2014 hip hop song "Bricks (Featuring Migos)" by trap producer Carnage (shown below). Over the next year, the video received over 13 million views and 3,900 comments.

Spread

On November 9th, 2014, the Stupid Vines YouTube channel posted a video of professional star football player Odell Beckham Jr performing the whip as a touchdown celebration, which accumulated upwards of 1.8 million views and 580 comments in the next six months.

On January 3rd, 2015, the head football coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes Urban Meyer tweeted a Vine video of a coach performing the whip (shown below). In the first five months, the video gained over 24 million views, 121,000 likes and 70,000 revines.

On January 26th, rapper Silento released his debut single "Watch Me", containing the lyrics "Watch me whip, watch me nae nae" (shown below, left). On March 4th, the hip hop song "Nasty Freestyle" by rapper T-Wayne was released, which is often used in videos featuring the whip dance (shown below, right).

On March 18th, Urban Dictionary^[5] user haysmith submitted an entry for "the whip," which compared it to the "nae nae" dance. On May 27th, Twitter user @ATM_johnn^[4] tweeted a video of Oklahoma Sooners' quarterback Baker Mayfield performing the whip. Within one month, the tweet gathered upwards of 1,400 retweets and favorites.

Various Examples

As of June 2015, there are over 32,8000 results under the tag "The Whip" on Vine.^[2]

Search Interest

External References