Three teenage friends from Tennessee might have been the first to kick off the latest viral dance that will no doubt be recreated in Fortnite in a matter of days.
Mathew Jones, 19, uploaded a video of himself and two friends dancing to Kelis‘ bop ‘Milkshake’ to TikTok in February. They called it “The Milkshake”. According to meme encyclopedia service Know Your Meme, Mathew and his friends were the first ones to bless the internet with the dance.
“My friends Mickey and Jacob were studying abroad in Vienna and they came up with it,” Jones told PEDESTRIAN.TV. “Then they showed me it and we filmed it.”
Jones said the video picked up 90,000 views in a matter of hours. Three days after it was published that figure was closer to seven million and Jones had 23,000 more followers on the app. TikTok doesn’t generally track views for the public, preferring to show Likes – in that area Jones’ video is sitting pretty with almost 950,000.
It’s a dance that looks pretty simple: link arms with two of your mates and then take turns jumping in and out. In practice, it’s a bit harder than that.
Shortly after Jones uploaded his video the dance became a trend on TikTok, starting up the “Milkshake Challenge.” Soon, videos of (mostly teens) trying the dance were picking up hundreds of thousands of views fairly regularly. The most popular loop on TikTok comes from Tj Black (@CloudTalk) who has over two million followers on the app.
His video racked up over one million likes and was republished by a bunch of media outlets.
On Facebook, uploads of the dance have millions of views. Folks, it’s going mainstream.
“People always tell me I’m TikTok famous but I’m not real famous until someone random comes up to me,” said Jones.
A shortform video app filling the hole in our hearts created by the loss of Vine, TikTok is fast becoming the starting point for plenty of memes and challenges – and, specifically, new dances. A big part of this is obviously the way the app is intertwined with music.
More than a month after it first kicked off, people are starting to hook into the challenge and have brought the dance out of the TikTok bubble and onto other platforms like Twitter and Instagram. Hell, there are even teachers trying it out.
Triangle dance. Nailed it 🙌🏼 pic.twitter.com/16BMYDLyAd
— 🏳️🌈 Adamski 🏳️🌈 (@AdamskiJonDicky) March 11, 2019
We took the #TriangleDance challenge at the offce😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/CnrWFoHSVr
— Steve Kibui (@SteveKibui) March 12, 2019
Teachers have to have fun too! Here are some 4th grade teachers doing the triangle dance. It’s pajama day in our school 😀 #TRIANGLEDANCE pic.twitter.com/12g17RuzsY
— Mr. Ong (@WillardTeacher) March 12, 2019
