Class of the Harlem Shake     

By Shawn Rampaul
Nov 15, 2025
​They brought a politician. He made a quip at the expense of our valedictorian — about him not knowing how to make a kite, about how lost our generation is. And like every politician, he mumbled through a mesmerizing pseudo-motivational speech.
                                                                                                     Guess who faced
                                                                                           extradition to the U.S.
                                                                            for allegations of
​                                                                   fraud, corruption,
                                                  and money laundering.
​It was Sir Darryl’s idea (I’m not sure why he was exempted from the “Mr. [insert last name] ” formula). But we rehearsed it:
​Henry, I’ll call you up to collect an award. The song will start playing and I’ll pretend to be confused. Then I’ll ask you, Joseph, to go to the laptop and turn it off. By the time you reach, the beat will drop and everyone will join in. It will last for about thirty seconds and then we’ll all sit back down to continue the ceremony like nothing happened.
That was the hardest part, sitting back down — breathless, stifling laughter in contrived stoic faces.
​
We felt comfortable after the third try. Everyone marked out their spot, their own move. Henry’s dad was in on it. He would record. No one was prudent enough to ask if he had an S2
or an iPhone 4s
​or even a BlackBerry.
He recorded it on some dainty flip phone. We never got the footage. I think that’s for the best. Not that it would be embarrassing to see. I’d love to see it. But I think it lives better in memory — Knowing that eighty percent of the attendees have probably forgotten that day. Because we’ve all had about three other, more important graduations after that one; because the craze of sillybandz and the goodness of politicians were oddly congruous; and because
​                                                                                                the vibrancy of
                                                                                                               a 2013 sky
                                                   was taken for granted.
Shawn Rampaul is a writer, poet, and essayist, with his fiction having been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2024, and his poetry having been nominated for the Best of the Net Award (2025).

Author’s Note:

I’m not a picture person — part of why I started writing was to document my life. A lot of my pieces run the risk of being too rosey because of nostalgia. This might very well be one of them. I think what made this specific memory stick for me is its innate poetry; here we have a class of Gen-Z pre-teens disrupting the traditional order of a graduation ceremony for a seemingly meaningless dance trend. Looking at it retrospectively, I see the iconic Gen-Z qualities present: our outspokenness; our proclivity to go against the grain; our demand to have our presence acknowledged.

​The Gen-Z voice is a powerful one for a plethora of reasons. One of them, I think, is our unity of adolescence. We raised each other; we did not live a stratified or fragmented youth like our parents and those before them. Yes, there were commonalities for them, points of similarities, but not to this calibre of integration. The Harlem Shake was just one aspect of our global backyard. I could list off many others: Vine; fidget spinners; Charlie-Charlie. “Trends” and “fads” are the wrong terms to use for these moments — they are not as inconsequential as that; they are landmarks of memories. Geography, language, religion — the Gen-Z zeitgeist prevails against all.

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