When drill broke out two years ago it had an unparalleled grip on the city’s hip-hop scene. The genre’s rise has been exhaustively documented (though not always well), but if you’re eager to get a taste for drill’s influence outside this city’s borders the best place to look right now might be Vine. The app has pushed New York rapper Bobby Shmurda into the web’s limelight after a six-second loop of him performing his “shmoney dance” started going viral a couple weeks ago; the clip shows Shmurda slowly jerking his hips with the right amount of style to make some herky-jerky dance moves mesmerizing. Lots of folks have not only watched #shmoneydance, they’ve also flocked to its source: Shmurda’s music video for a song called “Hot Nigga.” That video came out in March but it’s seen an uptick in traffic the past couple weeks; when Complex‘s Insanul Ahmed first wrote about the clip at the end of June it had around a half million views, and it’s doubled in less than two weeks (the current count is 1,058,533).
Take “Shmoney Dance,” a Shmurda collaboration with GS9 Entertainment rapper Rowdy Rebbel. Even though the track doesn’t sound much like Louie’s “Money Dance,” the uneven synth stabs and palpitating drums that fuel “Shmoney Dance” are indebted to drill. “Shmoney Dance” has recently started to take off, months after its initial release (the video was uploaded to YouTube at the end of February, and if you watch the visuals closely you can see snowpacks littering the streets behind the MCs).
