_{Image source}

Hey guys, good day here and welcome to my blog. Today, we're gonna look briefly at the dab, and some facts about it.

Trends, as we know them, tend to have quite short shelf lives. One minute, everyone is rushing to get a particular the stuff off the shelf or the internet, and it seems no one would get enough of it yet. The next minute, we’re tossing them in the bin and begging our manicurist for unicorn nails. It wasn’t too long ago that we were all caught in the craze of walking around with our devices with the hopes of catching virtual Pokémon whit the Pokemon Go app. Now it’s just one annoying app we deleted to make space for our growing obsession of cryptokitties.

In this sense, ‘dabbing’ probably cannot be considered a trend. Because despite the best efforts of critics to make it heinously uncool, it's still going strong. Here are a few things you should know about the dab craze. We'll start with knowing what the hell it is in the first place.

The dab is a style of hip-hop dance style that is executed when an individual drops their head inside the elbow of one arm while raising the other arm on the opposite side in the air. Much like the photo above.

Thought the origin of the dance is much disputed, it might have first been used in the 2013 Atlanta music scene, and a lot of people believe the name ''dab'' might have been culled from the practice of 'dabbing' in the cannabis culture. Dabbing simply is smoking weed (marijuana) that has a high THC value. For clarification, THC is responsible for making people high in weed. Again, this might just not be correct, just what people think.

Regardless of who created the dance, it started gaining local popularity by 2015 when local rappers started referencing the dab in their music videos, notably the song 'look at my dab' by local group Migos. Soon, the dab went mainstream when it was adopted by celebrities, most notably, Carolina Panthers' starting quarterback Cam Newton who celebrated every touchdown by performing the dab. It was less welcomed in some parts of the world though. In August 2017, Saudi singer and actor Abdallah Al Shaharani was arrested for performing the move at a music festival in Ta'if. Bummer! that one.

However, with time, it became a pretty cool sight as parents, grandparents, movies, animated characters and even people who aren't readily associated with hip-hop culture (Eg; Hillary Clinton, Paul Pogba, and Ellen of the Ellen show) were seen performing the dance move on TV.

So there it is, in just a few years, the dab has gone from being just a local hip hop dance step to becoming a classical meme and has reached the corners of the earth. After all, on the internet, memes are kings. right?

Let me know what you think about this.

Thanks for reading

Ref 1. Ref 2.