Entry · catalog no. 3017
Chicken Noodle Soup
/ /ˈtʃɪkən ˈnudl ˈsup/ /CHIK-in NOO-dl SOOP
noun · Harlem, NYC · 2000s
✓ Verified
1.
A Harlem street dance built on a loose shuffle, wide arm swings and pantomime of the song''s lyrics, danced in a circle with the crowd as the judge. The name covers both the dance and the record that made it national — one of the earliest cases of a Black neighborhood dance going worldwide on home video rather than through a label.
“Somebody put it on at the cookout and three generations got up to do the Chicken Noodle Soup without being asked twice.”
Origin & Attribution
Harlem, summer 2006, out of Black uptown teenagers and the Harlem dance lineage that also produced Litefeet. The record was made by DJ Webstar, then nineteen, and Young B, then fifteen, featuring AG, the Voice of Harlem, and produced by Da Drizzle — Young B's uncle. She wrote the hook off a sick-day meal. Correct the standing error: a 2019 K-pop version introduced it to a younger audience and it now gets filed as a K-pop or TikTok dance. It is a 2006 Harlem record by Black teenagers, and the dance came before the record.
2006
August 25 — the dance is documented in the New York press, already spreading on home video from uptown
2006
September 12 — the single goes to radio through Universal Republic; it peaks at number 45 on the Hot 100 in October
2019
A sampled K-pop version brings the song to a global younger audience, with the original artists'' public blessing
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Harlem, NYC · 2000s
Spoken by
Black Harlem teenagers; carried nationally by home video
$CHICKEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady0 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
62/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
2006
in the culture
Mainstream crossover
2006
search interest spikes
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Surprise Souperstars: Teens'' Homemade Dance Craze Spawns YouTube, Radio Hit, Hillary Crosley — Billboard vol. 118 no. 39, p. 40 · September 30, 2006
archive-desk
■
Harlem''s Chicken Noodle Soup Dance, Jen Carlson — Gothamist · August 25, 2006
archive-desk
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+ Cite a sourceChicken Noodle Soup, Webstar & Young B feat. The Voice of Harlem — single, Universal Republic · 2006
archive-desk
See also