Content warning: there will be some indirect discussion about sexual assault.

TL;DR Figuring out the best lindy hop video of the 21st century is a journey. You can start voting for best Lindy Hop video soon.

I did a search on YouTube earlier this summer for the most viewed videos tagged "lindy hop" and it sucked. Mostly videos that did not have anything to do with lindy hop, some old mediocre videos that lucked out on catching the YouTube algorithm at the right time, and increasingly, Frankestein-esque monstrosities created with AI. Fortunately, the New York Times 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century gave me an idea.

I considered just doing a top 10 list of best lindy hop videos on my own. It would have been faster. Maybe more controversial? But what appealed to me about the New York Times list is how they did an "industry ballot," where they published ballots from an assortment of people who make movies. I have friends everywhere, and something like that would be fun to try to pull together for lindy hop. Overall, this whole process has not been very straightforward, and I wanted to talk about some issues that have come up.

I started out by emailing about 200 people in July. Mostly organizers, instructors and assorted lindy hop nerds. I asked them to send me what they thought were their top five lindy hop videos. I got over 40 responses from that group, and a lot of fun conversations. The list they produced was pretty solid, but I wanted a bit more.

Backing up, for those of you who don’t know, I started blogging about Lindy Hop in 2008, because long form blogging was all the rage in the late 2000s. A few years later, I started a separate Facebook page for the blog. To help promote it, I used it to share random dance related links and videos. Then later added a daily photo feature to show off the photos I started to take.

Fun Fact: I started photography just to have something to break up the long walls of text I used to write. After a while, I set up a schedule where I was posting three times a day, 1 photo, 1 link, and 1 video, and did that for most of the 2010s.

My point is that I’ve seen a lot of lindy hop videos, but my viewings really tailed off around 2017/2018. As I was thinking about this current project, I was really interested in finding some standout performances that I might have missed from the last few years. That was the main goal in taking the balloting process for this list to social media in August. I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of overall response, but a total of 63 ballots seems pretty good to me.

I talked to quite a few people over those two months to get them to vote, and what I found was that a lot of people were interested in the results, but not as interested in submitting nominations. Many of them felt like they didn’t have the time or the depth of knowledge. The nerdiest nerd I know bailed out because they knew that they didn’t have the time to invest to do their ballot justice. However, a lot of people who did submit videos freely admitted to just going on vibes. The end result is a decent consensus near the top of the list, another tier of definite maybes, and a lot of one nomination wonders.

However, when you see the list in its entirety, I think it will end up telling a pretty interesting story. Admittedly, it will be mostly one told from an American point of view since most of the ballots came from the US. I was hoping for more international input, but I just didn’t have the time or resources for that kind of campaign. Hopefully this project might inspire people in other places to try it on their own and maybe we can combine them later on.

63 people ended up nominating a total of 299 videos. That turned out to be 157 unique videos. Since several of them were just different angles of the same performance or the same routine but in a different place, I ended up combining many of them so the list ends up being 135 videos. I did that just to keep things simple. In most cases, I emailed the nominators to make sure they were ok with that choice and all of them responded that they didn’t care which version of their favorite was the final one.

One person did end up withdrawing their ballot because they thought nominations would be anonymous. I’m not sure english was their first language since one of the stipulations up front is that everyone’s ballots will eventually be publicly available.

As I went through the ballots, I noticed a number of issues. The first of course is the lack of black dancers present in most of the popular videos, especially from the first part of the 21st century. If you were able to go to the earliest comments in any of the more viral lindy hop videos, (which I don't ever recommend) inevitably you'll discover that it didn't take long for people to wonder why there weren't very many black people present.

A more academic person I talked to called it a problem of the source data. One of my favorite moments caught on video is from the Strictly Lindy Hop division of the 2002 North Atlantic Dance Championships. As Manu Smith and Simone Cox walked out for their spotlight, he flashed what seemed like a peace sign. It's hard to tell on video, but since I was there watching the contest live I could tell that the words he mouthed were "The only two black people here" before he started laughing. Its at 18:13 in the video below. They won that contest.

I did not give very many guidelines for people to select what they considered the "best," but I did ask them to only select things that were performed in the 21st century and were not filmed for a movie shown in theaters. Technically all those old vintage film clips were posted online in the past 20 years, and have been hugely influential on our community, but I wanted to focus the list on dancing done in this millennium. Besides, I think it's pretty obvious that everyone knows that Hellzapoppin' is the greatest Lindy Hop performance ever filmed.

Still, many of the popular videos of black lindy hoppers from the 2000s are mostly of folks who learned before the modern era. That the community is largely white and middle class is a big part of the story of modern lindy hop. How we re-connected to black culture is one of the key arcs over the past 25 years.

The performances of Minnie's Moochers are another main point in that arc, but they didn’t make it to the final list. Their original ground breaking performance occupies a weird spot on the timeline, just short of the 2000s. My original criteria to the first group of people I messaged left some wiggle room to select it, but no one took the bait. Minnie’s Moochers and that performance was so highly regarded that they were invited to reprise it several times over the years, including one last time at Frankie95. That was 16 years ago, and not much has been said of them since.

That's probably due to the fact that a few of its members, like Ramona Staffeld and Skye Humphries, went on to be notable dancers in their own right. In addition, the original videos currently available online aren't very good quality, which may make it hard for newer folks to appreciate them. It seems like they have more of a "you had to be there" vibe to them.

Minnie's Moochers is an example of something popular naturally fading from memory and becoming less significant over time naturally. But what's the difference between gradually forgetting and deliberately moving on?

Going into this, I figured that it would be difficult to avoid talking about certain people who are now pariahs in the scene because of multiple allegations against them. I did consider the possibility of preemptively eliminating any videos with the presence of these sorts of folks. Rather than make any pre-determinations, I wanted to see if any voters wanted to make the argument for their inclusion, but no one did.

One particular person is still in a few of the videos nominated as part of a competition or performance, including two of the most popular lindy hop videos of all time: the ULHS 2006 Liberation Final and the ILHC 2013 Invitational Strictly Lindy Hop videos. You can read more about him here and here.

If those videos are still going to exist out there, then this may be a good opportunity to remind people of why certain people are not welcomed in the lindy hop scene any more. This is especially important as time passes and new people come into our scene. That dance ability should not excuse terrible behavior is another key issue that has been important to the way our scene has developed.

All that being said, listing a top 5 video is a pretty high bar, no matter how you want to interpret it. A lot of popular and important performances and performers did not make the final cut. There is also the opposite problem of some people that may be too popular.

I've been doing a phased rollout of the nomination and voting process to try to limit input mostly to people who are or have been active in the lindy hop community. If it was just about what has been popular, then you can just do a search for the key words “lindy hop” in YouTube, sort by view count, and call it a day. The problem is that it will bring up several results that have no relationship with the dance or the community. My hope is that this project will expose newer lindy hoppers or outside audiences in a way that allows them get to know the dance and the community with some nuance and in an approachable manner.

Bianca Locatelli & Nils Andrén pose a different kind of challenge to that. Over the past 9 years or so, they have established themselves as hugely popular on YouTube. That means they have a lot of fans who love them, but don't have much context for the dance that Nils and Bianca do.

This became apparent when their videos from the ILHC 2022 Invitational Draw were posted with them dancing with other people. The comments sections of those videos quickly got messy with people wondering why Nils and Bianca weren't dancing together. There was a fundamental lack of understanding by a lot of viewers that lindy hop is a social dance that is typically done with many people. It became a microcosm of how weird people can become on the internet over a very simple misunderstanding or misplaced preconceptions.

As I’m rolling out voting to the general public, I am afraid that it may end up getting flooded by people outside of the community who just might turn it into a Nils and Bianca greatest hits album. There's no doubt that they are a big part of our scene now, especially online, but I'm not sure their online popularity is proportionate to their overall influence on the lindy hop community as it has developed over the past 25 years. In a way, it illustrates the consequences of how the modern community has been only tenuously connected to Black American culture. Imagine Lindy Hop events 10 or 20 years from now that only consist of panel discussions about different performances by Bianca and Nils and nothing else.

Ultimately, worrying about a lot of people voting is a good problem to have. I think. Overall, I this project has been a great experiment on perspective; an opportunity for people to distinguish between something that was popular in the moment versus other performances that still resonate years later.

Voting will open over the next few weeks. 135 videos is a lot, so to make it easier for people to view and compare them, I’m a doing few things

First I am cutting out 97 videos that only received one nomination. These will be listed in a separate honorable mentions list. I was going to include them in the voting, but there was no way to break up the list in a way that would make it easy for voters to digest all the videos in a reasonable amount of time. I thought about doing multiple rounds of voting, but I there is only so much time that I am interested in devoting to this project. And to be honest, while many of these videos are very good, and some great, it seems unlikely that any of them would break through to challenge the videos that received more nominations. However, I do think the complete list will paint a more holistic portrait of the lindy hop scene.

I’m also dividing the overall list into four categories that will feature 38 videos total: Couple Routines, Team Routines, Competitions, Improvised Social Dances.

I am going to post the YouTube playlists for each category on Thursdays, and the voting ballots on Mondays. I think it’ll make more sense when we get into it. Voting for each category will open every week over the next month, and will remain open for all categories through November.

You can keep tabs on when things open by following this blog, my Instagram or FB page.