Chicken Noodle Soup
Let it rain, and clear it out. "Chicken Noodle Soup" rode a Harlem dance from the block to grainy YouTube uploads to the Billboard charts — part of the first wave of dance crazes the internet taught America.
"Chicken Noodle Soup" was released on September 12, 2006, by Harlem DJ Webstar and rapper Young B, featuring AG a.k.a. The Voice of Harlem, as the lead single from Webstar's debut album Caught in the Web. The track itself was simple by design — a bouncy, uncomplicated groove built for moving.
What made it legendary was the dance. Born in Harlem, the choreography was pure physicality: exaggerated shuffling, arm swinging, and pantomiming the lyrics on the command "let it rain, and clear it out." In late 2006 YouTube was still new, and the dance spread through grainy, shaky uploads — kids learning the moves frame by frame from other kids' videos, mastering them in hallways and living rooms, then filming their own versions. It was a self-propagating craze, a preview of a future where choreography would spread not through MTV but through uploads.
Commercially it was modest — No. 45 on the Billboard Hot 100, No. 30 on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart, No. 15 on Rap — but the chart ceiling never reflected the cultural reach. "Chicken Noodle Soup" became one of the earliest examples of a dance craze breaking through early YouTube, a template the internet would repeat endlessly. And the moves proved durable: in September 2019, j-hope of BTS released a sampled version featuring Becky G, sending a Harlem dance from 2006 around the world all over again.
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