The latest TikTok dance trend has roots in Filipino street culture

CNN —

“Paging Dr. Beat! Emergency! Emergency!”

If you’re up on the latest TikTok dance trends, you may have heard this refrain looped over a wobbly electronic bassline punctuated by high-pitched noises. The disco remix has been used in thousands of videos across the platform, many featuring people showcasing a series of outfits while lightly swinging their shoulders and feet. Even the Kamala Harris campaign and singer Olivia Rodrigo have gotten in on the fun.

Pop star Olivia Rodrigo is among the participants in the latest TikTok trend, which involves using a budots remix to show off different outfits.

But for those who know the context behind the song, the real emergency is that these users are doing the dance all wrong.

The track from DJ Johnrey, which samples Miami Sound Machine’s “Dr. Beat,” belongs to a Filipino electronic dance music subgenre called budots. And though many users participating in the recent trend are exhibiting subtle, stiff movements, dancing budots involves smoother, more exaggerated motions and getting way lower.

Well before budots became a vehicle to share fashion inspiration, it was a hit dance phenomenon in the Philippines and the stuff of memes and parodies.

Here’s the little-known history behind the genre.

Budots was born out of Filipino street culture

Budots, slang for “slacker” in the Visayan language, is thought to have originated in Davao City on the Philippine island of Mindanao.

It first emerged as a dance and was associated early on with youth drug culture, per Fritz Flores, who wrote an undergraduate thesis on the dance craze. Some scholars have also linked budots dance moves to art forms of the indigenous Badjao people.

Sherwin Calumpang Tuna, known by the moniker DJ Love,