Urban Shoulder Gesture
My mother and aunt are ardent Barack Obama supporters. This afternoon they came over and asked hubby & me whether we were familiar with a certain gesture they had seen Obama make during a speech last week. Imitating his movement, each of them simultaneously curled their right arms and touched their right shoulders with their hands. They assured us that after Obama did this, the crowd cheered boisterously. However, hubby & I have never seen Obama (or anyone else for that matter) perform this maneuver. Maybe this was some sort of “new” fangled thing the young’ins are doing now a days (when they aren’t busy texting or updating their myspace pages).
Undaunted by our own ignorance, we proceeded to enlist the help of the internets (gotta love those tubes) to help us decipher this new “Generation Y” code. Our first google search was ‘rap shoulder touch’, yielded plenty to results but nothing we were looking for. After about 20 minutes of substituting ‘hip-hop’ and various synonyms for ‘grab’, we were still no closer to understanding Barack’s mysterious shoulder gesture.
Finally, hubby typed in ‘urban shoulder gesture’ and low and behold guess what popped up? This site. Ah-Ha! According to The Root, Barack performed a “shoulder brush” and even provided a link to this Youtube video of the speech my mother and aunt had seen. Upon viewing the video, we quickly realized that Obama had indeed brushed his shoulder and not just touched it as my mother and aunt had indicated: a fact that would have aided our search processes immensely.
Now we could preform a new google search: ’shoulder brush off’, which yielded this definition from the “Urban Dictionary”.
Dirt off Ya Shoulder:– as in, “get – that – dirt off ya shoulder.” it means that you need to let go of that grudge you got on your shoulders because you are jealous of me.as in Jay-Z’s song, “Dirt Off Your Shoulder,” …I’m a hustler homey, you a customer crony
Got some, dirt on my shoulder, could you brush it off for me?
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. We now know that the gesture in question originated from a video by Jay-Z. One more google search: ‘Jay-Z Dirt off Your Shoulder’ resulted in this link to Youtube once again (see 1:03 for exact shoulder gesture). As it turns out, this video probably has been seen by everyone in America expect hubby, me, my mom and aunt. Upon viewing the video we quickly realized we had actually heard the song on numerous occasions, we just never realized that’s what Jay-Z was saying (or gesturing).
How white are we?!
PS. HAPPY BIRTHDAY MO & GRANDMA!
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