Renegade

Origin

The Renegade was choreographed by Jalaiah Harmon, who was fourteen years old and living in Georgia when she made it. On September 25, 2019, she worked out the routine to K Camp’s song “Lottery,” filmed herself performing it, and posted it — first to the app Funimate, then to Instagram.

The dance is genuinely difficult: a fast, tightly sequenced run of arm movements, wrist rolls and body isolations that takes real practice to execute cleanly. That difficulty is part of why it spread — performing it well was a demonstration of skill.

What it means / how it’s used

The Renegade became the TikTok dance of early 2020 — the routine everyone learned, performed at school assemblies, in shopping centres, at sporting events, and in millions of videos.

Its function was social rather than comic. Performing a viral dance is a form of participation, and the Renegade in particular functioned as a competence signal: doing it fast and cleanly was a small achievement worth posting.

The credit problem

The Renegade is now best known for what happened next.

The dance spread to TikTok and was performed by the platform’s largest creators — including Charli D’Amelio, whose Renegade videos were central to her becoming TikTok’s most-followed account — with essentially no credit to Harmon. For months, the most-watched performances of her choreography were by people who had learned it secondhand and did not name her.

The pattern was not unique. It reflected a broader dynamic in which dances created largely by Black teenagers were carried to mass audiences, and to lucrative careers, by largely white creators who acquired the visibility that the originators did not.

Harmon’s authorship became widely known in February 2020, when The New York Times published a profile identifying her as the creator. She told the paper she had been happy to see her dance everywhere, but wanted credit for it.

Recognition followed quickly: she performed at the NBA All-Star Game, appeared on television, signed with a major talent agency, and D’Amelio and others publicly acknowledged her.

Notable examples & variations

• Harmon’s original Funimate and Instagram uploads.
• The mass TikTok wave of late 2019 and early 2020.
• Her NBA All-Star Game performance.
• Side-by-side comparisons of the original and its copies.
• Later dances posted with explicit creator credit — a direct result of the controversy.

Legacy / cultural impact

The Renegade is the case that made choreography credit a live issue on short-form video. It is now routinely cited in discussions of how platforms distribute visibility, and it directly influenced norms: crediting the original choreographer in a caption is far more common now than it was in 2019, and TikTok itself has faced sustained pressure on the point.

It also produced a genuine consequence. In 2021, a group of Black TikTok creators declined to choreograph a routine for a major song release, and the resulting absence of a viral dance made the imbalance visible in a way argument had not. The Renegade is where that conversation started.