Making It Rain (And Picking Up the Money Because That’s All You Had)

Every hip hop dance move is a timestamp. The Running Man is 1988. The Dougie is 2010. Twerk is twerk—it arrived, colonized every floor and house party for a season, and calcified into cultural shorthand, something you reference at weddings when the DJ gets desperate. Each move encodes an entire moment: who had the floor, what the clubs sounded like, what it meant to be young and in a body that could do this particular thing.

Jimmy Fallon and Will Smith ran through the whole evolutionary chain on The Tonight Show—in costume, in character, with genuine commitment—and the result is one of those rare television moments where joy is the only appropriate response. Running Man, Hey Ho, Spank That, Dougie, Twerk, and the magnificent "Making It Rain (And Picking Up the Money Because That’s All You Had)," which is both the name of a move and an entire economic philosophy compressed into choreography.

Will Smith has a quality I’ve always found remarkable: he’s simultaneously one of the coolest people alive and constitutionally impossible to make look uncool. He could do a Twerk on late-night television and not a single person would question it. That’s a kind of cultural teflon almost nobody else has. Fallon brings the eager, self-deprecating energy; Smith brings the authority. Together they make something that has no right to work as well as it does.