Hip-hop may be the simplest musical form ever invented – just two turntables and a microphone. It allows Chinese hip-hop stars such as Dragon Tongue Squad to plunder banned regional Mongolian dialects, the Croatian rapper El Bahat-tee to top the charts in eastern Europe and French MCs to document the uprising in the banlieues, all to the same rattling drum machines and frantic wordplay.

Yet the strangest twist in the genre’s convoluted story is playing out across the land that spawned its driving beats. After years of gripes about misogyny and simplistic lyrics, an explosion of new dance tunes and styles is revolutionising American hip-hop all over again. Cities are spawning insane new dances, each one marking out the town and its style with distinctive flips and flavours, as if they were Tuscan city-states laying claim to a more urban sense of cultural excellence. The dances are camp, silly and frenetic, returning humour and a broad smile to the form’s frowning gangsta face.

Hyphy, from San Francisco’s Bay Area, mixes pattering beats with fast, twitching, almost ridiculous dancing known as “get hyphy”, or getting hyperactive. Snap dancing, from Atlanta, resurrects body-popping moves from the 1980s and 1990s, combining them with finger-clicking and fancy footwork to stripped-down tracks. In New York, there’s the chicken noodle soup, which involves exaggerated shuffling, arm-swinging and pantomiming to the lyrics. In LA, there’s an expressive, almost artistic dance called krumping – as popularised by David LaChappelle’s documentary Rize. In Chicago, they have jukin’, which sets complex footwork to a pacy blend of hip-hop and house.

This autumn, these styles are spawning sub-genres faster than JC001’s flow. Thus krumping has clown dancing, a slapstick form with dancers wearing face paint and performing physical jokes. The chicken noodle soup begat the Aunt Jackie, an out-of-nowhere Billboard hit for the Harlem producer and rapper Jason Fox. He uploaded to YouTube a homemade video of his crew doing the Aunt Jackie, a hand-clasping, foot-stomping blend of breakdancing and a Broadway chorus line. It rapidly became an online sensation, with hundreds of thousands of viewings. Out of Chicago, Dude ’N Nem released Watch My Feet this month. The video features an update of jukin’ called footworkin’.

Its steps are a blur – like a speeded-up Fred Astaire – with hooded teens spinning and dropping to a tune that adds clattering house snares to a solid hip-hop bass-drum thud.

“Jukin’ has loads of different dances coming out of it,” says Upmost, the 24-year-old rapper who makes up one half of Dude ’N Nem. “There’s the bob, ghosting and the twister, but when the boys start footworkin’, that’s when the girls start going crazy. Street crews battle it out to see who has the best feet.”

This is meat and drink to the YouTube generation. These styles have been uploaded, copied, altered and passed on at astonishing speed. The bookies’ second favourite for the UK Christmas No 1 is Soulja Boy’s Crank That, a tribute to the glories of cranking, a sub-genre of Atlanta’s snap dancing. By the time it reaches the charts, YouTube will have been showing clips of Samuel L Jackson, Beyoncé and the footballer Anton Ferdinand copying the simple seven-step routine.

For many observers, this is more than just a piece of fun – it represents a tectonic shift in the brutal plates of hip-hop culture. “There’s a new generation of American rappers who’ve seen the moody, gun-toting world of bling and gangsta rap, and want no part of it,” says Paul McKenzie, editor of Touch, the UK urban lifestyle magazine. “They dress down, and go out dancing until 4am instead of roaming around getting shot at or turning up at a club in designer gear and leaning against the wall.”

“Footworkin’ is popular in Chicago because it’s such a diverse city,” says Tragic, the other half of Dude ’N Nem. “The clubs are where all the crews meet – white, black, Hispanic. Where they’d be squaring up on the street, in the club it’s about dancing and happiness. It’s fun, you see?” Flicking across uploaded videos for any of these new styles, the most jaded reviewer has to agree that it does look like a truckload of fun. There’s no crotch-grabbing or bitch-dissing – just laughing, dancing and clowning around.

British music has long prided itself on regional tune factories creating whole new styles, from Camden Britpop to Bristol trip-hop. So, we’ve split along the traditional north/south divide in creating next year’s UK dance sensations. Southern kids prefer dirty pop, a mix of electro, house and garage. Yorkshire, however, is choosing bassline, a darker blend of drum’n’bass and grime that’s dominating dancefloors in Sheffield and Leeds. All we need now are the jokey steps.

Watch My Feet is out now on TVT records; www.dudennem.net . Crank That is released on December 17; www.myspace.com/souljaboytellem

To watch examples of hyphy and krump moves, visit timesonline.co.uk/dance

Explore Music

• Festivals

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette