A song from my boyfriend's past emerged in my own life a few weeks ago, and in my ensuing obsession I watched a YouTube clip of a news story originally broadcast on local TV in Champaign-Urbana, in which an earnest young reporter declaims straight to the camera that music was in trouble, dying even, but that the bands in her college town have rescued it and brought it back.
Each member of the band is interviewed, intercut with performance footage of them at an iconic local bar, including the song in question. One of the band members points out that one of the things that had been wrong with music (remember the times, and think bloated proggy FM-friendly groups like Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, the Eagles on their bad days) is that you couldn't dance to it, and that his band was bringing dance music back.
I have been thoroughly saturated in Garage music since the second half of my college years, the original stuff from the 1960's and the second wave of it from the Paisley Underground in the 1980's, and for me it's the core of everything, and anchors everything else about music for me, but I never especially appreciated it as dance music. "Dance" usually refers to either disco or electronica, neither of which were central to me or in my wheelhouse at all, ever (if my parents had been a bit more lax about language standards, I would have had a "Disco Sucks" t-shirt in junior high and high school, definitely). Also, I have mainly appreciated the Garage genre in the privacy of my bedroom, with headphones on and the album cover gripped in my hands, reading historical liner notes and lyrics and what have you.
But they're right. It's very hard to dance to Yes, but it's easy to dance to the Vertebrats, even if you're mainly just hopping up and down in the one spot.
This hopping up and down is one of the native dances of my people - I remember being smushed into a big crowd under a hot big-top tent at Sydney's Homebake festival, hopping up and down along with the band members onstage of Regurgitator (trying to keep track of my backpack which was on the ground at my feet, cumbersome but good for surviving an all-day festival). The other involves kicking your feet out and swinging the opposite arm, like you were running but in place, and perfected by Belinda Carlisle in the early career of the Go-Go's.
I have been in groups who grew up moving to different music, and you can really tell.
One time was at a friend's birthday party at the Greek Club in Brisbane, Australia (the story about this party led to a running inside family joke*). After dinner, there was plate smashing - the friend had wanted to hold her birthday here partly just for that, I think because she'd had a recent relationship disappointment and wanted to get her feelings out in the white pottery shards. And then there was dancing, which I remember being in a circle. It wasn't especially fast, but was a little bit complicated, and the regulars helped us learn the steps. We stiffly staggered around the circle like puppets made of boards and springs, but I remember watching the Greek ladies. Older ladies, dressed all in black, with sensible shoes, but these ladies could move. They just had a smooth, fluid way of doing things. You could see how, if you really knew how to do this, how sexy it was. We all laughed at ourselves and felt humble, and talked afterwards at length about the Greek ladies, and how they moved, could just move, and how really you have to grow up doing this to be like that. We were all stunned by the difference.
A second experience, exactly the same observation but this time it was a Sales and Marketing team from Latin America. I was at a world-wide Sales convention for a global software company that I had only just joined. The Sydney office was in a region that had previously been called "Rest of World", showing how strategically important and central it was to the company's mission, but under an inspiring leader we had become an actual defined region and tight-knit team, the "Asia Pacific and Latin America" region (I think they used the acronym "APL" at that point, and very soon after that we became "AMPACA", same region but reporting into a differently structured team at headquarters, and now I don't know what they call it, I've been away for quite a few years). As part of one of the big dinners at the meeting, they gave out awards to different teams, and the teams had to come up to a stage at the front of the big hotel ballroom where we were dining. We were a software company, remember, so the first few sets of nominees were all awkward tech types. I can envision white short-sleeved shirts, and grey slacks, and slumped shoulders, and downward glances when accepting the award. In part I'm sure to cover some of the awkwardness, the ceremony included loud music played while teams walked up to the stage, and during the presentation of the award certificates.
Then there was an award for which the Latin American Marketing team was nominated. The team gathered on the stage, and as one started moving to the accompanying music. Their hips were moving, they were swaying and bobbing up and down, it was as if they couldn't help themselves. And then, when they won, they danced even more. Found a groove in the loud corporate music and carried it onto the ballroom floor all the way back to their seats.
Later, a band played and there was more general dancing, and since I was a new team member, one of the Latin American team members invited me to dance. I have always been a quick study of dance moves, and consider myself fairly rhythmic and coordinated, but I realized that I could not dance at all, compared to him. Again, I felt like that wooden, sprung puppet. There were gyroscopic directions my hips were supposed to go that they just didn't move that way. The experience was humbling, and astonishing, and impressive.
Again, it really helps to be born into it and do it all your life. There's just something different about it.
*Family inside joke: The other reason my friend cited for wanting to have her birthday at the Greek Club was that they served grilled octopus. I was describing this to my sister on a long-distance call after the event. My sister was in the US and I had lived in Australia for about four years at this point, plus San Diego for about four years before that, so about eight years all up in the Pacific Rim. "They served grilled octopus," I said to my sister on the long distance phone, "and they were octopus legs, not the little octopus, you know, like in salad." My sister paused a beat and said, "Excuse me?" Salads with little baby octopus in them were not as common in the parts of the US she had spent her whole life in, and once she pointed this out I realized how bizarre my statement would have sounded, and we must have laughed for five minutes straight. So, henceforth, "You know, like in salad!" has become family shorthand for anything that someone else would find completely alien and bizarre but you've become used to.
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