Dancing part deux

OK so I can't dance, not in any trained or conventional manner. But I did form a style of dancing that is both original and totally ripped off. Obviously I put my own spin on it, but it was a style of dancing pretty indigenous to alternative music listening between 1994 and 1996. I don't have a name for this dancing but its similar to skanking, some may call it freak dancing. I first saw it at an all ages show in a high school gym in 1995, a girl named Becky Weston was dancing in brown cords, a cardigan and combat boots to a band called the Stillborns. She was waving her arms like you would in a skank, arms bent and moving side to side but her feet weren't kicking out and she wasn't spinning around. More and more after that I saw other kids doing this, and at the time I didn't question it but now I wonder who came up with this? Soon after I saw people dancing like this in a 1996 documentary about the north west music explosion "Hype" and also in the crappy film portrait of mid 90's style and music "Empire Records." OK so it was great to see Liv Tyler in a tight sweater, plaid skirt and docs one more time, but that doesn't excuse the fact that I didn't care about any characters in the movie at all.
Anyhow this is the only way I have ever danced. I dance this way all rock music I enjoy and I even danced like this once at a Latin dance club to horrified onlookers. At a local concert when I was 16 (again in the same QECVI high school gym) I danced so hard like this, jumping, flailing, my legs tossing around like limp noodles, I pulled out my groin and couldn't try out for rugby.

From the department of obvious shit: White people are bad dancers

I live in Toronto, and every Saturday you can dance in the large back room of the Clinton's which plays all 60's pop. Mostly stuff like The Beatles, James Brown, Wilson Picket, your basic hits from Motown and Atlantic records. In any case I really like dancing to this music, its pretty much the only music I will dance to. Some people will dance to anything just because they like dancing. This is not me. I can only dance to music I am familiar with, enjoy, and know the lyrics too. Knowing the lyrics to a song I am dancing to is imperative since most of my dancing consists of just singing along. Now this goes for any type of music I enjoy from Michael Jackson to Smashing Pumpkins, however you don't hear Cherub Rock in dance situations very often and you can't really dance to it. This is obviously not a big problem for me specifically going back to my point about just singing along to the music I am dancing to. But this music from the 60's is pretty much the best dance music that has been produced in the past five decades. My formative years in the 90's were dominated by alternative rock, boy bands and pilled up ravers dancing to jungle. So, how was I ever supposed to learn how to dance? I never listened to modern dance music, because it's awful and no one I ever knew was a good dancer.

Why is dancing so inherently easy in other cultures? Its because all their music is based on being danceable. Most music in South America, Spanish culture, Africa, and India are all made so you can listen and dance to it simultaneously. I grew up listening to alternative rock and punk, attached to these are forms of dancing but more accurately forms of jumping, screaming and falling into other people. Even white kids who listened to music with rhythm such as rap and techno, didn't dance to it, they just enjoyed it while playing Sega. Or blasting it out the windows of their Toyota Civic hatch backs at a volume that would rival a nuclear bomb detonation. I always wondered what the fascination was with parking in donut shop parking lots and amplifying Tupac so loudly out of car stereos it would set off car alarms. That's small town,white living for ya.

As I stared out into the crowd at Clinton's on Saturday night I saw a sea of white faces, clenching beer bottles in their hands and bobbing up and down. Their feet didn't move a lot, their arms do most of the dancing as well as their heads keeping time as they nod up and down. Couples awkwardly grope each other not moving in simultaneous rhythm as they keep trying to regain a steady movement they can maintain for a solid minute. I always thought everyone was looking at me, judging as I tried desperately to dance well, copying any move I could from someone who looked like they knew what they were doing. But then I realized no one knew what they were doing.

Nothing has changed since I was 14. Maybe I never learned to dance because I went to school dances for only one year in high school: grade 9. And what did I do at them? What everyone other 14 year old boy did, I waited until they played a slow dance song (Don't Cry by Guns and Roses) so you I could try and make out with a girl. So at least I learned how to do that. Thank you Jen Beck and Rebecca Campbell for those private lessons.

1st semester of grade 10 - One Hot Minute

In grade 10 I left the suburbs and went to school downtown. This isn't exactly like comparing moving from the burbs to Manhattan, but at the time for me, it kind of was. I was now at a school where expression was encouraged so I died my hair black, got a wallet chain and started wearing my dad's old green khakis and his beat up old blue zip up hoodie from the 70's. I was at a school where I didn't know anyone but pretty soon I had made a few friends. My first friend was Hrag, we both wanted to start a band but we didn't know how to play our instruments yet so we just listened to a lot of Red Hot Chili Peppers.
I had never really listened to the Chili's much but when I was 15 One Hot Minute came out and got into them through that record. Of course I knew Under The Bridge but I had never really listened to Blood Sugar Sex Magic which is the album you should get into the Chili's with. A friend of mine who's favourite band is Van Halen once told me that he got into VH through the album 5150 their first record Sammy Hagar after the departure of David Lee Roth. Not exactly the record you should fall in love with Van Halen with. This was the same with One Hot Minute, the first and only record with Dave Navaro on guitar after the departure of guitarist John Frusciante. A lot of Chili's fans dismiss this record but it has some really great songs on it, mainly the singles Warped, Aeroplane and My Friends. Sure it's nothing compared to the Frusciante albums but Navarro does a great job, he fit in well with the band and their sound, he was a little heavier but he was still funky. After that I went backwards and got really into the Chili's back catalogue mainly Blood Sugar Sex Magic and Uplift Mofo party plan but I still think that Warped is one of the best album openers I have ever heard. I also think Aeroplane is one of the best video's of the 90's.