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.