Let’s Dance: My Experience with Dance Music in 2016
This is a piece I wrote to read for my friend’s reading event, The Color Theory, on July 27th.
Six months later, I still can’t listen to David Bowie songs without getting emotional. “Starman”? Waterworks. “Heroes”? Forget about it. Out of all of my favorites, the one I’ve broken down the heaviest this year is “Let’s Dance.”
David Bowie changed his sound and vision again and again and again during his golden years. Throughout the ’70s, he was enamored by English glam, then American soul, then German electronics; he embraced the androgynous and became extraterrestrial. He did it all, but perhaps his most brow-raising move was the most seemingly conventional: he told people, “let’s dance.”
A few years after he completed his experimental Berlin trilogy — Low, Heroes and Lodger — Bowie released Let’s Dance, the album where he once again turned to American pop for inspiration. His newfound love? Disco. And who else to recruit for his endeavor than Nile Rodgers, the co-founder of Chic, responsible for classic such as “Good Times”?
But this was 1982, two years into a new decade. Three years prior was the Disco Demolition Night, where attendees of the Chicago White Sox vs. Detroit Tigers game were encouraged to bring disco records to burn and destroy. Though “Disco Sucks!” was already a thing, the event often marks the beginning of the end of disco.
During the end of the ’70s, Rodgers tried to escape disco, the genre he helped perfect but now reviled by critical mass. “I was almost hated at the time,” he remembers while reflecting upon his time making the album with Bowie. “I had tried to run away from the word ‘dance’ and then we put out a record called Let’s Dance.”
Bowie, on the other hand, embraced disco without shame. While many wanted the radio to rock, his next command for the world to follow was “dance!”
I’ve been thinking about dancing a lot this year. Why do we dance? Why do we like to dance? What does it mean to dance?
People dance for pleasure, sometimes, as the heads of EDM festivals like to sell it, to the point of ecstasy. It’s often romanticized as a means of escape — a grander ritual than simply a leisure activity. Usually, it’s a way to turn the life of mundane into something more meaningful, glamorous and extraordinary, if only for a night. But my favorite dance songs come from musicians who understand dancing as a relief from issues beyond just boredom and banality.
My favorite artists elevate dancing into a coping mechanism to re-align the self from personal conflict. For one of my favorite EPs of the year so far, Tiffany from K-pop group Girls’ Generation made dancing its central theme. While she sings about loss of purpose to explain her personal need for music, what sticks out of her song is a straightforward phrase: “I just wanna dance the night away.” It’s an impulse that’s quite universal no matter the context; I’ve buried more than enough nightmarish thoughts deep within the grooves and rhythms of my favorite records.
The best dance records for me have been made by those who move to keep their heads above water, like Chilean artist Alex Anwandter’s latest album, Amiga. His rhythms are urgent, his beats vital. His response against hatred, prosecution and destruction in “Siempre es viernes en mi corazon,” one of the best singles of the year, is dancing the night away. It’s always Friday in his heart. All the time he feels like dying, and on Friday he can die. If the beat stopped, he would cease to exist.
I still can’t believe Prince is gone. I hear him — his funk, his libido, his shrieks — in so many artists. Every listen of Purple Rain stabs my heart. But if you’re going to put on a Prince record, I urge you to revisit not Purple Rain but 1999.
It’s heartbreaking how the world looks relatively similar as what Prince wrote in 1983 for the song “1999.” He sings about the end of the century not as a dawn of a new, triumphant phase of life but the final days of human kind as he knows it. As his torchbearer Janelle Monae sang three decades later, “1999” is dance apocalyptic. Prince and his band doesn’t dance because they want to but because they have to. “So if I’m going to die, I’m going to listen to my body tonight,” they declare. What else is there to do to brace for the end but play music and dance?
“1999” also reminds that dancing as leisure, for pure fun and pleasure, without fear of threats, abuse or death, is a privilege many of us take for granted. Dancing to rid boredom is a luxury. Even the sheer participation of dancing contains risks some of us don’t ever have to consider.
Alex Anwandter’s Amiga is a product of the very threats and abuse that affects one to not go out. Anwandter is a gay man dancing against a straight society. He’s deemed sick by both the Church and Congress in “Siempre es viernes en mi corazon.” He boldly faces the slurs thrown his way, and he expresses his queerness with pride; in “Manifiesto,” he’s burned at the stake for his queerness as he refuses to dismiss it as his identity. It’s a portrait of a grim reality that expressing yourself is still a sin and crime for many in 2016.
Like my friends who are fans of Anwandter, I put on Amiga to cope with the news about the mass shooting at the Orlando nightclub Pulse. The mass event was the very proof of the real-life violence that inspired Amiga. What saddened me most is that the dancers came to enjoy a night of music in what was supposed to be a safe space of a queer Latin night. They looked forward to dance for pleasure, as I and perhaps you do after an exhausted week, but it sadly became another example of why some dance not to play but to survive.
When the news of Pulse spread, some of my friends on Twitter also put on DJ Sprinkles’ Midtown 120 Blues, one of my favorite dance albums ever made. They put on “Sisters, I Don’t Know What This World Is Coming To” because they couldn’t think of what else to do — and I don’t blame them. “Brothers and sisters! I don’t know what this world is coming to!” A sampled voice of Jesse Jackson screams, the same scream you might have heard on Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause.” And like P.E., DJ Sprinkles, the moniker of Terre Thaemlitz, united the broken through its common feeling of hopelessness. But her song is less a rallying cry than a chorus of isolated screams. Through the broken echoes and a cloud of thick gloom, she explores loss at its most dreadful state, filled with the loss of purpose, hope, and, in this case, life.
Thaemlitz made the album for situations like these, when the bubble shatters and a stark reality sets in. Her album calls out bullshit to the washed-up mainstream dance scene that has erased its history, rooted in oppression against race, class and sexuality, and left many of its originators to turn elsewhere. So long to freedom, so long to unity — the romantic ideals commercial dance music has sold to its audience for decades but kept away from people who it was originally made for. It is, in other words, a reality check to a world still full of hatred and hypocrisy.
I couldn’t put on Midtown 120 Blues. The moment felt too right, and the fatal shooting was enough of a shock. So I turned to something more comforting: disco. And the album I chose? Chic’s Risque.
Nile Rodgers and co.’s dance music was no longer the beat to celebrate but to now mourn. “Good times! These are the good times! Leave your care behind!” It seems difficult to take this mantra to heart, but in dark times such as then, was there really a choice? This, disco and funk, was the groove of uplift that many have danced for generations not to forget — no, we shall not forget — but to overcome.
Of course I also put on Let’s Dance that night to deal with the sadness. And when I heard Bowie declare, “let’s dance,” backed by the most glamorous ensemble, it was overwhelming. I remembered how Rodgers was essentially blacklisted because he was a disco musician. I remembered the aftermath of Disco Demolition Night, which not only led the genre to its demise but permitted a public expression of hate against the gay and black and Latinx community who needed it. I remembered, now decades later, the struggles and risk people still go through just to express themselves through their favorite records and rhythms.
After all that, like a “fuck you” to all of it, let’s dance. It was dance music at it’s most powerful. It simply stood as proof that the dancer is still alive, existing and fighting despite the chaos. And it sounded like another of Bowie’s songs. “We can beat them, just for one day. We can be us. Just for one day.”
