According to television commercials, the #1 movie in America is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Kill Me Now.
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According to television commercials, the #1 movie in America is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Kill Me Now.
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 For the 7th month in a row the #1 search term used to reach my website is "baby boomer music playlist" and the most viewed page (by a big margin) is "The Music" page. This is encouraging. Looks to me like there are lots o' folks out there planning dance parties.
I did a Google search of my own and saw "10 Essential Boomer Albums" come up in the results, linked to the AARP website. Intrigued, I checked it out. Unlike the usual "top Nth Boomer songs/albums/yaddayaddayadda" lists which are invariably compiled by a young hipster who in the recent past would have worked at a gritty used vinyl store, but who now blogs semi-professionally since the record store went out of business, the list on the AARP website was actually pretty decent. Of course, it's impossible to create THE list of essential albums because there are just too many great albums, but this list included Beatles/Sgt. Pepper, Stones/Exile on Main St., Marvin Gaye/What's Goin' On, Carole King/Tapestry, Stevie Wonder/Innervisions, Eagles Greatest Hits...even a Zep album! All excellent albums. Every last one! On each one of them is one very "dancible" tune. This is not criticism. These were giants of music, not dance bands. Even the Beatles, who started out as a club/dance band eventually reached a higher astral plane creating highly imaginative, groundbreaking, brilliant concepts like Magical Mystery Tour or Sgt. Pepper that were absent of any dance tunes whatsoever. They are still my favorite band of all time, so there. So keep searching my friends. The boomer dance tunes are out there.  Coming off my stint at teaching Samba at a dance party I have had time to reflect on a lifetime of popular dance. Being a DJ specializing in boomer-era music I have seen a range from my earliest memories of the twist and the nameless slow dances of the late fifties through the last decade.
I know that the music today still inspires dance steps, but as I have stated throughout this website, not my tempo, not my era. I would look silly and feel silly. It's like the elderly actress who performs Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" in the pivotal moment in Adam Sandler's "The Wedding Singer." Sure she can do it, but it was entertaining in the same way a bear on a unicycle is entertaining. I'm glad the dance floor didn't fill with elderly people doin' the Shizz, the Cat Daddy, the John Wall, the Wobble, or the Dougie. Yes, those are all real dances and if Google can be believed, they are all hot in 2014. You don't know about them if you are a boomer because you probably don't listen to rap or dubstep. That's okay. Your parents probably hated Elvis and thought rock and roll was Satan's secret plan for world domination. Time passes. Out with the old, in with the new. Someday something with eclipse rap and who knows, maybe partner dancing will return. ...and I am the King of Hungary. Ha! Crackin' myself up today. My point, and I do have one around here somewhere, is that there are a large number of dance steps that are endangered species. They are at risk of falling off the "Youtube Collective Visual Memory" meaning that you can't enter a dance step into Youtube search and get results that include the actual dance step. There will be results, but they are not correct, but instead reflect the most recent interpretation. I searched for Shingaling. Popular dance in the late sixties. Similar in context to the Boogaloo. The names alone suggest that dance was changing and incorporating more urban elements. Plenty of results are returned by the search, but video of the steps...the actual steps...not someone doing something that they have decided to call Shingaling? No. There are music clips that capture the tunes. There is a great tune called "Hong Kong Shingaling by Ray Lugo & the Boogaloo Destroyers (sounds promising, right?) Alas...no. In fact, there is not a single authentic performance of the Shingaling to be found in the results. Same for Boogaloo. You would think there would be archival Soul Train footage. Something. But no. Entertaining? Yes, but not the authentic dances from the sixties. Imagine you are fourteen years old and doing a research project for school on "The Shingaling." Because the link below is attached to such a funny, clever video it comes up high in the search results. Lots and lots of other kids have "liked it" on facebook, so it MUST be the real thing. (but it isn't) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVbKXgGeFZE This is education in the era of "searching...it's the new learn!" I noticed the same thing when I was searching for episodes of "The Avengers" TV show from the sixties. Type in "The Avengers and you get 20 pages of the Marvel comic book-turned-cinema-franchise. In time, even searches on John Steed or Emma Peele may only return results from the really awful film in the 90's. An entire post-millennial generation will believe that Uma Thurman is the definitive Emma Peele. So, better start archiving video of the Frug, Boney Maroney, and Watusi now before they are replaced by something called Frug, Watusi, etc., but share nothing in common except the name. |
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