I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Draft 1)

I've come again to the point of wanting to take social dancing lessons. I attended a dinner cruise recently where people took to the floor with line dancing and stepping. I've seen the Country Music Channel where rows of Southerners kicked up their heels likewise. A cousin said she and her mom are taking dance lessons at a community center. My daughter showed me a hip hop dance lesson On Demand on TV. And so I want dancing lessons. I want to be in a room where everybody is listening to a style of music that's meant to be responded to a certain way. And I want to learn those ways. Where to go, where to go?

There are places that men and women go for dancing, whether the music encourages it or not. Many restaurants have separated off a dance area, and clubs exist, of course. But I don't want to dance to today's music; often I don't want to listen to it at all. So that leads me to social dancing. I want to dance with somebody.

Latin dance nights are what many have suggested, and salsa and merengue are fine. I'm finding myself wanting to dance slower, though. I'm finding myself wanting to almost waltz. I'm finding myself wanting to dress up, really dress up, and groove. But not dress up and dance to go-go or Maze or Chicago-style stepping songs. Maybe I want to learn the dances they did in the USO in the 1940s? I probably don't know exactly what I want to learn. They say the first step, though, is saying you have a problem, right?

I don't just want to do it because everybody else is doing it, though. I go through these phases of wanting to dance, and I'm back here again. So if you know of events or venues, holla at your boy! Know who and what you're getting yourself into, though.

I'm the guy who, as a kid, never was addicted to Soul Train the way I was hooked on Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling or Saturday morning cartoons. I never was known as being interested in musical performance or dance the way my siblings all were. Late in my high school years I did get tired of paying to attend parties and not dancing, but my wallflower tendencies kept up even through college. And it's definitely the case that most of my favorite musical genres inspire one to sway more than to downright get down. Or maybe that's not true, but maybe that's just how I hear it. Whatever the music is putting out, I'm proving nonresponsive.

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Why do I want to dance now?

I've always had an old soul, and maybe my moon's in that phase again. I've been feeling more like Chuck D. By that I mean, I saw an episode of The Mo'Nique show recently featuring the rapper, a choreographer, and some young artists. Twice Mo'Nique got Chuck off the couch to become more involved in the show. The choreographer taught the host and guests some dance steps, and Chuck was good-natured but flat-footed. Then when the young artists performed, everyone stood to groove with them. Chuck clapped but didn't dance. But when I thought back to Public Enemy concerts or the one Fresh Fest I attended, I remembered, Chuck has never danced. He ran and jumped and pumped his fists: oh, he was active. But among the hip hop stars of a certain era, it was LL and Fresh Prince, or the Herbie Luv Bug-produced artists like Kid N Play, who danced. LL and Kane really were the only respectable rappers who also danced, who I remember. Everybody else was decidedly Sir Nose D'Void of Funk-like with theirs. ("I will never dance, Star Child!") Ice Cube said it straight up (Jackin' for Beats): "I don't party and shake my butt. I leave that to the boys with the funny haircuts."

(Aside: It's why hip hop can never save black people or the world - it's ignoring the core of its power to connect people. That core is to say "love" through the music. Instead, hip hop says Listen, first, and Get me paid, second, and Love, Maybe. Said another way, it shouts Avatar-ly, "see me!" but doesn't really mean what the Avatar tribespeople mean.)

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Maybe that was all bs that I just wrote.

If you really want to know the deal, I want to dance with a woman. I always love being on the floor doing my two-step with Jawando, my homey who made me feel less self-conscious about just doing what I do from high school forward, and who stood by me even when those steps were offbeat or just off. But I want to two-step with a girl. There, I said it.

But what's happening is, I'm psychologically standing on the wall, like the woman in Sam Cooke's Cha Cha Cha.

"Took my baby to the hop last night
and what to my surprise
when we got there, she hit me with the news
right between the eyes:
she said she couldn't do the Cha Cha Cha"

I came up on this music as well as anything else my ears could hear, which was most kinds of popular music in the 1970s and 1980s. I love funk the most, but it's undeniable I'm of the hip hop generation, or that one on the cusp between when pop overtook rock and Soul/R&B, and hip hop came to dominate it all. Content-wise, hip hop does not harken back to Sam Cooke leading his girl who couldn't Cha Cha Cha onto the floor, and teaching her until "she was doing it better than" him. And of course, hip hop follows Michael Jackson saying "life ain't so bad at all livin' off the wall." In my lifetime, dance music was hip hop, House, or electronica-infused variations of them.

Some of hip hop has that element in common with jazz: makes me want to listen, but to sit down and listen. Doesn't get me to dancing with a woman.

What do women want to do?