Why am I such a bad dancer?

For those of you who have seen me dance… I’m sorry – it’s not a pretty sight. There’s a lot of misguided hip shaking, arm swinging, and head bobbing as I desperately search for the beat. Usually, I resign myself to a modified “running man.” My head goes up and down or shoulder-to-shoulder, while my arms take turns upper cutting my chin. What my legs do is better left unsaid. Why am I such a bad dancer?

The short answer is that I’m a skinny, white, Jewish boy, without much rhythm. On closer examination, that doesn’t begin to explain my ineptitude. The belief that all Jews, or white people for that matter, are bad dancers is not only a broad generalization (racist) but inaccurate. When I watch “My Super Sweet Sixteen” (MTV guilty pleasure watching at it’s finest) the white kids are cutting a serious rug. (Do the kids say, “cutting a rug” anymore?)

So what makes them so different than me? Well, I’ll get to them a bit later, but first I want to explain why a fairly decent athlete like myself, has to rely on the delicate balance of “just enough booze” when I dance -- too little and I move like the Tin Man, too much and I’m somewhere between doing the cabbage patch and having a seizure, just right and I may walk off the dance floor with some of my dignity still intact.

The answer lies in the music I was socialized with. My mom was not hip. Anyone who has met her will say that she’s very sweet and kind, but no one is confusing her with “the cool mom.” (That was Linda Gerber, aka “the skunk,” aka a regular visitor to the… ahem… imagination of my 15 year old self.) Anyway, the coolest thing my mom ever had me listen to was the Beatles, beyond that, I don’t know if she even listened to contemporary music. I was pretty much on my own when it came to discovering music as a kid, forced to rely on MTV and the tapes my brother was no longer interested in. At the age of 12, my music collection consisted of the following artists: Poison, Guns and Roses, Genesis, Pink Floyd, The Dead Milkmen, Paula Abdul, Neil Young, Vanilla Ice, Fiddler On The Roof Soundtrack, REM, Pearl Jam, They Might Be Giants, Billy Joel, Weird Al, and an additional Paula Abdul album (I had both “Spellbound” and “Forever Your Girl”). What does this eclectic group of musicians have in common? They’re all white.

When Paula Abdul and Vanilla Ice are the closet things a kid has to music created by people of color, it’s damn near impossible to understand what “soul” is. And I’m not just talking about soul music (which much to my delight, I discovered in college); I’m talking about music that has soul in it. The bulk of my black classmates in elementary school grew up listening to the music their parents listened to and you better believe that music had some soul in it. Meanwhile, I listened to what most middle class white kids were listening to… the stuff on the radio and on MTV. Outside of Michael Jackson, MC Hammer, Living Color, TLC, and Salt and Peppa, I don’t remember too many black faces or voices on my TV or radio. And I didn’t have the slightest idea what soul meant.

Now what exactly is soul? Well, it’s hard to pinpoint just what it is. It’s easy to point to various groups or musicians (Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Aretha Franklin and so on) and say they have soul. It’s not so hard to trace the influence of soul artists to funk (Bootsy Collins, Maceo Parker, George Clinton, etc.) and onto hip-hop (The Roots, Jill Scoot, Erykah Badu, etc.) But what is it that all these people have in common (aside from being black)? What about their music makes it soulful? If I had to pinpoint it, it’s a combination of R&B and gospel inspired elements, most notably powerful singing and rhythms you can tap your feet to… and dance to.

In college, I used to go to a bar called Darwin’s every Thursday night and dance my ass off. It was a predominantly white crowd listening to predominantly hip-hop music. After a few cocktails, I’d usually work up the courage to approach a cute black girl and I’d say, “I’m skinny white, Jewish boy, without much rhythm… but I want to learn!” The line never failed and in seconds I was grinding was some cutie that could dance circles around most of the girls in the bar. Inevitably, I always heard the same thing week in and week out: “Listen for the beat. Find the beat.”

But I couldn’t. And it’s not because I was white and she was black, it’s because I was raised listening to Poison (no one is ever going to confuse anything Poison has written for having even an inkling of soul in it) and she was raised listening to stuff you can dance to. Now white kids were in the clear for a while. White music was pop music, and so others had to conform to the white style of dancing. In the 70’s it was disco, in the 80’s it was some sort of manic, arms flailing, seizure-like thrashing (http://youtube.com/watch?v=5Iwmqq1o0Ts - watch how the people dance in the background in this clip from 16 Candles), and in the 90’s it was head banging and mosh pits.

Today, hip-hop culture is pop-culture. White kids and black kids alike are socialized on black music. And while “soul” may be absent from Lil’ John and some of his hip-hop counterparts, check out the most recent Kanye West album and listen to “Gold Digger” or “Gone” and then try telling me there’s not a direct correlation from soul music to rap. Kids of all races are growing up listening to music that has a beat, which leads me back to “My Super Sweet Sixteen.” The white kids in that, bumping and grinding away with careless ease, have no trouble finding the beat. If you grow up listening to music with soul, the beat is just a part of you.