An incredible amount of songs were recorded based on this concept, and from these songs, dances like the Charleston, the Surfer's Stomp, the Mashed Potato, and an staggeringly high number of different variations of the Twist were created.
I hadn't really thought about it much until yesterday when I was listening to "Do The Slauson" by The Pyramids at work. The lady I work with and I kind of laughed about it, and then I started thinking about how hilarious it would be if this trend caught on in hardcore music.
A lot of hardcore music involves very specific dances to be done for specific parts of the song. By no means is this unique to hardcore music, though. Some people jump around and bang their heads and hurt people when they listen to metal. But there is a big difference between metal lyrics telling you to, "Bang your head! Hurt people!" and hardcore lyrics telling you to, "Cross one leg over the other while punching downward with the opposite arm! Do a scissor kick to roundhouse kick! Spin around in circles with your fist pointed outward!"
Kind of funny to think about.
But then, on what seemed, at first, to be a completely unrelated incident today while I was out eating lunch with my roommates, a bunch of people in bell-clad outfits entered the loft area of this restaurant and proceeded to start singing songs as a group celebrating Spring and May 1st and kind of just the goodness of life in general. This reminded me of singing in church or all those scenes in Stand By Me when they are walking along the railroad tracks singing songs together, and it all kind of made me think about uniformity in music for the purpose of sharing of it as a group.
It kind of takes the absurdity out of things like hardcore dancing and casts it in the light of a collective appreciation and our desire to feel like a part of the things that we love, the same way sports fans say "we" when referring to their favorite team.
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