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 Nick's Guide to Live MusicSuch a Lonely Together Dancing at Portland Indie Rock Shows by Nick Jaina
I saw a t-shirt the other night that said "Legalize Dancing in Portland" And, like most good t-shirts, at first it kind of made me laugh. Then it kind of made me sad. And then it kind of pissed me off. T-shirts always say the most profound things! Fucking t-shirts, stealing all the best things to say. They always beat me to it. How do they do it?! Why is dancing illegal in Portland? Well, actually, it's not. That was just a little t-shirt humor. But sometimes it feels like it is illegal to dance in Portland, much like it was in the little town in the film "Flashdance" where the conservative religious types outlawed dancing to save their children from hedonism-- except in this case, the youth in Portland have informally outlawed dancing in their own minds, as a way to not have to stick out and look like they care about something. But why do we all secretly have conservative religious types in our minds? Well, that question obviously wasn't serious enough to be bolded and set apart from the rest of the text. So the question before us actually is Why doesn't anyone dance at Portland indie rock shows? Well, maybe we've jumped ahead a bit. Perhaps the first question should be Does anyone dance at Portland indie rock shows? And the answer to that is, of course, no. Have you been to a Portland indie rock show? (And by indie rock, I mean almost anything other than folk and hip hop, as folk has no expectations of dancing and hip hop has plenty of dancing. Or so my white hip-hop friends tell me.) So now we can rightly ask again Why doesn't anyone dance at Portland indie rock shows? Many of the obvious answers to this question center around such notions as "because people suck" but that will lead us into Why do people suck? and that's just too large a notion to get our mitts around. Let us assume that people don't suck. Instead, let us say that people are afraid, people are sad, people are in pain, people are arrogant, people truly don't care. These are notions we can work with. Remember we don't just want to be angry at the end of this article, we want to be dancing. Hmm... that sounded really square. What is dancing for, anyway? I propose that it is for a sense of community. It is for self-expression. It's for having a good time. It's for sweating. These are all things that the local music scene in general wants to be about, yet has struggled to be. (Well, maybe it has achieved sweating.) People are afraid. Fear makes people hesitant to take part in acts of love. Why are people afraid? Well, northwest indie-rock is a very postmodern creature, very aware of itself and all that has gone before it. Things don't just happen in indie rock in an evolutionary way, they are brought in to express a fashion, or to express contrariness to a fashion. A very self-aware art form makes for a very self-aware audience. Self-aware audiences don't tend to dance, unless it's the kind of dancing that is so missing the point of dancing that it shouldn't even be called dancing. That would be ironic dancing. As in, "I've seen people dance like this, and I totally don't have an urge to do this, but look at me smugly assert that I am better than dancing at the very moment that I am dancing." That kind of dancing does us no good and gets us no closer to Portland Dance Nation! Ah, too square again. I'm struggling here. The social benefits of dancing are obvious on a very primal level. The most apparent is the benefit of attracting people to you so that you can have sex with them. Dancing is perhaps the only way that you can demonstrate, in public, your limberness, your flexibility, your sense of rhythm, and your ability to gyrate your maker-areas to a receptive audience of your peers in an environment where alcohol has drained away any notions of decency or level-headedness these people might normally have had in their workaday lives. So why would the urge to dance for this reason not exist in the Portland indie-rock scene? Perhaps the spark for the fire is missing, in that indie-rock is an unsexy musical form. The alcohol is certainly there. The desire to couple is, I've heard, quite abundant. But the music the audience is witnessing has to provide not just sexy rhythms, but a sexy show onstage, so that people in the audience are reminded-- again, primally-- that sex is fun, sex is great, sex is the only way this species is going to survive. Generally, if there is a conflict between audience and performer, the performer is at fault. That's because the performer spends his whole life practicing with his associates on his act, while "the audience" is an ad hoc group of people who happen to be in the same room at the same time. An audience has never gotten together and practiced anything. Let's blame the performer for a minute. The guitar is the foundation of indie-rock (a genre, by the way, that is defined by the fact that it is utterly without financial backing) but how sexy is the guitar? It's sexy when Prince plays it. But Boggle is sexy when Prince plays it. The guitar has overrun the modern rock garden, choking out other instruments in its incessant power grab. A few thousand guitars could be pruned from the scene and we would just get to the point where we could see the other layers of guitars. And we'd say, "Man, look at these other layers of guitars, all pale because they've never seen the sun-- and still they're blocking out all these other instruments. Hey, drums! Remember those?" Drums can be sexy, because they provide rhythm. Lead singers who don't play an instrument can be sexy, because they don't have to deal with an object restraining their movement and blocking the audience's view of their maker-area. Even a cow bell can be sexy: free range of movement and an unfettered view of the player's maker-area. The saxophone is sexy in a totally wrong, get your hands off me you're my parent's friend kind of way. I don't have to go through the whole orchestra to delineate what is sexy. But I will. tuba- kind of sexy Well, I think we've gotten off topic. Some people defensively respond to the question of public dancing by saying, "Man, I would dance, if only other people would dance." Well then why do you crucify the one poor bugger who, every night, tries to get something going? He moves to the front of the audience, makes his intentions clear by leaving behind handbags and beverages, takes his hands out of his pockets, and starts to slide and dip. And every night, the rest of the audience reacts how? By sympathetically joining in and creating a community of movement and rhythm? Not hardly. I've seen it every time and it still makes me wince, like the hyena in the nature film who thinks he can outrun the cheetah. And, like the cheetah, the crowd was just toying with you, poor solitary dancer, by nodding their heads and twisting their shoulders, making you think they would accept your bold advances. But no, every night, the audience backs off and gives the solitary dancer a wide berth, as though they're all imagining a cartoon saw coming from below the floor, to cut out a little circle around the dancer and have him drop through and disappear. And the dancer, sensing this, either gives up and shuffles himself back into the deck of cards, or-God, you hope this is what he does-- he dances on, undeterred. He knows that a cartoon saw is cutting a circle around him, but he dances proudly anyway, knowing that once the circle is cut, the whole rest of the floor and the entire audience is what will actually fall away and disappear-- in contradiction to normal physics, but not cartoon physics-- and he will be dancing alone, on a circle of floor, floating in space. Which is just fine with him. But join him before he floats away. It's the fun of being together, as people. Oh, fuck it, I can't talk about dancing without sounding square. Do whatever you want. -mlp |