In a particular funk these last few weeks, I made some grand statements to friends about the healing power of music and have now decided that the healing power of dance deserves a chance too, and so I am embarking on an epic journey to memorize the dance steps in a favourite music video. Sounds easy, right? You try it.
Or perhaps you have tried it. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to do airbands in elementary school – no, I’m positive, in fact. Julie? You were there in grade six at Vital Grandin, right, when everybody did Janet Jackson’s bloody ‘Escapade,’ weren’t you? Yeah, and my group was going to do bloody ‘Escapade’ but that morning we found out that everybody else was doing it, so we decided to do Paula Abdul’s ‘Promise of A New Day,’ which went over like a lead balloon. Obviously we’ve all survived that trauma somehow, but now, now… the trauma begins anew.
So yeah, in the spirit of 1991, I picked Vanilla Ice’s ‘Ice Ice Baby,’ agreed by many to be either the worst or the best rap song ever, and watched it through a couple of times. (It is not the worst video ever. That dubious honour goes to Baltimora’s ‘Tarzan Boy.’ Worst… video… ever.) Then I watched it again with a notepad and a pen. And started having doubts. For one thing, do I really have this kind of attitude?
Probably not, eh? There’s a lot of that in the video, unfortunately (also, I think there may have been a lot of that in 1991 in general – but I digress). Can you see the passion in his eyes? Can you see the passion in his oversized sweatshirt? (In this capture, you can’t see the passion in his baggy orange parachute pants or his patent-leather wingtips, but trust me, it’s there.)
Leaving out the attitude problem, there’s the actual, uh, ‘choreography,’ if one can call it that without disgracing choreographers everywhere, and if one can accurately apply it to ‘several badly-dressed men having seizures in a warehouse.’ Then, when they’re done in the warehouse, they go up onto the roof in black vests and puffy white shirts and have kind of a… kind of a… a penguin… rap… conga line. Or something.
Oh my God, I think I’m in over my head. I’d like to give up, but there’s a voice in my head (obviously not the Voice of Reason) insisting I’ll have so much street cred if I can manage the entire four and a half minutes at Kim’s wedding next May. With the spinning and the running man and the elaborate hand gestures and that great, great ‘Word to your mother’ that he does partway through. It’s a fool’s errand, right? Too hard. Definitely.
No? Maybe not?
Any volunteers to form the rest of the crew, yo, at the wedding?
I absolutely remember the fabulous air-bands of grade 6. I believe I made set of card board drums. Somehow I also remember being in music class sometime between grade four and six and performing a dance to Madonna’s Like a Prayer. If you think back hard enough you may also remember the gym class where they made us do the move where we flopped down chest first onto the ground and the rest of our bodies ah gracefully followed in a smooth motion – may help with the whole doing the choreography without pulling a muscle thing.
Too late, I already pulled a muscle. I was doing the Vanilla Ice hunched-over running man and my back went ‘clickety-clickety-clickety’ like a trapped flamenco dancer. Damn! We were so flexible when we were kids. Wasted!
I also remember doing dive rolls in grade six gym… ow, my wrists ache with nostalgia.
at… the… wedding? (collapses)
(picks self up) Between that and the treadmill dance that Solange and Kim G are supposed to be getting together, it’ll be one interesting dance.
I’ve always treated wedding invitations as coded requests for Silly Dance Contests, you know that.