Is Dancing
Dangerous?
Some musings
on two songs by Sparks: ‘Dancing is Dangerous (1979) and ‘We Go Dancing’ (2023)
It is well known that when
Sparks’ desire to find a new framework for their unique songwriting and singing
skills led them to work with Georgio Moroder, they were criticised in some reviews
for ‘going disco’. They saw it differently though. Russell has explained that they were actually
more interested in exploring the potential of electronic music as a vehicle for
their own songs rather than writing disco music as such: We didn’t think of it
as dance music but just placing what we do over a sound with electronic
backing’. (Classic Pop magazine interview, 2021) Ron explained their approach in a similar
way: ‘We were in that area and outside of it at the same time – the lyrics and
Russell’s singing kept it separate from the wider world of disco’ (cited in Daryl
Easlea, Talent is an Asset. The Story of Sparks, p.158). The Number One Song in Heaven album
(1979) is, of course, now regarded as ‘a hugely influential album for people
who knew the future when they saw it’. While
it clearly draws on the musical energy and themes (sex, materialism, hedonism)
of the disco culture, it also, in typical Sparks fashion, subjects it to a wry,
even subversive perspective. The title song, for example, shows how even a hit
‘written by the mightiest hand’ can be debased into the backing for a T.V.
advertisement, and famously takes a swipe at the lack of depth in the lyrics of
typical disco music: ‘Lyrically weak, but the music’s the thing’. This dual approach is even more apparent in
their parallel project, the album written and produced for the singer Noël, Is
There More Than Life To Dancing (1979).
The first song on this album is ‘Dancing is
Dangerous’. Listening to this again
recently and noticing the insistent repetition of the refrain ‘dancing,
dancing’, I kept thinking about ‘We Go Dancing’, a song from The Girl Is
Crying In Her Latte (2023), and here’s why.
The Noël song has been described
as straightforward electronic music, but the witty lyrics suggest a different
story. The title itself questions the nature
of the dance craze, and the song portrays from a personal perspective an
insidious trance-like effect, associated with darkness (‘We’ll never see
daylight again’), gradually induced by the throbbing rhythms of the music. The singer tells of losing the sense of
place and identity (‘First step you forget where you are/ Next step you forget
who you are’). This process is seductive, all-consuming and everlasting:
‘Dancing is dangerous. Gently embraces us/Then won’t let go till the end of our
days’. It is also impossible to free
oneself from its clutches (‘I’ve tried but I can’t break away’), The analogy
with drug addiction is unmistakeable. The dancers in the dance hall, the singer
and, potentially, the listener are all implicated in this danger by the use of
‘I’, ‘We’ and ‘You’. The singer senses
that there might be another life out there, but ‘try leaving, you won’t get
away’/As we dance, dance, dance to the music’. Such a giving over of the
individual self to the collective experience of the dance craze might be seen
as a transcendent and euphoric experience, but also potentially painful and
destructive. Ultimately the loss of inhibitions does not seem joyous or
life-enhancing here. The album’s title song, which asks the question, ‘Is There
More To Life Than Dancing’, reiterates this critical view of the dance craze,
as the singer confesses, ‘But could it be that I’ve overdone it / I’ve danced
my mind away’. Despite warning doubts from her subconscious, she is unable to
do more than ‘dance till it fades away’. That this album appeared not long
before the fall from popularity of the disco craze shows how, once more, Sparks
were ahead of the game.
Flash
forward 44 years, and we find in ‘We Go Dancing’, we find dancing as a metaphor
for the marching of crowds in patriotic displays in North Korea (made explicit
at the end of the song), and more broadly, a satirical portrayal of how music
might be used to control and coerce a whole population. In this unusually
overtly political song, narrated by a seemingly willing participant, Kim Jong-Un
is depicted as a D.J. using ‘dance’ as a means of brainwashing and coercing the
people (‘he rocks our world’). Here, the insistent repetition of ‘dancing,
dancing’ reaches truly sinister heights, as the crowds, like automata, must
conform to the command-like repetition of ‘dance, dance’, even if they get
injured in the process. In this culture, discipline is elevated to a moral and
social imperative, producing a different kind of uniformity and
self-abandonment to that suggested in Noël’s song. But is it that
different? Arguably, the dress codes of
clubland are as much a uniform in a certain way, and the surrender of
individuality to the choices of the DJ is inherent in both cases. Here,
however, the (decadent) Western influence of YouTube is rejected in favour of a
narrow and strictly prescribed choice of ‘music’ and movement (‘We don’t have a
lot of moves, but our one move is tight’ ) which is seen as their strength: ‘No-one
has the discipline, the choreography’. Deviation is outlawed, and, as in
‘Dancing is Dangerous’, there is no way out.
In both
songs, then, dancing is associated with a degree of pain (the discordant effect
of the music in ‘We Go Dancing’ is manifestly not music that you can dance to),
control and the loss of self, intensified, in 2023, to the control of the
psyche of a whole nation. In both cases, the narrator has a lingering awareness
of what is happening to them but is still in thrall to the imperative to keep
dancing. I find both songs unsettling in
ways that are both very different yet compellingly similar. That’s the wonder
of Sparks.
Penny Brown
April 2024
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