The death of slow dancing: I was reminded of my high school slow dancing experiences when I read that Paul, of Paul and Paula, had passed away last week. I don't ever recall feeling that dancing then, in the early-mid '60s, was intimate, but was more about trust, and closeness. As I got older it became more about intimacy to the point that slow dancing in social circles could be uncomfortable with that level of intimacy on display. Maybe that's the real issue behind it disappearing--hook up culture has little to do with intimacy and displays of any kind of intimacy have come to make people very uncomfortable. That could be why the most intimate dance scenes as portrayed in the media are typically shown with the couple in solitude, with no one else around.
Nice comment, which reminded me of the linked article in Ted's piece. I find it baffling that twerking is a thing to be done in public dancing. Seems like "front-to-back" dancing was to be found in strip clubs. Yeah, I'm old, but I have no recollection of slow dancing being in any way pornographic.
All this talk of twerking reminded me of the old joke about the church that prohibited sex while standing up on the grounds that it might lead to dancing.
A big part of the problem is that kids don't know how to socialize any longer. Everything is centered around their cellphones and the latest videos by an influencer.
At my health club, almost everyone is staring into their cellphones between sets (and bogarting the weights or machine) instead of communicating, talking trash, etc. with each other. When I look out the window at the outdoor pool, people mostly have their faces buried in their cellphones again. You are not going to learn how to socialize unless you practice doing so!
Cellphones should be made illegal until a person is 21 or maybe 25.
Isolation creating more isolation, intimacy, and trust, which creates more... Add the extant pandemic, which is growing another wave, and we have some real problems.
I doubt I had any physical contact with a boy until my middle school dance. I was largely ignored unless they wanted to pound a dodgeball straight into my face.
So imagine my surprise when I was asked to dance.
“Stairway to Heaven” to be exact.
The longest 8 minutes of my life. Avoiding eye contact, rocking back and forth, shuffling around awkwardly through increasing tempo changes. “Do I stop touching him now? Can I pull the fire alarm and run?”
Twerking is appalling but had it been around in 1983…
Inre slow dancing: In the 1920's, civic groups in Chicago were concerned about the sexuality of slow dancing. They put pressure on dance establishments to speed up the tempo of the music played by the bands. Of course, that gave a boost to jazz, which as we know, became the ultimate corrupter of youth. Pity the poor upholders of public morality.
You write: "Maybe I’m dreaming...but this could lead to a revival of smarter, less formulaic movies. ...character-driven and plot-driven dramas are a lot cheaper to make than Marvel spectacles."
This isn't likely though we are also hoping. I am on the board of Sundance and we are working hard!
Superhero movies may be running their course, but I expect that simple, formulaic movies with black and white good guy/bad guy characterizations, more action, less dialogue and less complexity will persist. They are made this way for a lot of reasons.
About 10-15 years ago the major studios made a decision to take the, say, $5 Billion dollars they spent on making, say, 30 movies, and instead spend it on making 5 movies for a billion each. Why? So they could release it worldwide, simultaneously, in Spanish, Chinese, Laotian, Tagalog, Bengali, Urdu and Swedish on 100,000 screens all at once. No need to translate or do voiceovers for a lot of complex dialogue. Action is easily understood and superhero movies tend to be legible across cultures. Superheros can represent any race, represent the fight for justice of any people, no matter on which side of the political spectrum you live: and there is no Goliath that doesn't feel that he is really, at heart, a David. The biggest audience for movies turns out to be kids in their teens, 20s and maybe a few 30-somethings. Thus, the cineplex keeps shipping this stuff. But I am hoping alongside you. The over-30 audiences are home watching episodic shows on Netflix or Max--and some indie films too! Was Barbie the turning point? Will the American movie-making era of Five Easy Pieces and Nashville finally return? Let the answer be Yes!
Cineplex movies are 98% garbage which is why so few viewers over 35 ever go there. Ditto most of Netflix/HBO. The money-boys (well parodied in The Player) don't know cinema. They don't even care. Sundance! Oh please. American film is the worst offender in the Degradation of Film. You have my sympathies.
Slow dancing was huge in Venezuela in the 70s, the parties were in almost complete darkness or "black light", sometimes just a painted lightbulb. Long slow songs were almighty, like "Starway To Heaven", "Down By The River", "Epithaph" and "War Of The Gods" by Billy Paul, and sometimes it resulted in some kissing, partner exchange, etc. As I remember, whatever happened there stayed there. Once I french-kissed my older brother´s girlfriend, forty years later he still doesn´t know...
Thanks for your piece "The Death of The Slow Dance." Much appreciated. One area in which the slow dance is very much alive these days among the young folks worldwide is Argentine Tango. Not huge flocks of youthful dancers, but devoted flocks nonetheless. Tango is alive and well in Argentina and the rest of the world, and new tangos are being written and recorded at a breathless pace. The music and dance forms have never gone away. Hope you'll look at my Substack piece in which I mention all this..."On Love in Buenos Aires": https://terenceclarke.substack.com/p/on-love-in-buenos-aires-17f . Take care. Terence Clarke
I've been sad about the state of dancing since I was a high schooler in the late aughts. If you really like to dance, rather than twerk or just step side to side, it's a tough world out there. Also, I hope you're right about the movies! I've been noticing a trend back toward moderately budgeted, average movies. Remember when movies could just be a nice way to pass a couple of hours? Not every single one had to set profit records? I'm hopeful we're getting back toward that idea.
re Live Music: I grew up listening to pre-Beatles music during what Martin Mull called “The Great Folk Music Scare of the Sixties ... when that stuff almost caught on!” I tell young parents that they should try, as much as possible, to put their children in a room with live music that can survive a power failure. If they can do that, the kids will love (and probably prefer) hand-played music for life!
A guy with no record deal standing at an old U87 with a splash of echo and 3 dogs at his feet blowing up iTunes is proof of the trend. Before I got too lazy to finish my rant along these lines many years ago, I came across some research by biologist, Ingo Steinbach, on the healing power of live music. A fun fact I recall: a cello had chartable healing properties on subjects but a sample of the same instrument did not. At the time, the majority of pop radio was machine driven. 30 years later, I so hope the trend is reversing... as the pendulum swings.
Back when I was a young professional cellist I was hired by the Australian music show, Countdown, to play the cello in a music video for Tim Finn. I was handed a walkman and asked if I could "mime" the cello line on the tape. I was listening and listening but couldn't hear the cello track. When Tim arrived in the studio I said to him: I can't hear a cello on this tape. He looked astounded and said, "there's no cello on it". Then it clicked: do you mean the synth track? It was only about 6 bars in the intro and the same 6 bars in the middle of the song. Easy peasy, but Tim Finn seemed impressed that I could play it so quickly and easily.
As Quincy Jones always said, “nothing like flesh on catgut”. Standing in front of a cello, one is moved by the sonic air between you. Ven the best samples don’t do that.
There was always some weird shit going on in Australian commercial music. in the 60's I played conga drum for a Bata shoe commercial. There were 3 couples dancing to my drumming while the camera panned a rack of Bata shoes. The director could never make up his mind about the order, left to right, of the shoes, and we did take after take, after take. By the end of the 3 hrs. the dancers were exhausted and my hands ached.
It's this kind of dedication to the art of film making that spawned the Australian golden age of cinema in the 1970s and 1980s! (Your poor little bongo hands ached for a cause :)). So much of Aussie advertising of the late 60s and 70s was totally surreal and you didn't mind watching them when it was only 2 or 3 ads shown at 15 min intervals. By the end of the 1990s you'd get 1 ad break in the first half hour of a 1 hour show and then 5 or six in the last half hour, each with upwards of 4 or 5 ads. No wonder television died.
I particularly enjoyed learning that babies preferred and benefited from live music. I am on a kick to return my cultural interactions to the “analog” mode. Live performances, coffee in cafes, walking the streets and talking to people. I think it’s good for the brain, especially the right brain, which Iain McGilchrist tells me in a fascinating book, The Matter With Things, is atrophying in our culture, while the left brain hypertrophies. Not a good situation he says. So the baby bit makes sense to me.
The Batman didn’t make a billion but it grossed almost 3/4 of a billion. That’s not shabby.
The superhero genre will be done when good ones don’t make bank. Since Avengers Endgame they’ve almost all ranged from just mediocre to downright terrible.
The Batman trilogy of films by Christopher Nolan did pretty good at the box office, plus they were definitive Batman movies. A standard DC has had a hard time living up to lately. Marvel has some opportunities to make more $1B dollar grossing films but until they do they are on “the clock”!
Wow, Ted, you covered so many issues that I'll stick to a few that are more up my alley.
Slow dancing was, and is, fantastic. The last of us old folks who've enjoyed it for decades are, like myself, left to enjoying the music without enjoying the dance. Ailments abound; getting old is a bitch.
"Maybe I’m dreaming—okay, I’m almost certainly dreaming—but this could lead to a revival of smarter, less formulaic movies. That really ought to happen, because character-driven and plot-driven dramas are a lot cheaper to make than Marvel spectacles." You're correct, and this phenomenon was put on display front and center by the demise of the Indiana Jones movies, which were originally cheap, character-driven films that devolved into gargantuan overblown CGI productions with inane characters. Also, politics aside, "The Sound of Freedom" was an inexpensive film rejected by the major distribution companies that was a character-inspired story, almost a documentary, about a border agent who stepped out to do the right thing.
And in a matter of utmost importance to me as the owner of an early mechanically fuel injected flat six Porsche, I can attest that the "mechanical music" as referenced in Rush's "Red Barchetta" as an amazingly beautiful thing. My son has a carbureted '71 911T, which sounds good, but lacks the amazing sound produced by the cam in the E. BTW, "Red Barchetta," in my estimation is the finest car song ever written.
Link above is to “Slow Dancing” covered by Johnny Rivers, who had a fairly good hit with it in 1977. The song is sometimes mistitled “Swaying to the Music” or “Slow Dancing (Swaying to the Music).”
Several others have since covered this song.
Keep up the great work with The Honest Broker, Ted!
Media siding with big power is not new. The strike may be the topic du jour , but the underlying partnership was exposed March 2020. Media and big pharma, govt as the sole purveyors of truth with the papers on record acting as stenographers at best, propagandists at worst.
Most were okay with this practice when the partnership targeted the plebs but as many warned, one day it will come after you.
“As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.”
The death of slow dancing: I was reminded of my high school slow dancing experiences when I read that Paul, of Paul and Paula, had passed away last week. I don't ever recall feeling that dancing then, in the early-mid '60s, was intimate, but was more about trust, and closeness. As I got older it became more about intimacy to the point that slow dancing in social circles could be uncomfortable with that level of intimacy on display. Maybe that's the real issue behind it disappearing--hook up culture has little to do with intimacy and displays of any kind of intimacy have come to make people very uncomfortable. That could be why the most intimate dance scenes as portrayed in the media are typically shown with the couple in solitude, with no one else around.
Nice comment, which reminded me of the linked article in Ted's piece. I find it baffling that twerking is a thing to be done in public dancing. Seems like "front-to-back" dancing was to be found in strip clubs. Yeah, I'm old, but I have no recollection of slow dancing being in any way pornographic.
All this talk of twerking reminded me of the old joke about the church that prohibited sex while standing up on the grounds that it might lead to dancing.
A big part of the problem is that kids don't know how to socialize any longer. Everything is centered around their cellphones and the latest videos by an influencer.
At my health club, almost everyone is staring into their cellphones between sets (and bogarting the weights or machine) instead of communicating, talking trash, etc. with each other. When I look out the window at the outdoor pool, people mostly have their faces buried in their cellphones again. You are not going to learn how to socialize unless you practice doing so!
Cellphones should be made illegal until a person is 21 or maybe 25.
Isolation creating more isolation, intimacy, and trust, which creates more... Add the extant pandemic, which is growing another wave, and we have some real problems.
I doubt I had any physical contact with a boy until my middle school dance. I was largely ignored unless they wanted to pound a dodgeball straight into my face.
So imagine my surprise when I was asked to dance.
“Stairway to Heaven” to be exact.
The longest 8 minutes of my life. Avoiding eye contact, rocking back and forth, shuffling around awkwardly through increasing tempo changes. “Do I stop touching him now? Can I pull the fire alarm and run?”
Twerking is appalling but had it been around in 1983…
Inre slow dancing: In the 1920's, civic groups in Chicago were concerned about the sexuality of slow dancing. They put pressure on dance establishments to speed up the tempo of the music played by the bands. Of course, that gave a boost to jazz, which as we know, became the ultimate corrupter of youth. Pity the poor upholders of public morality.
You write: "Maybe I’m dreaming...but this could lead to a revival of smarter, less formulaic movies. ...character-driven and plot-driven dramas are a lot cheaper to make than Marvel spectacles."
This isn't likely though we are also hoping. I am on the board of Sundance and we are working hard!
Superhero movies may be running their course, but I expect that simple, formulaic movies with black and white good guy/bad guy characterizations, more action, less dialogue and less complexity will persist. They are made this way for a lot of reasons.
About 10-15 years ago the major studios made a decision to take the, say, $5 Billion dollars they spent on making, say, 30 movies, and instead spend it on making 5 movies for a billion each. Why? So they could release it worldwide, simultaneously, in Spanish, Chinese, Laotian, Tagalog, Bengali, Urdu and Swedish on 100,000 screens all at once. No need to translate or do voiceovers for a lot of complex dialogue. Action is easily understood and superhero movies tend to be legible across cultures. Superheros can represent any race, represent the fight for justice of any people, no matter on which side of the political spectrum you live: and there is no Goliath that doesn't feel that he is really, at heart, a David. The biggest audience for movies turns out to be kids in their teens, 20s and maybe a few 30-somethings. Thus, the cineplex keeps shipping this stuff. But I am hoping alongside you. The over-30 audiences are home watching episodic shows on Netflix or Max--and some indie films too! Was Barbie the turning point? Will the American movie-making era of Five Easy Pieces and Nashville finally return? Let the answer be Yes!
Cineplex movies are 98% garbage which is why so few viewers over 35 ever go there. Ditto most of Netflix/HBO. The money-boys (well parodied in The Player) don't know cinema. They don't even care. Sundance! Oh please. American film is the worst offender in the Degradation of Film. You have my sympathies.
Slow dancing was huge in Venezuela in the 70s, the parties were in almost complete darkness or "black light", sometimes just a painted lightbulb. Long slow songs were almighty, like "Starway To Heaven", "Down By The River", "Epithaph" and "War Of The Gods" by Billy Paul, and sometimes it resulted in some kissing, partner exchange, etc. As I remember, whatever happened there stayed there. Once I french-kissed my older brother´s girlfriend, forty years later he still doesn´t know...
You sly dog!
Hah, when she dumped him he was crying to "Neither One Of Us" and I was secretely so relieved. Imagine if him would marry her!
Phew, saved by their dysfunctional relationship :))
Hello Ted:
Thanks for your piece "The Death of The Slow Dance." Much appreciated. One area in which the slow dance is very much alive these days among the young folks worldwide is Argentine Tango. Not huge flocks of youthful dancers, but devoted flocks nonetheless. Tango is alive and well in Argentina and the rest of the world, and new tangos are being written and recorded at a breathless pace. The music and dance forms have never gone away. Hope you'll look at my Substack piece in which I mention all this..."On Love in Buenos Aires": https://terenceclarke.substack.com/p/on-love-in-buenos-aires-17f . Take care. Terence Clarke
Beatrice was lovely and glowing. That is an adorable picture. You must have been very lucky.
I've been sad about the state of dancing since I was a high schooler in the late aughts. If you really like to dance, rather than twerk or just step side to side, it's a tough world out there. Also, I hope you're right about the movies! I've been noticing a trend back toward moderately budgeted, average movies. Remember when movies could just be a nice way to pass a couple of hours? Not every single one had to set profit records? I'm hopeful we're getting back toward that idea.
re Live Music: I grew up listening to pre-Beatles music during what Martin Mull called “The Great Folk Music Scare of the Sixties ... when that stuff almost caught on!” I tell young parents that they should try, as much as possible, to put their children in a room with live music that can survive a power failure. If they can do that, the kids will love (and probably prefer) hand-played music for life!
A guy with no record deal standing at an old U87 with a splash of echo and 3 dogs at his feet blowing up iTunes is proof of the trend. Before I got too lazy to finish my rant along these lines many years ago, I came across some research by biologist, Ingo Steinbach, on the healing power of live music. A fun fact I recall: a cello had chartable healing properties on subjects but a sample of the same instrument did not. At the time, the majority of pop radio was machine driven. 30 years later, I so hope the trend is reversing... as the pendulum swings.
Back when I was a young professional cellist I was hired by the Australian music show, Countdown, to play the cello in a music video for Tim Finn. I was handed a walkman and asked if I could "mime" the cello line on the tape. I was listening and listening but couldn't hear the cello track. When Tim arrived in the studio I said to him: I can't hear a cello on this tape. He looked astounded and said, "there's no cello on it". Then it clicked: do you mean the synth track? It was only about 6 bars in the intro and the same 6 bars in the middle of the song. Easy peasy, but Tim Finn seemed impressed that I could play it so quickly and easily.
As Quincy Jones always said, “nothing like flesh on catgut”. Standing in front of a cello, one is moved by the sonic air between you. Ven the best samples don’t do that.
There was always some weird shit going on in Australian commercial music. in the 60's I played conga drum for a Bata shoe commercial. There were 3 couples dancing to my drumming while the camera panned a rack of Bata shoes. The director could never make up his mind about the order, left to right, of the shoes, and we did take after take, after take. By the end of the 3 hrs. the dancers were exhausted and my hands ached.
It's this kind of dedication to the art of film making that spawned the Australian golden age of cinema in the 1970s and 1980s! (Your poor little bongo hands ached for a cause :)). So much of Aussie advertising of the late 60s and 70s was totally surreal and you didn't mind watching them when it was only 2 or 3 ads shown at 15 min intervals. By the end of the 1990s you'd get 1 ad break in the first half hour of a 1 hour show and then 5 or six in the last half hour, each with upwards of 4 or 5 ads. No wonder television died.
Very interesting point about the physiological effect of live music vs. pre-recorded samples.
Very interesting about the slow dancing. Have you ever read Roger Scruton's essay on dancing?
https://www.roger-scruton.com/homepage/about/music/understanding-music/173-the-lost-love-of-dancing
Thanks for the posting that by Scruton. Interesting. Hadn't seen that before.
I particularly enjoyed learning that babies preferred and benefited from live music. I am on a kick to return my cultural interactions to the “analog” mode. Live performances, coffee in cafes, walking the streets and talking to people. I think it’s good for the brain, especially the right brain, which Iain McGilchrist tells me in a fascinating book, The Matter With Things, is atrophying in our culture, while the left brain hypertrophies. Not a good situation he says. So the baby bit makes sense to me.
The Batman didn’t make a billion but it grossed almost 3/4 of a billion. That’s not shabby.
The superhero genre will be done when good ones don’t make bank. Since Avengers Endgame they’ve almost all ranged from just mediocre to downright terrible.
The Batman trilogy of films by Christopher Nolan did pretty good at the box office, plus they were definitive Batman movies. A standard DC has had a hard time living up to lately. Marvel has some opportunities to make more $1B dollar grossing films but until they do they are on “the clock”!
Wow, Ted, you covered so many issues that I'll stick to a few that are more up my alley.
Slow dancing was, and is, fantastic. The last of us old folks who've enjoyed it for decades are, like myself, left to enjoying the music without enjoying the dance. Ailments abound; getting old is a bitch.
"Maybe I’m dreaming—okay, I’m almost certainly dreaming—but this could lead to a revival of smarter, less formulaic movies. That really ought to happen, because character-driven and plot-driven dramas are a lot cheaper to make than Marvel spectacles." You're correct, and this phenomenon was put on display front and center by the demise of the Indiana Jones movies, which were originally cheap, character-driven films that devolved into gargantuan overblown CGI productions with inane characters. Also, politics aside, "The Sound of Freedom" was an inexpensive film rejected by the major distribution companies that was a character-inspired story, almost a documentary, about a border agent who stepped out to do the right thing.
And in a matter of utmost importance to me as the owner of an early mechanically fuel injected flat six Porsche, I can attest that the "mechanical music" as referenced in Rush's "Red Barchetta" as an amazingly beautiful thing. My son has a carbureted '71 911T, which sounds good, but lacks the amazing sound produced by the cam in the E. BTW, "Red Barchetta," in my estimation is the finest car song ever written.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGjqUSOyDHc
Link above is to “Slow Dancing,” a song composed by Jack Tempchin and first recorded by the Funky Kings on their self-titled debut album in 1976.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmiNLVTDFDI
Link above is to “Slow Dancing” covered by Johnny Rivers, who had a fairly good hit with it in 1977. The song is sometimes mistitled “Swaying to the Music” or “Slow Dancing (Swaying to the Music).”
Several others have since covered this song.
Keep up the great work with The Honest Broker, Ted!
Dr. Earle Hitchner
Jack Tempchin is a wonderful songwriter. He has penned so many great tunes.
Re the "Ideal Electric Vehicle Soundtrack".
Just got one thing to say about this Big Big Worry - How RIDICULOUS
Yes, I believe EVs are ridiculous. I'm partial to flat-sixes, but a thundering V8 sounds good, too.
Media siding with big power is not new. The strike may be the topic du jour , but the underlying partnership was exposed March 2020. Media and big pharma, govt as the sole purveyors of truth with the papers on record acting as stenographers at best, propagandists at worst.
Most were okay with this practice when the partnership targeted the plebs but as many warned, one day it will come after you.
“As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.”
Hunter S. Thompson