30 Day Music Challenge: Day 9

‘A song you can dance to’

This is going to be awkward.

Because I don’t think this song really exists - or else it’s every song. Every song or any song or no song. There’s a line in a ‘Frasier’ episode somewhere about Maris (first wife of Niles Crane… the character we hear so much about, and yet whom we never see) disliking ‘public displays of rhythm’. I’m not quite as bad as that, but … I don’t know. Going out dancing… it’s not really me. I like to listen to music as music, and don’t feel the need to respond by making myself a rival for the centre of attention. Either that or I like it as a background for talking. I hate night-out venues which are so loud that conversation is impossible. I hate those nights out (and this made me a very boring 18-30 year old, but so what… those twelve years are much too long ago now to worry about) where the only human response is dancing. No matter how stupid you make yourself look - no matter how you expose yourself either to ridicule or to unsolicited groping on the dance-floor - it’s the only recourse you have if you want to take an active part in the evening’s festivities because it’s just too noisy to do anything else.

If you can’t beat them, join them, and all that, and it’s not as though I’m incapable of joining in, but I always find myself being struck midway through by a paralysis of utter boredom. Oh, here’s another song, and let’s see, this time I shall… um, watch what other people are doing, apart from that nutter everyone seems to be avoiding, and try to make myself inconspicuous by more or less, kind of joining in. Qualifying clauses at every step. That’s my strategy for wedding parties or birthday parties or… you know, the kind of thing you get invited to once you pass that 18-30 age bracket and you don’t get checked for ID at nightclub doors… you get checked for a pension book or a bus pass.

It’s not as though I don’t have a sense of rhythm. I absolutely love music. I have done all my life: my earliest infant memories involve songs and symphonies and words and modulations of accent. No: I’ll react to music, I’ll tap a foot or a fingertip or whatever, but I’ll do it in a horribly self-conscious way to avoid being one of those irritating ‘old people’ who think they’re all ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ and ‘with it’ and make the young people within watching distance lose the will to live, and long to reach for the stereo’s remote control. No: a lifetime of worrying too much about what other people think has choreographed dance, as a spontaneous reaction to music I enjoy, right out of my life. Maybe it was taking dance seriously until I was about 15 or 16 that did it: getting marked in competitions or graded in exams. Maybe it was not being quite the right shape for dance at 15 or 16… you can’t diet your way out of a typical Irish bone structure. Maybe it’s a lifetime of being that person for whom spontaneous responses are met with criticism not applause. Why does that seem to work for everyone else, by the way? - why is it that when somebody, anybody else makes a witty and arguably bitchy comment off duty at work, they’re met with the joyful complicity of communal laughter, but when I do it there’s a brief shocked silence followed by a chorus of disapproval?

Maybe it’s an inability to relax. Maybe it’s an excess of self-criticism, self-consciousness. Maybe it’s a simple lack of grace. But today’s challenge leaves me with a choice between complete silence and a cacophony of noise to deafen every ear. Because there’s no song or there’s any song or there’s every song, and I might be tapping an invisible toe or finger… but I’m something like the very opposite of the characters in the film ‘Mamma Mia’, which I saw for the first time last week. All that leaping. All that dancing. All that joy.

I’m no misery. But I’m definitely no dancing queen, whether in the street or in the moonlight or in September. Maybe in the dark. If I absolutely have to. ‘Dancing in the Dark.’

Will that do?