Yesterday I went to a free concert by Johnny “Dandy” Rodriguez and his Dream Team by the Harlem Meer in Central Park. I don’t know a lot about salsa, but these guys sound to me like an excellent salsa band.
The event wasn’t a sitdown concert, it was a dance party. People of all ages were getting down. The experience made me think about something that my music-philosophical arch-nemesis Sir Roger Scruton wrote in Aesthetics of Music (1999), in which he bemoans the impoverished state of social dance in the modern world:
It is obvious that dancing has social consequences—particularly on the attitudes through which men and women come together in quest of a partner. Traditional dances had to be learned—often by a long process which began in childhood. (Think of the gavotte, the gig, or the stately saraband.) They were not forms of abandon, but exercises in self‐control. They required the dancer to understand steps, patterns, formations, and sequences; they required him to fit his gestures to the movement of his partner and to the pattern of the whole… The dancer may be prompted by desire; but he is dancing with people for whom he has no such emotion, acknowledging their existence as sexual beings with gestures of innocent courtesy. A girl might dance with her lover’s friend or father, with her own brothers, uncles, and neighbours, clarifying—not in her mind only, but also in her body—her posture towards the other sex…
There are now few occasions when a young man can dance with his aunt, or a young girl with her boyfriend’s father. Dancing has become a sexual exhibition, since the music available for dancing has no other meaning besides release. It requires neither knowledge nor self‐control, for these would impede the democratic right of everyone to enter the fray. Hence no one really dances with anyone else; instead, each dancer exudes a kind of narcissistic excitement which requires no acknowledgement from a partner besides similar gestures of display… The dance becomes a lapse into disorder, a kind of surrender of the body which anticipates the sexual act itself. This decay of dancing is a necessary consequence of democratic culture, and an irreversible feature of the postmodern world (pp. 498-499).
This is very true… of white people. There are, in fact, many places in this world to dance with your aunt. One such place was at the Johnny “Dandy” Rodriguez show yesterday. The median age of the dancers appeared to be about sixty. I don’t know if anyone dancing was related to each other, but they certainly could have been. The whole event had a family-friendly feel, even though the lyrics were frequently naughty. I was there with my sister, her husband and our kids, and while none of us really know how to salsa dance, it felt perfectly fine to bop around with each other as best we could.
I have been accused by various terrible people online of wanting to undermine Western civilization (at least, the white-dominated version of it.) This is true! Western civilization has a lot of problems. I don’t agree with Roger Scruton on much, but I do agree with him that limiting social dance to clubs and EDM festivals where everyone is drunk or high is not good for us. Scruton’s solution is to yearn for the glory days of eighteenth century Europe. My solution is to look to our friends from the African diaspora, whose social norms around music and dance are very different from those of white people, and in a lot of ways, more grown up.
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