The politics of dancing
The politics of, ooh, feeling good
— Re-Flex (released in February 1983)
Sometimes it takes decades for a song to make an impression. That is the case for me with the lone American hit by the British band Re-Flex. “The Politics of Dancing,” which hit 24 on the Billboard charts, was released 40 years ago this month and struck me as a toss-off, dance pop song at a time when dance music was far from being on my radar.
Unexpectedly, the song has become a staple of a playlist of nuclear-themed songs of that era that have been in regular rotation. The song’s ironic linkage of politics and pleasure — “ooh, feeling good” —may not be connected to the nuclear anxiety of the early 1980s, like the other songs on the playlist, but it was released amid a rash of songs that met that anxiety not with dread but with a desire to live and to live it up.
The playlist has been a writer’s soundtrack, of sorts, the musical accompaniment to a long essay — part of a manuscript I’ve been working on — that brings together Kerouac and the Beats, nuclear weapons, the post-punk era, and my own beginnings as a writer. The late-Beat era — which runs from the middle of the 1950s through about 1965 — coincides with the end of the first nuclear era and my earlier memories.
I used to have a dream as a kid of a city in flames. I was probably 6 or so when I first had it, and I can’t say what triggered it. I was born the night John F. Kennedy made his first public speech about the Cuban Missile crisis, something I only realized recently.
That was a crisis point for the nation and the world, and it informed the next three or four years of mass-culture, with the nuclear threat playing a central role in several films. From Doctor Strangelove and Fail-Safe to Seven Days in May and much of the early James Bond franchise, the threat of nuclear Armageddon seemed palpable.
Perhaps I picked up on it. Perhaps it seeped through to me via TV — I remember watching Star Trek, Get Smart, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. “Even children’s shows and cartoons such as Felix the Cat, Looney Tunes, and Space Patrol had episodes dedicated to the Bomb,” Reba A. Eisner wrote several years ago.
The portrayals of all of these shows ranged from fatalist to satirical and everything in-between, sometimes even dramatizing how Americans should deal with nuclear fear in their daily lives.
The manuscript — part of a larger one that attempts to place Kerouac and the Beats in my own personal mythology — goes into this in more depth and tries to draw connections between separate eras, one of which was the years between the Three Mile Island disaster and the re-election of Ronald Reagan, because that is the period during which my initial political and artistic awakening occurred.
One thesis I use to structure the essay connects the Beats and the post-punk period through the notion of nuclear threat. Kerouac does not write about it much, but there is a lot of literature considering the impact that nuclear weapons had on our culture in the late 1950s, both positively and negatively. Norman Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” while sometimes simplistic and completely racist in its assignment of a mode of behavior to an entire race, does get at something key in understanding the Beats’ disaffection with American society. Mailer — to simplify myself — argues that a new “hipster” had arisen in response to the twin holocausts of Nazism and the atomic bomb. This “hipster,” he writes, sees futility in a world that has been made hostage to a mechanistic murder imposed from on high, a violence so extreme and so out of our control that we are without recourse. The hipster, he says, responds by receding into both disaffection and a primal desire for “kicks,” thrills. If we are all to die, he has the hipster say, then we should go out with a different kind of bang. This thesis — especially when cleaved from the racial nonsense — maybe reductive but also seems quite sound. Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti, McClure, Welch — each of them dips into this well to some degree, recounting their fear and anger, but also immersing themselves in dueling philosophies: a misplaced hedonism, existentialism, Zen Buddhism, even a mystical Edgar Cayce kind of Christian spirituality. Kerouac, more than the others, came to see little worth preserving of the modern world, romanticizing the “fellaheen,” or the lowest economic classes, which he imbued with a kind of grace and mistakenly cast as somehow living above worldly concerns.
This pre-occupation continues into the mid-sixties in film and, to a less degree pop music. Dylan worries about the bomb, as do other folk/rock musicians (Phil Ochs, Barry McGuire, The Fugs, for example) but the fear and anger gets redirected by the hot war taking place in Southeast Asia and the very real possibility that the boys now coming of age would be drafted and sent to die in Vietnam, and the brutality of the nation’s racial capitalism. Nuclear issues would not disappear completely, but instead would hang in the background until Vietnam ended. Then came Reagan’s failed 1976 president challenge, during which he called for an arms build up, a successful testing of a neutron bomb and the decision not to move forward with it, and Three Mile Island. Nuclear issues were front and center again. The film, The China Syndrome, is released weeks before the TMI meltdown, and a vibrant anti-nuclear movement kicked off with the No Nukes concerts and film. Other films — the cult documentary The Atomic Cafe, several British films, the American TV movie The Day After — and a smattering of books were released.
But it was the popular music of the moment, especially the records made in Europe and Australia, that indicated the level of fear that had seeped into the minds of the youngest Baby Boomers and Gen Xers. XTC declared we were “Living Through Another Cuba.” Nena was launching “99 Luftballoons” and Peter Gabriel sang of the war games plaid by national governments (“Games Without Frontiers”). Some of the music is straight protest, songs that press the alarm, while others harken back to Mailer’s thesis (absent the racism). These post-punk performers often couched nuclear anxiety in a framework of fun or kicks, as with Modern English’s recording of “Melt With You,” which describes a couple making love during a nuclear attack or Much of the music from this moment hits on this thematic thesis of 1980s nuclear fear, songs that turn the fear to desperation, and then use the despair as a prod for seeking “kicks” — or, to use Prince’s language, to “party like it’s 1999.”
Prince released “1999” in 1982, a year after writing and recording “Ronnie Talk To Russia.” The earlier song was an explicit plea to Reagan to avert catastrophe, asking Reagan to “talk to Russia before it's too late / … / Before they blow up the world,” and a direct command to the new American president “Don't ya blow up my world.”
On “1999,” Prince’s fear turns to a kind of desperation that triggers a desire leave it all on the dance floor. He dreams of “judgment day,” of which drives him not to hide, not to recede into himself, but to party, because, after all, “Life is just a party / And parties weren't meant to last.”
Everybody's got a bomb
We could all die any day, aw
But before I'll let that happen
I'll dance my life away, oh-oh-oh
The song is a dance anthem with a dark side, one of a number to hit the airwaves in the post-punk era. “The Politics of Dancing,” like “1999,” offers dance as a response, an imposition — though an unstated one in this case. The politics are obscure, but even as the song surfs atop the synth-pop and dance beat, the singer tells us “the message” is “spreading,” like an “infection.” It is a message purely about movement, the sense of “feeling good” echoes the title of Barbara Gordon’s memoir of addiction, I’m Dancing as Fast As I Can, which was released as a film just the year before.
Songwriter Paul Fishman has said the song is about “the power of when people come together and express themselves through dancing and letting go.” This would imply a sense of freedom, except that the lyrics point away from that, with the politician/DJ spreading messages like an “infection,” and “you know you can't stop it / When they start to play / You're gonna get out the way.”
The song can be interpreted in a number of ways, which Fishman points out. But it also came out during a moment of heightened fear and I can’t help but hear it within this context.
Dancing as politics, or as an anti-politics, the crowd both losing themselves in the sound but also flailing at the direction of an unnamed authority. Perhaps, there is some nostalgia in my return to the New Wave sounds of my late teens and early 20s, but there also is something too current to ignore.