An End to Soul

 

Back in the day a slow coastal freighter carried me from the border of Panama to Colombia’s main Pacific port, Buenaventura. 

The Pacific side of Colombia is, basically, the hood—it’s the Afro part of the Andean country where generations of slaves escaped from the Spanish and took refuge in the forests and swamps and eventually built towns and cities like Buenaventura itself. That small freighter down the coast was like the boats that the U.S. military has been attacking recently, actually, for alleged involvement in the drug traffic. We won’t get into that here although it seems a lot like murder to me. 

These vessels also carry passengers from Colombia’s largely-roadless Chocó Province, that borders Panama, to the more-populated south of the country and even as far as Ecuador. For a few years personal business kept me coming and going along that route and—not liking airplanes but loving the sea—a slow boat to Buenaventura seemed to be the best way to travel. So, like, once there was this brother on board with me who was also headed from rural Chocó to the big city, apparently to a party or a dance. In order, you know, to boogie down if one uses the vernacular. 

Passenger accommodations were a single large room with bunk beds—it cost $60 for the twenty hour trip south—and during the night, every time my eyes opened, due to music at 2 a.m., music at 3 a.m. or even 4 a.m., this particular Negro traveling to Buenaventura was in the middle of the floor practicing the same dance move. Where he went from doing one thing with his quite athletic-looking body to doing something else? Not an entire dance, like to a particular song, but just a move that would take less than five seconds to execute and would doubtless appear completely effortless in a club but had actually been practiced up the ass, for hours on end. With me as an unwilling witness. 

Anyway, this anecdote tells you everything you need to know about black people’s “natural rhythm” that white people have commented on for hundreds of years. There is nothing natural about it. Our legendary skill on the dance floor doesn’t come from genes. It comes from practice. And the bad news? It’s disappearing. 

Back in the day during my Black Childhood in America which lasted, oh, from the 1960s to the 1970s, one of the worst things you would hear African Americans say about white people—a really vile insult—was that Caucasians are lame. Which meant they can’t dance. Which was a big deal, to peeps of color at least, that you were reminded of every time you watched American Bandstand on TV. American Bandstand was, fyi, white people’s weekly music and dance show, with live acts performing the latest singles, and it could be pretty scary, actually. Watching white young people dance, that is, could be scary—that anyone could be that stiff and out of tune—like 99.999% of the Bandstand dancers were? And still are, mostly, white people that is, lame. But, and unfortunately, increasingly, so are black people. 

Are white people really constitutionally unable to move their limbs in tune to a beat? Not to be racist or anything—but that is the question we will address here. Not because it’s critically important but because of how the answer relates to black people’s dance skills, which are important. Let’s consider who can boogie down and who can’t but instead of relying on old tropes, like natural rhythm, we can instead turn to science—kinesiology, actually. One hint: It’s not about having ancestors going back generations who boogied down around the village fire at night, while hunting gazelle during the day. It’s actually about practice. That would be my whole hypothesis, really. It’s about who puts in the time on the dance floor and who does not. White people are not lame, as one likes to say using the black argot, because they lack natural rhythm but because they are not as experienced in the medium, whatever the medium is/was. Because they didn’t do the due diligence, so to to speak. 

The great Miles Davis, king of the blues, was once asked about white people’s inability to keep time and his answer was that Caucasians always seemed to be a step or two behind the beat. Davis was then asked if black people’s ability to stay with a tune had something to do with the lingering effects of discrimination and Miles, you could tell, thought the white guy asking the questions was crazy. But suppose he wasn’t?

Let’s start with a few foundational principles. One is that white guys are worse dancers than white chicks. It has something to do with a leg. Not both legs but a single leg. And sometimes a head. 

Elvis Presley was a wonderful performer (who among many other white artists ripped off black music) and his rendition of “Return to Sender” in one of his movies features an errant leg, perhaps he was keeping time but to what song is unclear because it wasn’t the one he was singing. The movement looks more like a nervous ailment. And in his official video of “I Shot the Sheriff,” Eric Clapton (another white guy who has made a good living doing black music) does better with his leg—he’s clearly keeping time—but he has the benefit of a black guitarist and a black backup singer to keep him in tune. But from there the Clapton video gets scary. The camera pans to a white guy (the one with a hat, if you’re following along) in the crowd, busy nodding his head to some song other than the one playing, and then pans to a member of the Rolling Stones (another group that benefitted greatly from black music) also in the crowd and he’s just as clueless in his movements. It may have been difficult for Caucasians because both songs, “Return to Sender” and “I Shot the Sheriff” were by black songwriters but if we reject the “natural rhythm” hypothesis, for songwriting or dance, there has to be another reason. For example in the Clapton video the song may have been “I Shot the Sheriff” but the audience footage may have been from another part of the Clapton set, another song, and was just used for the vid. It’s happened before, certainly.

You never got mistakes like that with Soul Train, by the way, which was the black version of American Bandstand. The dancing was in tune to the music, and more. For a couple of generations, Soul Train was the apotheosis (the peak, you feel me) of African American cultural life which meant African American life, in general, because we were mostly about music and sports. That was all there was. It was there, on dance stage at Soul Train, which in my family like most other black households we rose to without fail every Saturday morning, that the myth of natural rhythm was reinforced. Whites talk about life being “a marathon not a sprint” but black life at the time, in the United States, was a rhythm, because your movement didn’t mean progress, because you didn’t really move forward.

While black people had more time on our hands, historically, because we may not have been employed, and because we were restricted from entering certain endeavors, notably anything that was not music or athletics or domestic service. So, like that’s where our efforts at self-expression tended to be directed, entertainment or sports, while whites did not live in a segregated world. They could spend their time doing what they wanted to do and that was not restricted to music/athletics. This isn’t rocket science, bro. This is the research thread were pulling here.

And this has an analogy in the Asian argument against affirmative action in college admissions, actually, made before the Supreme Court a year or two ago. The Chinese argument is that they have put in the time and gotten the grades. They've practiced. And isn’t that a critique of African Americans, in many of the areas of endeavor where Asians/Caucasians have said that we traditionally do poorly? Hello! The Chinese are not good at academics because of their physiology, or their cerebrums, one assumes, but because they burn the midnight oil on differential equations. That may be a lesson for black people too. In fact a lot of black people have begun to burn this midnight oil on differential equations too, as disappointing as that may be tour dance skills. The result has been less time boogieing down, that would be my whole argument, actually. 

        Black medical school admissions are down recently, after the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, but are still light years ahead of what they were in past decades. African-Americans have through recent decades, as segregation has lessened and other opportunities beckoned, found a lot of other fish to fry than being able to look cool on a dance floor, which was inordinately important at one time but today is of less dire consequence. In fact, if one graphs out the numbers, there is a perfect inverse relationship between the rise of African Americans in professional positions and decreasing ability on the dance floor. It’s quite shocking, really.

The only area of dance where black people have maintained our game, it would be my contention, is the horizontal variety. In fact there is a very common belief, held by members of the black intelligentsia, that white women and Chinese chicks and even Indian girls are practically begging black guys to show them how that particular rhythmic movement is done right, in a horizontal plane, because their own boyfriends are too busy coding or writing algorithms to learn the necessary skills. Does that make sense? Which takes black men away from our own time with differential equations but black guys are too polite and feel too much sympathy for these women, who have never been sexually fulfilled, to say no. Dance moves have an analogy, then, to moves/ability in the boudoir although, luckily, African American men, although willing to let their dance floor moves deteriorate, have resolutely been unwilling to let slide our horizontal game in bed. If that day ever comes, however, we may see the end of the black race. 

Not to be alarmist or anything. 

This may sound like sacrilege but the end of black dance hegemony was the mid-1970s, not during the 2000s as the N.Y. Times ( aka the White Lady) recently claimed. Specifically, the three important years were 1975, 1976 and ’77. We’ll start with 1977 but the first question to ask is do you know your Civil War history? Because the War Between the States has an analogue in the War Between the Races, so to speak, the Pennsylvania battlefield versus the dance floor. 

Have you heard of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg? 

It was a great failure for the Rebel Army and is called the high water mark of the Confederacy for good reason, because after that it was all downhill—not in a good way—for the Southern states. The Confederates had been punching well above their weight and had the Union on the ropes until that afternoon. Something similar happened in American dance on a Saturday morning in 1977, on a sound stage in Los Angeles, which was the high water mark for black people shaking their booties and boogieing down. 

That was when Marvin Gaye appeared on Soul Train to perform his hit “Got to Give it Up,” specifically “Got to Give It Up (Part 2).” It was all downhill after that, and again not in a good way. We’re not talking about Beyoncé here, you’ve noticed, and her intricately-choreographed moves, because like the brother on the Colombian freighter the whole idea on a black dance floor is to look cool and natural doing it, which Queen B, no matter her mastery of the routine, does not. In fact, like ballet, there’s nothing natural about dance when it’s Queen B. Instead in the case of Soul Train—except for the performers, who may have been more Beyoncé-like, with intricately-planned routines, and were very often not really singing but lip-synching? The Soul Train dancers on the other hand were otherwise ordinary black people who had normal low-paying jobs and practiced their moves at basement parties at night during the week and for whom getting down on Saturday, on camera, was not a pleasant pastime but a raison d’être. Which means “reason for being” in French, not to get all pretentious. 

And that day, not to be a downer, Marvin Gaye only had a few short years to live and like the Confederate Army at Gettysburg he was at the top of his game. But unlike General Pickett’s men who also only had a short time to live, who you can look back on and be happy that the motherfuckers got beat? With Marvin and his band—and the dancers out on the Soul Train floor—we can only look back sadly, with nostalgia, because that was kind of the end of African Americans knowing as a peep what we were doing on a dance floor. Again, sadly. 

The first thing you’ll notice about the “Got to Give It Up” performance btw is that the Afros were perfect. Everybody looks good, from the band to the dancers to, of course, the Brother Man himself, Marvin Gaye. 

As part two of “Got to Give It Up” begins, Gaye goes into the audience and starts to boogie down near a chick with bouncy hair (“good hair,” as Beyoncé said famously in a song of the devilish Becky, was a big thing at the time, good hair that is, whether Afros or curls, because the product “Afro Sheen” was usually Soul Train’s sponsor). Again, Marvin on the dance floor is not a guy who’s displaying professional chops, he’s just another party dancer who has been to a lot of clubs. That’s the conceit of this famous Soul Train appearance. Just like the couples around him, who had high tight well-practiced skills. The song “Got to Give It Up” was, you’ll be surprised to learn, about dancing at a party, not having sex which was the theme of most of the rest of Marvin Gaye’s oeuvre. 

Even the regular Soul Train dancers were not paid, btw, but did sometimes get a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, per report, for what were very long sessions under hot lights. These were amateurs who were as good as it gets and who you wouldn’t see on any American dance floor today, because even at clubs today people are busy with their phones. Or they’ve been working on Wall Street during the day and are doing a podcast during their leisure time, not practicing like the brother on the boat to Buenaventura. Anyway it was all downhill from there, that day in 1977, not to repeat the obvious. 

But if you look to the prior year, 1976, you see something interesting. White people as they began to up their game, while black people were about to lose ours. White people soon topped out too—there was only so much time they were going to spend practicing on a dance floor—but for a while they were at least improving. Because the myth about black people’s natural rhythm had been exposed. 1976 was the year when Abba came out with “Dancing Queen” and it was a revolution. (Again this is mostly about white women because the men were and remain pretty fucking lame.)

The idea that not just white people but European white people could boogie down was mind-blowing in the extreme, because Europeans at the time, and Koreans—North and South varieties, not to sound all racist—were the only people who could make white Americans look soulful up until that point. Again, not to sound all racist or anything but the only thing giving white American culture any kind of claim to coolness, like dancing—unlike the general lameness of Europeans and Asians—was exposure to Negroes. That’s how our music got stolen by the likes of Elvis and the Stones, Clapton and the Beatles. Everybody, in fact. The only factor that has made our white people any cooler than their white people, that is Europeans, has been being around black people. That would be my entire point, actually. 

In the U.S. for example there was the long-running American Bandstand but from a skill-on-the-dance-floor standpoint it could still be painful to watch. Black people watched American Bandstand too, btw, but often only to jeer the competition. Not to sound mean-spirited. But if you watch the official “Dancing Queen” video, you suddenly saw something amazing. There’s this little white chick, maybe 17 years old. Brunette or dirty blond, in a red top? This chick could boogie down. She had game, most def.

Her moves are, once again, like someone who has taken the time and effort to learn how to dance, while clubbing, not with a choreographer like Beyoncé has. And not like club dancing is a pleasant pastime but like it’s serious work, serious as a heart attack, actually, which it is, if you want to be any good. 

This white chick in the Abba video doesn’t look effortless but, somehow, she still looks cool. And practiced. It is because that’s actually what Abba’s great song is all about, chicks going out dancing. In “Dancing Queen” the guys are completely disposable, as in the lyric, “any one will do,” meaning any guy is good, you just need a male body, a Dancing Queen just needs a partner like a queen in a beehive needs a drone. Anyone will do, literally. 

        And when one song is over the queen is already looking for another guy to boogie down with. It is, in other words, a women’s liberation tract as well as pop. Which is also true of quite a few soul hits, btw, preaching the revolution through soul or R&B that you could dance to. And this little white girl in the video, she has game that most sisters today could only dream of. How sad is that? And she’s Swedish! That’s my whole point, actually. And kind of blonde! This little Swedish chick could more than hold her own among the brothers and sisters who were regulars back then on Soul Train and she is better than 99% of dancers, black or white, or Korean, that you see today. Why is that important? Because Sweden is, less we forget, where white people were invented. Ipso facto, bro. It’s the last place you would expect to find girls who know how to shake their booties, if you believe in the black “natural rhythm” myth. Or, so you would think. Not the Sweden part, but the white girl part. In other words there is no natural ability. It’s all about practice. 

There’s a strikingly similar case in music. Several years ago Gwyneth Paltrow, a woman who in her public life at least has no pretensions to soul or coolness—although she is hot. Paltrow recorded a version of the  Temptations’ great “Just My Imagination” with Babyface. Have you heard it? And Gwyneth does a really credible job on this soul standard, in fact probably better than the Negro singer with her. And Paltrow is blonde! What does that tell you, “dead lay” claims about blondes notwithstanding? She practiced. You could give her another Motown hit to sing and she would probably fall flat but she knew “Just My Imagination,” because she devoted the time to a song she clearly loves. It’s also said that Jay Z was her coach for a time. A question that has been asked in the blackosphere—this is not totally relevant—do you think Jay Z was getting any of that, like, on the side? Did he get the box in exchange for singing lessons and, more importantly, did Beyoncé know? And, you know, just because this is a scientific examination and all, and certain issues must be addressed, was Gwyneth Paltrow really “Becky with the good hair” of Beyoncé’s complaint, not some Indian chick who everyone has pointed at? That is something we may never know, even as science advances. 

This is going to seem outrageous but the best booty-shaking in history—caught on film—was actually a year or so before “Dancing Queen” came out. The year is in dispute but appears to be 1975. Black people were headed down, like General Pickett’s army, but didn’t know it yet. While Caucasians—white women, specifically, not the guys—were moving up in the dance world. And it was a white chick, not no sister, who was the proof. And there’s film of the performance.

We actually know something about the white girl involved. Her name is Lisa. The song in this early music video was the wonderful standard, “Hang on, Sloopy” about—this time—a chick from the wrong side of the tracks. To set the scene. So, like, the plot of the video, not the song, is a hot white girl just walking down the street, minding her own hot business, when she hears a song being played up the block and she follows the music and stumbles upon Rick Derringer & the McCoys, white boys all, with Derringer on vocals, singing about a girl named Sloopy. To set the scene.

Derringer and his group are awesome. And the white girl in the video, the aforementioned Lisa which is her real name—this will blow your mind—she’s blonde too! 

You know the reputation American blondes have, of course. The only coordinated movement they know is swiping Daddy’s credit card, have you heard that one before? Not to sound all sexist/racist. Even the blonde herself of music fame—Debbie Harry of the group Blondie—despite producing some of the greatest music in pop/rock history, including dance music, had all the moves on stage of a nun teaching Sunday school. Not to stereotype or anything but Debbie Harry needed to take a slow boat to China, not Buenaventura, to give her time to practice boogieing down. Not to be critical but she just stands there when she sings.

But so, like, this blonde in the “Sloopy” video—Lisa Leonard Dalton is her full name—not only performs immaculately but also shows herself to be master of what is considered the hardest routine in club dancing—the twisting booty shake, known by its initials, TBS—when a woman is moving her body on two distinct axises simultaneously, but still in time to the music. And looks good doing it. 

What’s amazing about Lisa Dalton is that she hasn’t even been gifted with booty africanus, like so many black girls have and the very rare white chick, an asset which would have made Lisa’s movements easier to execute. She has just a normal white girl butt. But even Beyoncé with all her coaches and more God-given assets couldn’t shake it like this, bro. And as a black woman Beyoncé genetically has more to shake, does that make sense? This is science, bro. But it’s like the pundits have long opined: “It’s not what you have. It’s what you do with what you have.” Truer words have never been spoken, at least on a dance floor. 

It would be my thesis in fact, having seen booty-shaking at all levels, throughout a long life, that this performance in the “Hang On Sloopy” video is the best ever. Even better, on a difficulty scale, than what you saw on Soul Train on Saturday mornings back in the day, because those dancers had the protection of the group—which is always helpful in nature, including human nature. Except the rare line-dancing contests, most of the boogieing down was not really isolated on camera on the Soul Train sound stage. It was more a group endeavor. Even line dancing, on the other hand, the country and Negro versions both, involves a different and safer dynamic than dancing alone in a spotlight, so to speak, like Lisa.

In the Snoopy case it’s all about Rick’s voice and Lisa Dalton’s body. She even ends the performance by doing an archetypical white girl twirl. 

Have you ever seen little white girls, maybe in the six to nine year old range, who suddenly just raise their arms above their heads and start to spin? Lisa Dalton does that too at the end of the song and, speaking as a critic of dance and of music—who is nonetheless aware of racial and gender identities—one can see that spinning as an unconscious effort to stamp the performance with the authenticity of blonde-girl soul. Does that make sense? 

Lisa Dalton has said in interviews that she began dancing as a kid, and it’s always been part of her life. That’s called practice too, bro. 

Lisa Leonard Dalton shakes it:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBxtqo05ovI