The Safety Dance

You can leave your friends behind

Dear Gen Xer,

I admitted in a previous post that I’m a crummy Canadian. I prefer the CFL, champion the metric system, and bathe in a vat of maple syrup while blasting my Anne Murray boxset.

As a Canadian, I am bound by duty to root for all Canadian artists. Sometimes it’s easy: Leonard Cohen, Alanis Morissette, Arcade Fire, Rush.

Sometimes, however, the going gets rough. Celine Dion springs to mind. As does Justin Bieber. As does this week’s entry in the Gen X Jukebox. Or at least that’s what I thought.

Let’s travel back to 1983, shall we?

Michael Jackson’s Thriller ruled the charts. CD players landed in North America. And David Copperfield shocked the world by making the Statue of Liberty vanish.

It was the year when Gandhi won the Oscar for Best Picture, when Cats won the Tony for Best Snoozefest Musical, and when Kiss appeared for the very first time without their famous makeup.

It was also the year when a little known group from the province of Quebec ruled the charts for a bizarre couple of months.

I must have been eleven — excuse me, eleven and a half — when I first laid eyes on The Safety Dance. I say ‘eyes’ instead of ‘ears’ because, like most Gen Xers, I was first introduced to the song through its video.

FADE IN:

A little person traipses through a field. With him is a man who’s dressed like the relative Robin Hood refuses to talk about. They’re joined soon after by a handsome young woman who appears to have smoked the same happy tabbaky as her fun loving pals.

The three of them bounce into a charming village where they begin to frolic with the trippy locals. There’s dancers and a Maypole and enough folk imagery to give Edward Woodward and The Wicker Man the shits.

What the hell is this crap? I cried. 

Who were these people?

What was this song, with its baritone vocals and ping-ponging synths?

Where was Prince? Where was Michael Jackson? Where were Alvin and the goddamn Chipmunks?  

The answer arrived at the end of the song, when the veejay (remember those?) announced that the band was Men Without Hats - a hot new group from Montreal.

Of course, I thought. The French.

The French were the ones who lived in Quebec. Who cheered for the Canadiens and the Nordiques. Who drank Pepsi and ate poutine and made me learn their silly language twice a week at school.

What eleven year-old me didn’t know at the time is that the Quebecois are fucking awesome, and the country is far better off with them in it.

Something else I didn’t know, and didn’t find out until I decided to do this piece, is that The Safety Dance is a protest song.

No, really.

Here’s Ivan Doroschuk, singer of the group, talking to (now defunct) Boom 97.3 in Toronto:

"The song was really written about me after I got kicked out of a bar in Ottawa. I got kicked out for pogoing to The B-52s, I think ‘Rock Lobster’. It was the dying days of disco. I got kicked out of the bar and went home and wrote this. I think it's a message that kids still want to hear today: yeah, it is safe to dance."

Holy ratatouille, I thought.

Are you telling me that the song I’ve been dunking on proudly for decades is actually a defiant middle-finger to disco?

I dug a little deeper, and sure enough, bouncers in clubs during that time were roughing up and throwing out anyone who dared to pogo dance. Jumping up and down and thrashing all about was considered dangerous behavior on the dance floor; unlike disco dancing, which involves shaking your butt in relative sync with a likeminded partner. The song was written, then, in defiance of disco, and in praise of individualism.

Something shifted deep inside me.

I’m an individual, I thought. Even more importantly:

I. HATE. DISCO.

OK, sure, I can enjoy a song here and there. There are no absolutes in life, after all. But I would not lose a wink of my diminishing sleep if the genre were to return to the rock it crawled out from and shut its pie-hole forever.

Therefore, The Safety Dance, with its finger firmly in the eye of disco, is clearly a song with a modicum of merit.

Another thing The Safety Dance has going for it is the fact that the event which led to its writing happened to occur in Ottawa. For those of you who don’t know, Ottawa is the capital of Canada. It’s also the city where I went to university. Which is to say I know how uptight and conservative the citizens of Ottawa can get. The place is crawling with government workers. What do you expect?

I found myself, while writing this, in the sticky situation of not particularly liking the song but loving and believing in what it stands for. But the more I thought about it and the more I listened, the more I began to appreciate the song’s quirky sound.

Because The Safety Dance isn’t just a fuck you to disco. It’s a fuck you to anyone who tries to stifle your expression of self, whether you’re dancing or making music or posting a heartfelt piece here on Substack.  

And who in their right mind has a problem with that?

So in the name of maturity and personal growth, I’m going to hit play and I’m going to dance, and I’m going to leave my friends behind. In my case, those friends are ‘What the Frig are the Quebecois Smoking?’ and ‘Holy Crap, This Song Blows’.

So go ahead, you can dance if you want to.

Even (sigh) if it’s to disco.