Understanding The Safety Dance
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 พ.ย. 2022
- Why do I do this to myself?
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What is it that moves a person to dance? For Ivan Doroschuk, lead singer of Men Without Hats, the need to dance was an intrinsic part of himself, one that was under threat by bouncers who insisted his dancing was "unsafe". Ivan disagreed, and in trying to express that, he wound up making one of the greatest dance tracks of all time.
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Some additional thoughts/corrections:
Pogo dancers and bouncers - an ironically named rivalry on the dance floor
“You know, that dance wasn’t as safe as people said it was.”-Philip J Fry
I must say that I did not expect to see an almost 25' long analysis of The Safety Dance of all things.
Fascinating. The song is so dance-friendly that it fitted the stepping for the English Morris Dancing that formed part of the footage in the video version. I belong to the Chippenham Town Morris Men and danced in the video. We had just invented the dance - named 'Monkton Park' - a few months before we were asked to take part in the filming. The stepping draws heavily on dances from the Fieldtown Morris tradition, and it was sheer luck that our newest dance happened to fit perfectly with the music. The video was filmed at a tiny village called West Kington and we had a blast hanging out with the band and all the crew. Those of us who are still dancing are long in the tooth these days, but we still end all of our public performances with 'Monkton Park'. One or two of the guys still have Men Without Hats badges on their kit. Happy days.
proud of your ability to draw the maple leaf. not even many of us canadians can do that.
The best pogoing I ever saw was at a biker disco. Some punks came in and for some unknown reason one of the bikers seized a punk by the collar and the punk seized the biker by the collar. They then pogoed locked together. They bounced about face to face for an entire record track. Everybody there thought it was one of the most entertaining things they had ever seen.
The octave C beeps always reminded me of a type of "breaking news" type warning or a "This is a test of the emergency broadcast system" that you could sometimes get on the radio. Kinda '50s-'60s style. Or maybe those "check both ways before you cross the street kids" type things that were big in the '70s.
Gotta say that while they may have been a "one hit wonder" as far as the charts, Men Without Hats had a bunch of other tracks that could have been hits and are as good as Safety Dance, like Pop Goes The World, Where Do The Boys Go, Living In China, and others, and if you like some of those songs you musssst check out their 2012 record Love In The Age Of War, it's as good as their 80s stuff and there's no filler, every track is good!
I laughed when you said “to keep it from being too distracting” and then drew a squirrel.
My head canon about this song is that it was in fact not safe to dance and the ending claps are the shots from a gun of a fictional oppressive regime which does not allow dancing directed at the protagonist of the song for inciting dancing lol
As an actual member of Men Without Hats in the 80s I loved your explanation, however the song wasn’t written with as much forethought as you might think! It was largely just a function of the machines. The Linn pattern was probably stock and the bass in our songs was almost always straight 8ths. I think the sync box was a JL Cooper that sent a trigger to a modified Prophet 5 every eight note. I think Ivan called it “pulse bass”. Safety Dance happened when the box was found to be able to send multiple clock pulses. You just held down a key on the Prophet and you got the triggers, controlling the pitch with the keyboard. Damn cool for the time. Later on, the bass lines were played on a real bass by Al Gunn, and even later on a keyboard manually by Marika Tjelios. Playing fast 8ths for a whole show proved to be a wrist smasher, soMarika developed a technique of using 2 or 3 fingers on the same key to lessen hand fatigue. Neat!
This song means so much to me, i have lupus and many respiratory issues, and i was in a terrible health state(im very good nowadays by the way!) back in 2012
The magic of The Safety Dance is that it's lyrically an exhortation, and it's musically a
What you omit is that the Pogo was a result of the fast tempos of New Wave songs like Rock Lobster, Turning Japanese and Echo Beach. Safety Dance was an older, Disco tempo that allowed for more time for movements in between beats.
So, you can listen to music. You can know the lyrics. You can know day, month, year of writing and release. You can know everything about the musicians and group. Or you can tear into every beat and instrument like this. I have worked in engineering since 1985 and tear into industrial instrumentation and PLC/DCS control systems to the exact same degree this guy does. I also apply knowledge of numerous software programs, just like he does. To many this may seem insanely intricate and perhaps even annoying, but I appreciate what he is doing and why. Fascinating how much there is to know about the composition of music, instruments, synthesizers, and the programs they use. Bravo, sir. Bravo!
The stopmotion quality of your pointing the beat direction is really good.
YES! The
As a left-hander, it amused and comforted me to see someone else write from right to left. I do that in my notebook, and sometimes I'll add notes to my daily to-do list at the bottom, from bottom to top.
as someone that primarily listens to "dance"-ish electronic music (and a big fan of your channel), it was nice to see you talk about a song as being in "layers" instead of sections, as thats more how i personally experience the music that i enjoy