I’m not one hundred percent sure what has changed, but
things are definitely different now, and somehow, I blame cell phones.
When I was in junior high we all couldn’t wait to go to the school
dances. Nowadays, inexplicably, we have to tell our boys that they are going. “But
it’ll be lame. I don’t wanna go!”
Shut up and get in the car.
Kids just don’t seem to want to hang out at school together
after hours as much as we did. I think they are simply too connected now. It’s
too easy for them to communicate via texting and Facetime, so they don’t see
the value in going to the dance.
Do you know what you can’t do with a text? Slow dance with a
girl, that’s what! (I don’t even want to think about or discuss what kids can
and can’t do with Facetime, so let’s all just not go there.)
Our boys don’t even have phones, so you would think they
would crave the socialization, and yet Son Number One’s biggest highlight at
the last dance was buying a Snickers bar and two sodas at the snack table. We
didn’t have a snack table when I was his age. We danced with girls! At least we
talked a lot about dancing with the girls, and sometimes we actually did.
One problem with the current state of affairs at the middle
school/junior high dances might be the music. It’s entirely possible that the
songs just aren’t as awesome now, and by “entirely possible,” I mean “definitely
true.”
Music today just isn’t as good as it was in the mid-eighties,
and many of the songs are so digitally enhanced and auto-tuned that even if the
dance was cool enough to have a live band, they wouldn’t be able to perform
them anyway.
Many of our dances had live music. Rock bands made up of local
high school kids that we actually knew or knew of, who could actually play
instruments really well, would come to our junior high dances and cover all the
cool Top 40 songs by Bryan Adams, Duran Duran, Night Ranger, etc.
If we had actual video tape of the events, which would have
been recorded on actual video tape in a camera the size of a Ford Fiesta, I
think we would discover that the bands actually sounded pretty bad. But I
remember the events as being on par with a real rock concert, only with parent chaperones
and no forty-five-dollar T-shirts for sale.
As long as I live, I will always remember the night when Tim
Spangler, one of the mega-cool older high school kids, showed up at our seventh-grade
dance to be the guest singer for one song – What
I Like About You, by The Romantics.
I had never seen a guest singer show up to sing anything. I
didn’t even know “guest singer” was a thing. At the time, however, I thought it
was quite simply the coolest possible thing anyone had ever done on earth, ever.
And has there ever been a song in the history of music that
makes you want to dance more than What I
Like About You, by The Romantics?
Yes, is the obvious answer. It Takes Two, by Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock makes you want to dance
more, but that wasn’t released until 1988, so at the time in the mid-eighties, What I Like About You was the top dance
song.
When that opening guitar hits and the whole band shouts, “Hey!”
into their microphones, even the chaperones and the principal get up and dance.
It’s sad that kids don’t have those kind of experiences today.
I think there’s only one real solution that makes any sense. I’m obviously
going to have to DJ the next dance.
Better bust out my mixed tapes.
See you soon,
-Smidge
Copyright © 2018 Marc Schmatjen
Check out The Smidge
Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!
No comments:
Post a Comment