A similar phenomena is currently taking place in bars all over and having thoroughly listened to the Passion Pit album this week, I've decided it's time to extoll the return of white people to the dance floor.
Welcome. We've missed you.
You see, for the longest time, White people completely owned the floor. Waltzing, foxtrots, flappers, the charleston, the twist. Remember when Footloose came out? Disco? The hustle?
White people used to dance. In dance clubs. It was cool, and it was the cool thing to do.
But then... then came hip hop. Because hip-hop proved to be such a culturally embedded art form, white people never really were able to appropriate hiphop to the same complete extent that they consumed jazz, or rock and roll.
To this day, despite Eminem's best efforts and rabid consumption of hip-hop by white suburbanites, ownership of the music is still inexorably linked to black culture, and as such ownership of all dancing and dance-like movements (i.e. breaking, popping, locking, and various degrees of getting jiggy, leaning and nodding very, very slowly). The stigma of white hiphop has not been overcome, and as a result, white people are uncomfortable dancing freely, although they most certainly will try their best to emulate the actions of black people dancing -- mostly out of respect for the form.
But when you see white people dancing to Beyonce at a club, let's be honest -- that's not how white people dance. If you've ever seen the Chapelle show skit with John Mayer and ?uestlove, you'd know that in their natural habitat, surrounded by fellow white people with approved white music playing, this is white dancing taking its natural course:
Within the last two years however, slowly but surely, there has been a relatively new genre seeping into bars and clubs -- white dance music. And not European white, commonly referred to here as "Gino beats", or "Techno". No, I am referring to homegrown, North American music, made for dancing.
The sample above features a Santogold song, which is not prototypical of the genre I speak, but still somewhat relevant as according to the white-hipster rulebook (section 143.2d) she is an approved artist under the white-dancing protocol of 2003.
You see, what started with a few dance infused indie rock bands (the Rapture, !!!) and extended into djs (Daft Punk, Girltalk) has naturally evolved into a whole new genre that, although seemingly ubiquitous to us today, is actually quite new -- indietronicpop.
To be honest, the genre is so popular yet actually still so new that nobody has coined an all encompassing term yet, like how "Emo" came to eventually represent all melodic power pop punk and metal.
Helping to pave the way on the pop side of the equation was Dntel and Ben Gibbard, who together put out the Postal Service, a forbearer album that led hipsters to add synths and midi to all the folk songs they had been recording in Garageband.
Sometime in 2005, after Kanye West was awarded honorary hipster status, white indie artists became comfortable enough with certain minority artists (but not all. The list was essentially Kanye, MIA, The Roots, NERD and TV on the Radio, who don't rap, but were black and played indie rock. This strange juxtaposition helped join this bridge from the non-white side of the equation, as did Lupe Fiasco and Pharell, who liked to pretend they could skateboard -- a decidedly white hobby until about 3 years ago) to appropriate not the actual essence of black music, but at least some of the tools used to create it -- tools which could be borrowed and reutilized to form their own, more comfortably familiar beats.
Thus 808's and record sampling began to be common place in the vintage clothing crowd.
The movement began gaining momentum.
Now, we have clearly reached a tipping point. With bands such as LCDSS, Cut Copy, Justice, Hercules & Love Affair and Passion Pit, white people have finally found their way home.
Walk into any hipster hangout on a weekend now and the days of shoegazing, toe tapping and headnodding while leaning against a wall are long gone. No, today you will hear falsetto's blaring, synths, heaving bass and people dancing drunkenly and uncontrollably -- the natural state of a white person dancing (it's been downhill since Fred Astaire), emancipated from the coolness associated with dancing to hiphop, and the monopoly hiphop had on rhythm until just this decade.
Here, in three short videos, is an abbreviated evolution of hipster dance music.
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