I bet you look good on the dancefloor

Moving to music is a funny thing. One presumes it derives from the most primitive of impulses — insert caveperson dance sequence here, complete with sticks-and-rocks proto-band — yet unlike most primitive impulses, it seems to have no immediate survival or procreative purpose, though I suppose one could make a case for the latter. (“A vertical expression of a horizontal desire,” as the cliché goes.)

There was a time when I envied people who, in public, could bob their head in sincere appreciation of music. Such a level of unself-conscious rhythmic movement was something I could only dream of. Then again I was in my early teens at the time, and basically self-conscious about absolutely everything, from my reading material to my height and weight and fashion sense, or lack thereof.

Something changed along the way, and thank God for that. I think a lot of it had to do with going to a high school that also had girls in it. The annual administration-sanctioned party/dance held in the canteen gave us ample opportunities for life-scarring humiliation, a.k.a. asking people of the opposite sex to join us on the dance floor. After doing it a few times, you realize that the worst thing that can happen is that they say no (and you are subsequently branded a loser for the rest of your life, and are crippled with self-doubt, never reach your full potential, and end up bitter and homeless and drooling in a public restroom).

Penny B. on the dancefloor: From Phonogram: The Singles Club #1

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the girl who, so many years ago, gamely attempted to dance with me to Spandau Ballet’s Gold (and to curse the DJ who played that song, which is basically impossible to move to unless you like looking like an idiot when the tempo changes), and to apologize to the guy whose drink I knocked away while flailing my arms to a New Order song (Bizarre Love Triangle, of course).

Life has little enough joy as it is. I’m thankful that jerking spasmodically to a catchy beat in the company of a mass of other, similarly twitchy people is one joy that I learned not to deny myself.

That joy is hard to capture in writing, as I am learning; it helps to have pictures, moving or otherwise. One of the best representations of the sheer bliss that moving to music can bring can be found in the comic book series Phonogram, by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie; it’s an amazing little series, the premise of which is: music is magic — literally. People who use music/magic to subtly change other people and the world are called phonomancers. “Properly wielded, a song can save your life.” Pick up the second series, called “The Singles Club,” which takes place over seven issues on a club night called Never On A Sunday. You can almost hear the handclaps and “yeah yeah yeahs.” I could imagine it. It was like I was there, dancing with Penny B. and Silent Girl and the rest.

Romy and Michele don’t need anyone to get their dance on... Unfortunately.

Not that I ever developed much beyond an ability to stay on the beat. I don’t have “moves,” as such, unless sweating profusely can be called a move. I’ve learned that, for guys, it’s best not to attempt anything fancy, unless you have been training for years; there is no middle ground on the dance floor, so to speak. You are either tastefully minimal or all-out impressive. In between there is only sadness.

I don’t look like the kind of guy who goes dancing regularly, and I’m not. But some of the best nights of my life have been spent in unschooled but enthusiastic and non-profit gyration in front of a band or a DJ and usually with a girl I like. More thanks: thanks to the girl who ducked into a showband-showcasing Malate bar with me and thoroughly and sincerely enjoyed dancing with me to the cheesiest hits of the past three decades; thanks to the girl who on a summer night went with me to a reggae place on Timog, where we danced until half of the 70 percent of the water that made up my body weight ended up on the floor; and thanks to the girl who went with me from bar to bar, dancing to band after band, until the sun came up and we had to drag ourselves sleepily back to our lives.

Here’s to all of you, and here’s to the bands and the DJs, and here’s to that epiphany-enabling, hip-impelling, eternally irresistible beat.

* * *

Thanks to Sputnik Comics in Cubao X (sputnikcomics.multiply.com), where I got my Phonogram fix.