the Harlem shuffle, the Boston monkey, the shake, the shimmy, the shing-a-ling, the boo-ga-loo, the bounce, the freeze, the continental walk, the slide, the four corners, the fishing pole, the happy feet, the mohawk, the pass the hatchet, the mashed potatoes, the fly, the popcorn, the karate, the African twist, the barracuda, the beetle hop, the drive, the waddle, the duck, the ostrich, and a multitude of other crazes or would-be crazes ensured the dancer would always dance alone (the Madison, which debuted in 1957, was different in that it was a communitarian line dance, as was “the hully gully” popularized by the Olympics in 1959).
The dances were a milestone in culture. Many were reenactments of animal behavior, such as the monkey dance where the participant acted out primate pastimes such as the peeling of a banana. With “the bird,” the dancer flapped his or her imaginary wings. People were attempting to simulate wild beasts they had never seen or that were now scarce in an alienated, prefab world. In a sense, the dances were a funeral rite for a lost Garden of Eden.
With industrialization, humanity had realized its biblical prophecy and banished itself from the natural world, which it now only experienced through imperialist National Geographic documentaries. Food in the postwar period was, for the first time in recorded history, packaged without trace of its origins. Meanwhile, animals (except for a few domestic varieties) were unknown in the new suburban habitat. A few years before, pigs, chickens, and cows would have been visible within city limits, and butchers, fishmongers, and vegetable sellers would have plied their wares at markets. After World War II’s corporate consolidation, food became something that was shrink-wrapped, freeze-dried, or instant and boxed.
Dancers furiously tried to embody the animals they could no longer see, in an effort to call them back—to express either their admiration or their jealous contempt for them in a bittersweet goodbye. Dances like the twist and the tighten-up were ritualized reenactments of industrial machines used in factory work. These were also vanishing in the new economy based on consumerism, wherein people’s only skill and pastime would be to shop. All these moves were performed obediently following the barked dictates of a “lead singer,” who mimicked the behavior of the foreman on the factory floor or a galley slave driver.
The new, individualist dance crazes were so exhausting—as well as psychically and physically devastating—that they lasted only ten years (1959–1968). By 1969, dancing was all but forbidden by rock bands who insisted that their audiences sit obediently and consume drugs en masse whilst trapped in enormous arenas, raceways, pastures, and superdomes. The rebellion of narcotics had the appeal of being hermetic, secretive, and illegal, but their real purpose was escape from rock itself, which had become intolerable. Rock ’n’ roll’s alienation had defeated its victims who were now rendered exquisitely passive. Occasionally, the trend for regimented dance moves would reappear—either as camp (the disco fad’s “disco duck,” the “Bertha Butt Boogie,” and “the hustle”) or as satire (punk’s pogo, mosh, and slam)—but these attempts faded fast, impotently raging against the dying of the light. With the death of dancing, drug abuse became the rock fad, another step in the alienation of the music victim, lost in noise, buried in a stoned cacophony.
Before this, alongside the twist, oral contraceptives or “birth control pills” arrived, first marketed in 1960. The pill, though developed years earlier, had not made it to the marketplace, stymied by the FDA’s moral and health concerns. The twist forced the agency’s hand. Just as Adderall and Ritalin are part of a tool set required to navigate today’s cyber-Internet consciousness efficiently, and increasing loneliness and alienation engendered by cybersociety create the need for pills like Zoloft and Prozac, so was “the pill” a necessary invention in the newly twist-ed world. The new paradigm demanded it.
The pill is widely credited for launching the so-called sexual revolution and for sparking a new era of promiscuity and rebellion against the nuclear family unit and its oppressive gender roles. But the pill and the twist, along with other postindustrial dances, didn’t just encourage more sex without regard for pregnancy; they also parented a new relationship to sex. People engaged in intercourse with lots of different people not because they were newly carefree—there had been sex before this—but because dancing, the ancient ritualistic pantomime of intercourse and intimacy, was now an alienated action; an individualistic task where the participant was required to be alone, in a frenzied, masturbatory state, both highly stimulating and deeply depressing. The void was to be filled with actual fornication. The two phenomenon are therefore related: “The Twist” (1959) made the pill absolutely necessary, while “the pill” (1960) made the world engendered by the twist manageable.
Meanwhile, to dance now required working knowledge of new dance moves which—once the twist went sour—were always in flux. The discotheque was a place to announce one’s adroit command of moment-to-moment consumerism. Dances were like gadgets or jokes which showed off working knowledge of temporal ephemera, leisure time (a requirement so as to learn and practice the new moves), and buying power (so as to purchase the records which were necessary components for instruction). At the disco, when the latest 45 barked out the contortion of the week, the dancer was ordered to comply with the locomotion, the turkey trot, the whatchamacallit, the choo-choo, the bump, the lion hunt, the “after the fox,” the shotgun, the shake ’n’ bump, the funky walk, the wash, the sophisticated boom-boom, the monster walk, the lurch, the stereo freeze, the moonwalk, the broken hip, the bounce, the weirdo wiggle, the squiggle, the Tennessee wig walk, or the pimp walk. One’s dance partners were nonexistent or incidental; specters and shadows gyrating in the flashing half-light of the dance hall, hallucinations in the night. Sexual consorts were similarly identityless.
Sex itself was likewise extracted from what it had been—eternal and universal—and became a consumer’s whim, a new move; i.e., “fashion.” It was necessary for the rock ’n’ roller to engage in actual sex because of the lack of tenderness; touching one another casually had been made verboten by the new dances. Therefore, the conceit of the sexual revolutionary wasn’t only that those involved were having more sex but also that they had liberated sex entirely from its olden-days gulag of repressed courtship rituals and “teasing.” A spate of tease songs (Cliff Richard’s “Please Don’t Tease,” the Monteras’s “You’re a Tease,” Bob Kuban’s “The Teaser”) appeared in the early sixties, bullying diatribes against “Little Sally Tease” (Don & the Goodtimes) and other women who weren’t complying with the new era of mechanistic sex on demand.
Sex, during this so-called sexual revolution, was itself reinvented. Rock ’n’ roll’s stance has always been that it invented sex; that Elvis’s shaking hips were somehow a revelation to all those who saw them, something altogether new. And they were. They were rejecting the sex of the past—the Lost Generation sluts and sleazeballs who cavorted, canoodled, and contorted with people like Fatty Arbuckle—to create something entirely different. Sex was redefined. It was an ultraindividualistic sport of play and pantomime which didn’t even happen when it happened. Eros, once risqué, naughty, and discreet, became stark, narcissistic, and codified like the new dances; people practiced their moves, first through smut, then with post-hippie how-to manuals (such as The Joy of Sex), and then finally with “hardcore” pornography as a guide.
Pussy-eating, cocksucking, anal sex, threesomes, wheelbarrowing, and 69 were outlined, streamlined, diagrammed, and stripped of mystery. The cobwebs were cleared and a tungsten bulb was blasted at the newly clinical sex act. Without risk of pregnancy and with the new brutal aerobics of the frug and the jerk banishing intimacy, closeness, and tenderness, the teen-amphetamined world of rock ’n’ roll begat a whole new scene. This started with the guttural obscenities of the first rock ’n’ rollers. But though Elvis and other first wavers’ gestural feats led the way, the twist was the coup de grâce which finally did away with the sexual tenderness of the old world.
New razor technology was also introduced in the new age, to address the compulsory youthfulness enforced by the new adolescent rock ’n’ roll class. Formerly, “countercultures” sought wisdom and experience. The Beat Generation had wanted to look mature and rugged, while the Lost Generation were likewise scruffy adults. Now, people shaved whatever facial hair they had to maintain a young look. Not coincidentally perhaps, shaving technology became quite sophisticated in 1957—immediately before