Corona, ‘The Rhythm of the Night’: When did men stop dancing?

Corona
‘The Rhythm of the Night’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
Number 2 on September 24, 1994

1. You could put some joy upon my face

Claire Denis’ brilliant Beau Travail is a film about men’s bodies. Most of the movie is filled with long, lingering shots of muscular men sweating in the desert sun. But the movie begins by looking at women. 

The opening scene of Beau Travail is set in nightclub in Djibouti. The DJ is playing catchy Turkish pop song ‘??mar?k’ and a group of pretty young girls are having fun on the dancefloor. It’s innocent, carefree fun; people dancing simply because they have a body that can dance.

Soon, the girls are joined by men in military uniform. These are the film’s main protagonists, a French Foreign Legion company stationed nearby. The men join in the dance, but not in the same carefree way. It’s more like a mating ritual, with a clear goal of leading the girls off the dancefloor towards somewhere quieter. They dance at the women.

One of the soldiers in this scene is played by Denis Levant, a physical, acrobatic actor who often dances in his films. But in Beau Travail, Levant plays the uptight officer Galoup, and Galoup does not dance. Instead, Galoup stands on the dancefloor almost motionless, while his girlfriend grinds against him.

“Grinding” is a dancefloor activity that emerged in the early 90s. Socialogist Maxine Leeds Craig describes grinding in her book Sorry I Don’t Dance: Why Men Refuse to Move as:

“a dance form in which couples sensuously move in close proximity to each other…a way for a young man to demonstrate sexual conquest. In the performance of [grinding] among heterosexual pairs, women are expected to perform more of the erotic labor, and so gender difference is accentuated in the dance. These varied dance forms provide solutions to the problems that dancing presents for masculinity. It is easier for many men to dance when dance is associated with physical intimidation, athleticism, or heterosexuality.”

Coincidentally, those three items are the main themes of Beau Travail: intimidation, athleticism, and heterosexuality. The camera often lingers on the physical beauty of these men, but the men behave in ugly ways. They fight, compete, and seek to dominate each other.

At the end of the film, Galoup is a broken man. He’s been dishonorably discharged for trying to murder a colleague, and he’s ended up trying to rejoin civilian life in Marseilles. But his body simply isn’t intended for civilian life.

The final scene shows Galoup in his apartment. He makes his bed, straightening the sheets with military perfection, then lies down with a gun in one hand. The camera moves across his body revealing a tattoo that says Sers la bonne cause et meurs (“Serve the good cause and die”). The only two valid uses of a man’s body. Work hard, die well. 

But instead of ending with Galoup’s suicide, a jumpcut takes us right back to the start. We’re in the Djibouti nightclub again, although the dancefloor is empty now except for Galoup, who smokes a cigarette as Corona’s ‘The Rhythm Of The Night’ blasts through the speakers.

The rhythm seems to catch him. He starts dancing, gently at first, then increasingly wild. He whirls, spins, flails his arms. He’s beyond the music, into a world of pure movement. At one point he drops on the floor and rolls around like he’s on fire. Can this even be called dancing? Doesn’t matter. Nobody’s watching.

In his final moment on earth, Galoup daydreams about allowing himself to dance.

2. Sunshine in an empty place

It’s not fair to say that white cishet men can’t dance. There are plenty of people in this demographic who love to dance and can do it well (Denis Levant, pour l’exemple). That said, it is traditional among my people to avoid the dancefloor unless we’re dragged onto it kicking and screaming.

I love music, but the idea of dancing to it—in front of people—fills me with horror. Honestly, one of the best things about being middle-aged is that there are fewer opportunities for people to try to bully me into dancing. I simply don’t enjoy it. I would rather stay seated with all the other non-dancing blokes.

Why is that? Why do so many men hate dancing?

In Maxine Leeds Craig’s book mentioned above, she interviews a number of non-dancers (mostly white men): 

Neil is passionate about music but does not dance. He has, on rare occasions, accompanied his wife to dance floors, but described those attempts as uncomfortable instances in which he did not know what to do with his body. His response to music, he explained, “is something that largely goes on inside my head, and is sort of divorced from, to a large extent, the rest of my body.”

Neil’s not alone. A YouGov survey found that one-third of men never dance, while a less scientific BBC poll put the figure at 75%. Presumably, most of these people—like Neil, like me—enjoy music, but don’t enjoy the phyical act of dancing.

This is strange when you think about, as dancing is possibly humankind’s oldest recreational activity. The 12,000-year-old cave paintings in India’s Bhimbetka rock shelters show people in a group dance, as do the even older paintings in Borneo’s Lubang Jeriji Saléh. Neither of these images show a group of blokes on the sidelines with their arms folded.

Mind you, those paintings also don’t portray solo dancers showing off their sick moves. Dancing, it seems, has always a social activity, something that people do with together as a way of strengthening community bonds. In a way, that makes it even more bizarre that some folk would choose to exclude themselves.

Maybe people don’t exclude themselves? Maybe they get left behind?

3. Won’t you teach me how to love and learn

French sociologist Pierre Bordieu has some interesting writing on the concept of “bodily habitus”. In very, very basic terms, bodily habitus is about how our own bodies exist within society. All of our physical actions informed by the people around us. We mimick accents and gestures as a way of signalling that we belong.

(Reading about this makes me think of when Oasis broke through in the mid-90s and Oasis fans started doing Northern accents and the Gallagher monkey. That Kevin & Perry sketch where Perry has turned into Liam Gallagher and Kevin starts copying him is close to my understanding of the “bodily habitus” concept in action.)

Dancing is one element of this bodily habitus, especially in societies with communal dances. In these groups, everyone knew their role on the dancefloor. You’d be learning the steps since birth, so you didn’t really have to think about it.

As the world changed, so too did dancing. Here’s Craig quoting Bordieu on those changes:

Bourdieu studied the consequences of socially derived habitus in rural Algeria and in rural and urban France. In each of these settings habitus was the root of social reproduction in that it provided strategies for action that tended to thwart social mobility. In an early ethnography he studied the predicament of rural French peasants, condemned by social and economic circumstances to live as celibate bachelors. He used the concept of habitus to explain their discomfort in urbanizing settings. At dances in town the rural bachelors stood as clusters of rejected men, out of place and refusing to dance. Bourdieu described their bodies as well adapted to farm labor but poorly equipped to perform the latest dances, and therefore to participate in the social life in towns.

Bordieu seems to suggest that men didn’t have time to learn these new dances because they were too busy working. But women also worked hard, and they had time to learn! What gives?

Part of the answer seems to be that women didn’t just practice new dances, they practiced with each other. Men—especially those with a very specific kind of masculinity—were at a disadvantage because they didn’t have anyone to practice with. Dudes simply don’t ask their bros to waltz. Eventually, this puts men at a disadvantage on the dancefloor.

Not all men, not all communities, and not all styles of dance, obviously. The number of men on the dancefloor varies greatly depending on other cultural factors. In fact, the post-war period saw a surge in dance activity among both sexes as teenagers swung, jived and jitterbugged their way out of rationing and into the early rock’n’roll era.

But then, in the 1960s, the story of dancing took a surprsing twist.

And it goes like this.

4. I don’t wanna face the world in tears

The Twist was one of the first solo dance crazes to go global, and it helped change the entire politics of the dancefloor. Women no longer needed a man to lead the dance; they could dance with friends or even by themselves. Men, on the other hand, suddenly found themselves alone and exposed.

One of the biggest differences between solo dancing and couples dancing is that people will look at you and judge you. You can’t hide behind your partner. If you’re a bad dancer, people will sometimes laugh, and men hate being laughed at. On the other hand, if you’re good, people might look at your body in motion and fantasise about having sex with you.

Men really hate that.

From Craig’s book again: 

The risk that dance poses for men arises from its perceived delicacy and eroticism. Dancing may be experienced as engaging in sex, yet in order to dance sexually, a man may have to appear sexy. In the contemporary United States, white middle-class heterosexual men are expected to desire sex but not to be publicly sexy, because being sexy could indicate that they appear so to other men. Many middle-class white heterosexual men are uncomfortable being watched and are particularly uneasy being watched by an eroticizing gaze. I asked a nineteen-year-old white heterosexual young man, Zachary, if he thought women found him attractive when he danced. He treated the question as somewhat difficult to comprehend.

Men still had to go out on the dancefloor, because that’s where the girls are. But doing so meant dealing with deep-lying feelings of shame and inadequacy, and facing the prospect of humiliation. Going to a disco required nerves of steel.

Or, alternatively, around twelve beers.

Fear of being seen looking foolish is ironically the reason some men will only dance when drunk. Phil was the student in Dance 101 who could do the moonwalk, but was otherwise a reluctant dancer. “After a few drinks,” Phil said, “I’m not seeing myself as that person who might be ridiculous.” Neil could not recall the times he had danced because, he said, he was very drunk when they had occurred. Jamar, a thirty two-year-old, heterosexual, middle-class, African American manager, said his friends know that he will only be persuaded to dance when drunk. Alcohol and dancing were so strongly connected that older men explained that they no longer dance because they no longer drink. 

Tragic when you think about how dancing used to be an activity that included everyone, a way to enjoy one’s own body. You shouldn’t need to get drunk to enjoy dancing. All you need is a body that can dance.

5. This is the rhythm of the night

Going back to Beau Travail, this is one of the main themes of the film. All of these men have amazing bodies, but they’re afraid to enjoy them.

They’re not afraid of dying or getting hurt—suffering is an honorable use of a male body. No, they’re afraid of being vulnerable, of being humiliated, of being dominated by others. Dancing would expose them to all of those horrors (unless they were dancing as a way of meeting women, which is okay because it asserts their heterosexuality). Galoup, the main character, can only bear to think about dancing when he’s about to die, or perhaps already dead.

Maxine Leeds Craig’s book is very US-centric and mostly focused on white men. She makes a decent point about how modern dances created by men for men tend to be competitive (like breakdancing) or aggressive (like moshing). Men seem to only enjoy their bodies when they’re asseting themselves against others.

Most Europeans would point out a major oversight in her analysis: rave culture. Straight men were very enthustiastic about rave culture in the 80s and 90s, and few of them were aggressive or domineering; they just wanted to dance. And yes, a lot of this was down to MDMA, but taking ecstasy is somewhat different from drinking 20 pints. Ravers didn’t get high and end up dancing by accident; they got high because they wanted to dance.

I was only a kid when ecstasy and rave culture were first blossoming, but I’ve talked to many oldheads about the golden age of clubbing. They describe it as a revolution, almost a miracle. The chaos of drunken nightlife seemed to vanish, people were hugging instead of fighting, and everyone just wanted to dance. For a few hours every Saturday night, the dancers got to feel like part of a community joined together by music, as people used to in the past. Didn’t matter if you were male or female, straight or gay. All that mattered was the dance.

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