All the Single Ladies is one weird song. It has to have the weirdest dance break I have heard in a long time. I mean, weird. The dance break, aka, the bridge, is usually that transitional moment in a song where you, the listener, are swept up and transported to another key, or even meter: your limbic system is commandeered, synaesthesia is induced (this music is hot, what a sweet riff, etc), and off you go into the sublime. Well, if they are a great performer that is. If they are not, you likely will yawn and think, "oh yeah, here comes the big chord change, still didn't save it," or if it's poppy RB, "this bridge is better than the rest of the song, but it still ain't happening." That transition becomes predictable, hackneyed, embarrassing. When it's good, like, Whitney Houston back in the day good, you get chicken skin on your arms, you burst into tears without knowing why, you loose your breath, you wanna spin around in a circle holding your heart.
Well, Beyoncé did not achieve that at all with this song, but she managed something else:
What is it with the diapered set that this song moves them so? I would like to go back to that awkward bridge and rethink it for what it is: the song kernel. Yes, maybe the song marshals such strong, quick and easy infatuations from babies because it is all dance break with a wee bit of verse. All up in the limbic system, this vapid call and response ditty simply drives impulse through repetition, never allowing synaesthesia to occur. Rather, it seems to me, that it allows practice to occur. DO it over and over and over; it is literally pre-mastered. If I were a toddler trying to get my walk on, I would feel mighty good grooving the biped-way after one chorus. What do think? What's Beyoncé's special sauce?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mVEGfH4s5g
(embedding disabled)
(as I am reviewing the video, my 4 year old is right now, mastering the choreo as she sees it for the first time. not kidding. she completely stopped moving at that "bridge")
4 comments:
post script: it appears that there is now a copyright infringement case opened on the baby that got everyone excited nationally and ended up as a piece of choreography on a TV show. i'll look into it, but i think i smell a rat...or rage. maybe the choreographer of Beyoncé is staking claim even though this is clearly a home video? more details soon.
What I am curious most about is what is MISSING from these videos, and that is the image of the 'stage' parent in the frame coaching the child to enact/resemble replicate/imitate the choreography from the video. Because the parental figure is not shown doing the moves with the baby, or that the transmission process is omitted from the shot, what is constructed for viewers is the notion that all babies have the urge to dance. That all babies, despite their dermal realities, have natural rhythm and or desire to move the hips and ribs. And because the most popular of these baby videos getting buzz on sites like ‘youtube’ are associated with black singers, especially those by women (Beyonce) and by hip hop artists, the associating with natural movement is subversively/subconsciously associated with blackness/womanness. It also illuminates how popular music (arguably black music), is reduced to a form of entertainment rather than high art. That might be a stretch…but what do you think?
I was thinking about the absent parent as well. I wonder if/how the parents do the dance in front of/with their child? I also think that research on cognition, sound and bodily response from babies/toddlers (that is how they have created Baby Einstein and other 'smart baby' videos/education aids) would be helpful in trying to decipher what it is about this particular song that makes babies want to move. The association between the rhythm, the black dancing body, and the apparent naturalness of the babies' response to the song does set up an essentialist rendering of rhythm/dancing ability, I agree with you Joel.
As a parent, I have to say that the babies are not necessarily being coerced into moving. I have never asked Graciela to do the dance nor have I shown it to her until she came int he night I was posting this up. She began to dance. Previous to seeing it, she danced spontaneously in the car whenever it would come on. At most, I would just laugh and say "go girl!"
The construction is not so much that all babies have the urge to dance but that any bouncing around to a song is dancing. That construction is gaining prevalence in teacher-less dance classes like 5Rhythms and Trance Dance. I think at best we could call it aerobic, in the literal sense.
So what is entertainment versus entrainment?
Post a Comment