Music
Discover the novelty dance move’s long road to legitimacy
As Stormzy rides high with Vossi Bop and Russ’s Gun Lean and Drake’s In My Feelings continue to rack up views, we explore the radical history of tracks with their own moves.
When you think of Stormzy, you probably don’t think of Bobby Pickett, the one-hit wonder who sparked a dance craze with his single The Monster Mash in the early ‘60s. You know the one – it’s that cheesy pop pile-up of horror movie cliches, spanning mad scientists, ghouls, graveyards and vampires, you somehow still hear on wedding playlists in 2019. Pickett was an army vet who’d served in Korea. When he returned to civilian life, he vowed to forge a career in the entertainment industry and went about landing a hosting gig in a Hollywood nightclub. His big break came in summer 1962, as American teens rushed to dance floors across the country to copy The Twist and Mashed Potato, dance moves popularised by Chubby Checker and soul legend James Brown. Halloween wasn’t far off, and Pickett did a mean impression of legendary horror icon Boris Karloff. What if he wrote a rock ‘n’ roll bop that put a Frankensteinian spin on those moves?
The Monster Mash was written in an afternoon with friend Leonard Capizzi, then recorded with producer Gary Paxton. Two months later, it was number one in the US singles chart, and it’s hardly been out of the American consciousness since: the track charted again in 1970 and 1972 and continues to experience sales spikes every October on iTunes (in 2012, it peaked again at number 25 in the charts). Pickett died in 2007, but the Monster Mash, fittingly for a song about the undead, lives on: It has effectively become “The national anthem of Halloween,” his manager told Vice in 2014.
Stormzy gets that orange feeling
© Samy Khabthani / Red Bull Content Pool
What’s all this got to do with Brixton’s Glastonbury-headlining grime don, you might be wondering. The answer is the same thing connecting Stormzy with noughties Cha Cha Slide hitmaker DJ Casper, with La Macarena composers Los Del Rios, and even with Gangnam Style viral sensation Psy. When Stormzy dropped Vossi Bop, the first single from his upcoming second album, earlier this year, he became part of a pop tradition stretching back to Monster Mash and beyond: the novelty dance hit. The Vossi Bop was a viral dance created by Twitter user @NL_Vossi in 2015 that’s pretty simple really: lean forward, stretch an arm out, bop to the rhythm then switch arms. Like The Mash, the lure for fans of being able to participate in the track, learning its dance, recreating and repurposing it in the club and in social media videos of their own, helped propel the track to massive success: the song scored Stormzy his first number one single, beating Taylor Swift.
Vossi Bop, which Stormzy dropped at Glastonbury surrounded by kids performing wheelies on bikes, is an example of how the novelty-dance pop song format has mutated across its existence. In the decades since the Monster Mash, it’s evolved into a way for artists to bring their culture into spaces that have historically excluded them. In 2019, novelty dances can even act as access points for mainstream audiences into genres they’d otherwise never explore. The micro-genre used to be looked down upon as gimmicky: once upon a time, witnessing a novelty-dance song meant the Village People raising their arms to spell out YMCA. It meant Black Lace’s Agadoo, Billy Ray Cyrus’s line-dancing fave Achy Breaky Heart and Steps’ 1990s bubblegum pop dance-along Tragedy.
Some dances are transtemporal. They seem like they’re fads but they become fixtures of the culture
“The phrase gets a bad rap in some ways,” says music scholar and cultural theorist Jason King, an associate professor at New York University. “It’s associated with words like 'craze' and 'fad', implying it’s here today and gone tomorrow. But some dances are transtemporal. They seem like they’re fads but they become fixtures of the culture, like the Electric Slide. In African American culture, it’s been around since the '60s. It’s not really a fad. It’s something that’s lasted over the decades.”
The Electric Slide – popularised in mainstream circles by Marcia Griffiths and Bunny Wailer's 1982 track Electric Boogie – is an example of how novelty dances have been co-opted by artists from more marginalised backgrounds, who’ve used tie-in dances to make statements and break through barriers, achieving success they otherwise might not have. The Hustle was born out of 1970s Bronx-based Puerto Rican teens’ defiance at their elders’ objection to grinding slow dances, then turned into a pop chart smash by disco star Van McCoy: his 1975 track The Hustle went on to sell in excess of one million copies.
PSY
© Getty Images/Red Bull Content Pool
A more recent example is Psy. Gangnam Style was a phenomenon on its release in 2012, smashing YouTube records and transcending the internet bubble it was born in. “To me, that song and video are very reflective of a certain kind of absurdist internet humour, very specific to the age of social media,” says King. So were early meme culture songs Chocolate Rain and What What by Samwell. But Psy’s track had an elaborate, eccentric dance routine fans could do at home that helped tip it into a cultural juggernaut, explains King. “His bizarre, unusual dancing became so central to how that song was interpreted and why it was so successful. You can’t imagine the success of Gangnam Style without his way of moving to the song that became part of the DNA itself. The song, the video and its dance are all fused.”
Gangnam Style was a song about class, its lyrics poking cheekily at the luxury and excess of the Gangnam neighbourhood in Seoul, essentially the city’s version of Beverly Hills. This couldn’t be more fitting. “A lot of novelty dances do that because of where the dances come from,” explains King. “They’re often coming from humble backgrounds, not as socially economically privileged.” In 2019 Britain, Russ’s Gun Lean is treading a similar path. The track continues to rack up views, becoming an access point for drill music to reach mainstream audiences in the same way that Gangnam Style presaged the massive K-pop moment that western pop is having right now, with artists and audiences alike embracing the shiny, energetic sound of acts like BTS.
This concept of virality is something that novelty dances actually prefigured: The Charleston, in a way, was viral.
“To me, that’s the same as the black bottom in the 1920s. That was one of the ways that the blues became popular – through that dance,” adds King. “It’s the same tradition, but it's just become so accelerated in the age of the internet. It's become a structure: a way to do this on a consistent basis. It’s interesting that this concept of virality is something that novelty dances actually prefigured: The Charleston, in a way, was viral.”
One change to the novelty-dance pop song format ushered in by the social media age is the ability for fans to add their own novelty dances to songs that had no dance routines to begin with, and for that to start a craze. Drake’s In My Feelings, for example, evolved into a phenomenon that transcended music, becoming a wider pop cultural sensation, thanks to the Kiki Challenge: a dance copied from a YouTuber’s own dance routine, then spread across the internet like wildfire, as social media users replicated the dance in different locations and scenarios. The track was always going to be a smash – Drake’s one of the biggest artists on the planet – but the Kiki Challenge helped elevate it into something greater, with a much vaster cultural visibility outside of hip-hop and Drake’s existing fandom.
A stranger example of this is Baauer’s Harlem Shake. “It became corny and annoying as fuck, and my name was attached to that,” the producer told Rolling Stone after the song took on a life of its own in 2013, six months after the Philadelphia musician released it as a free download. The Harlem Shake had already been a dance, but the internet morphed it into something else. The idea was simple: stand still till the drop, then go wild when the beat kicks in, cutting from scenes of tranquility to oddball mayhem in the resulting video. It made a brief sensation of a beatmaker few people within mainstream music had ever heard of, who’d have otherwise stood little chance of finding that visibility. “It was really priceless, career-wise,” he admitted in 2016.
The Kiki Challenge, Harlem Shake and others like it sparked a trend of musicians, spurred on by record label marketing departments. All of a sudden, artists everywhere, from Pharrell and Iggy Azalea to Paul McCartney, were trying to apply dance challenges to their songs. The fact that so few of these artist-engineered attempts to start novelty dance crazes have caught on speaks to the sea change that’s occurred within the culture around novelty-dance pop songs. Now, in a time of TikTok, a fast-rising app that allows fans to create their own video content centred on their favourite songs, it’s fans as much as artists who drive novelty dances: for yours to be a hit as an artist, well, it better be good.
“Record labels and artists have become more pragmatic and cunning in how to use social media and novelty dances to promote their work. But there’s also an increasing audience focus aspect to novelty dances where consumers are making dances that then become codified by others,” says King. The floss dance, for example, is thought to have been created by American teen Russell Horning (better known as ‘the Backpack Kid’). After it went viral, Katy Perry began building it (and Horning himself) into live performances to connect with the youth audience already doing it on school playgrounds and social media feeds across the US.
What, then is the future of the novelty-dance pop song? “I think that we’ll have both iconic influential performers defining novelty dances and audiences themselves continuing to take control of the content of popular culture, creating their own dances that artists then codify,” says King, breaking into a chuckle. “It’s a dance, ironically, between the artist and audience.” Novelty-dance pop songs have been a fixture of popular music since the very beginning of popular music. As Stormzy’s Vossi Bop success suggests, don’t expect that dance to end anytime soon.