I went to see a band called Starfucker play in Brooklyn last night. Everything they played was danceable, and the small basement room was filled with sweaty people bopping to the clickity-clack drums and pulsing basslines.

There was a man up against the front of the stage who danced throughout the whole set. He was wearing an old t-shirt and a Holden Caulfield hunting cap. He was a little chubby and pale but he moved with a selfless abandon that was endearing, almost encouraging.  I felt conscious about not dancing when I looked at him.

A few years ago I met an ex-bagboy with anger management issues who had just finished a year stay at a Buddhist monastery. He was thin and soft-spoken. He looked perpetually sunburned and had a blushing smile that he seemed to wrestle with in fits of embarrassment.

He once told me that women can tell if you’re good at sex by how well you dance. He opened his eyes a little wider and tried to suppress that blushing smile when he confessed that a woman he once knew had told him he was a good dancer.

I like to dance. I used to feel self-conscious about it. I would only do it in private or, if I was drunk enough, with a woman in a crowded party. When I was twenty-three my friend P told me to shut up and just two-step to everything. A girl I used to date suggested that I dance like a praying mantis, all gangly angles and insectoid gestures.

I’m not sure if that’s true or not. I am long and thin. There’s a fine line between lithe grace and loping angularity with a frame like mine. Some nights are less graceful than others apparently.

I’ve stopped believing that there’s a good or bad way to dance. A woman I was sleeping with once tried to teach me how to dance. We were in a loud disco with the kind of schizophrenic electronic music that everyone says they like but few actually enjoy listening to (e.g. Autechre, Aphex Twin, Mu-Ziq). She bounced up and down while tilting from side to side; she was basically two-stepping to some absurdly fast breakbeat music.

I don’t believe there’s a right way to dance. Dancing is like sex; it’s an expression and shouldn’t ever become an act of assimilating to a set of best common practices. It’s easy to imagine there’s a right way to dance because it preys on all the nascent social anxieties we all have.

With sex, everyone’s certain they’re an above-average lover. Everyone seems to have osmotically absorbed those best common practices, but with dancing, and especially for men, the best common practice is to confess incompetence. “No, I can’t. I’m a terrible dancer,” we tell each other. Imagine if you were sleeping with someone the first time and they declined to go down on you, claiming that they’re really terrible at oral.

So but there I was in a basement in Brooklyn, watching another man dance because he liked the band so much that his body had to move with them. He looked perfectly in place when I just glanced at him, like the impossibly joyful crowds on a New Year’s Eve special dancing along to a Pink song in their Macy’s best. The longer I watched him the clumsier he became. He was off-beat and barely moving his hands. He turned in slow circles, making eye contact with everyone around him but his body was little more than off-kilter pendulum in a furry hunting hat.

I wanted to join him. I wanted to dance alongside him, to feel that same immediate need to let my body speak because it was filled with happiness.

But I couldn’t. I just wasn’t that into the band.

 

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