Dance, white girl, dance!

James Miller Miller on Tap

(Author's note: My thanks to Dr. Rudolph A. Heinrich, professor of Ethnomusicology, for contributing to this piece.)

A bad party is like a fart in a train car. Everybody in the area is aware of the situation, but no one wants to admit responsibility or take any steps to solve the problem, which would be an admission of guilt in itself.

People stand against the walls. Guests sip warm beer or iceless, saccharin gin and tonics. Questions that all begin with "So, ..." float around the room. You can feel everybody hating the music on the stereo. The party is static and dying.

It's time for action. It's time for move juice. It's time to get the white girls to dance.

This is the key to a good party. At a real party, there are people dancing - I think that much is certain. White men either don't dance at all or dance with massive quantities of liquor in them. The math is pretty simple either way.

The girls are a different matter.

My associates and I have spent years observing the interactions of elementary party physics. We have, in my estimation, come upon the perfect mix tape. It consists of songs that will stroke the psycho-musical-kinetic center of the female brain, getting them into a mood to shake a tail feather.

"Blister in the Sun" by the Violent Femmes:

This is definitely your lead-off song. It slashes right at the nostalgia jugular. This is the song most women hold in their minds as the point from which their years as a suburbanhipsterbeatnikbohemian began. When the Seventeen magazine and Paula Abdul records stop, and the bad poetry starts.

The prodigies will have been introduced at an early age, maybe by a sibling. Others will have gravitated to it in an attempt to be subversive in high school, as I think a lot of lunchtime joints were smoked to this one before sixth period.

This song is the catalyst that will trigger a raft of non-conformist, rebel-without-out-a-bra memories that they think, mysteriously, are theirs and theirs alone.

"Moondance" by Van Morrison:

It has a walking bass line! A prominent piano part! It's jazz, I guess! Guess what, Amy?! We like a jazz song! Get the rest of the tennis team! We can swing dance with each other!

"Lucky Star" by Madonna:

This one plays to a different part of the nostalgia muscle than the Femmes tune. It goes back a little further, conjuring images from a pleasant childhood, either real or imagined. The fear of adulthood that college spawns causes some white girls to develop a really interesting and irritating infantile streak.

They wear barrettes and Oscar the Grouch T-shirts. They drink hard cider and giggle about "cute boys" with their idiot, toddler friends. They insist childhood is some kind of transcendental state of being rather than the larval stage of the human animal. Music from a time when they were "young and perfect" will make them comfortable and free to raise their hairy armpits to the heavens and beat the earth with furious dancing.

"Brown-Eyed Girl," the second half of the Van Morrison double shot:

Bear in mind that I have the utmost respect for the Irish Otis Redding and could listen to him sing the phone book. White girls, however, have latched onto him for a number of reasons. The power of "Brown-Eyed Girl" comes primarily from its title.

Often, girls with brown eyes will feel plain and commonplace when compared with their Aryan counterparts. Every girl with brown eyes who's ever been felt up in the front seat of her mom's car or had a Lloyd Dobbler, little sweetie boyfriend is under the impression that this is her song. Plain and mousey with bob haircuts and mediocre cranial capacities, they perfect irony by believing a song that millions of their clones like for the same reasons will make them different from the rest of the livestock.

"Respect" by Aretha Franklin:

The heavy artillery. Woody Allen once said that marijuana was the drug that made white girls think they're Billie Holiday. This song appeals to the same reflex. White girls love that little "soul sister" feeling that R&B can sometimes provide. The same way a kid from Bloomfield Hills, after spending an Alternative Spring Break in Detroit, will nod with indignation when someone speaks of white privilege.

For WASPs any ethnic coolness we can get is more than welcome. Playing Aretha Franklin at your party will cause the white girls to flash on some of the really great passages they highlighted in "Our Bodies, Our Selves," which will lead to a feeling of solidarity and before you know it, they're craning their necks and snapping their fingers like Ricki Lake fans.

Consider this the shortcut to Whitey's Audio G-Spot. Enjoy.

- James Miller can be reached over e-mail at jamespm@umich.edu

09-23-98