Tag Archives: dancing

A Rave for Kids?

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© Photography by Khristopher Morgan for Here & Now (fb.com/weareherenandow)

Falkirk nightclub ‘Temple’ recently applied for a variation to its license to allow it to operate as a venue for children’s ‘rave’ events during the day. Councillor Robert Bisset, sitting on the Licensing Board, said he wanted to delay a ruling until more and better lighting had been installed in the club.

I understand the health-and-safety implications of a horde of hyperactive kids jumping around in a dark room, but it’s obvious that not one single member of that board has ever been to a rave, else they would have known that darkness is something of a prerequisite, not to mention a necessity.

If adults were to have a rave in a brightly-lit room, the cumulative effect of all those illuminous togs, jutting limbs and sweating, gurning faces bouncing up and down to a thumping, whizz-bang beat would be too disgusting and absurd for its participants to bear, and they’d all have to go home and sit in a corner for three days, rocking back and forth while trying to peel the skin from their faces.

Light burns; darkness salves.

Do we really need to inculcate our kids into raves, anyway? I understand that the ravers of yesterday want their kids to follow in their footsteps, but so soon? I did a lot of things in the late 1990s, most of them entirely unsavoury. I wasn’t once inspired to think, ‘You know what, I hope my kids get the chance to go hunting for drugs one day, too. But, you know: when they’re six!’

Surely the adult world can wait. What are we going to do to them next? Put them in little suits and see if they can blag mortgages for their Wendy houses? Make them sit through an awkward-as-fuck dinner party? Send them to the vet and force them to witness a series of increasingly harrowing hamster euthanasias?

What would a rave for the under 6’s look like anyway?

Let’s just imagine that for a moment or two…

Come regress with me.

At the kids’ rave

The beat drops for Baby Shark. There’s a scream and everyone starts juddering like crazy across the dance-floor, except for one boy sitting cross-legged at the side of the hall, who rolls his eyes and mutters something about Baby Shark being ‘soooo 2018’ and a ‘passing fad’.

‘It’s too commercialised now,’ says Felicia, a little girl wearing an ‘In the Night Garden’ T-shirt. She squats down next to him in solidarity.

He rips open his buttoned cardigan to show her his ‘Teletubbies’ T-shirt, and then gives her a disgusted look.

‘Don’t try to rave with me, newbie. I’m old school. I busted moves to Pingu, shufflin’ it penguin-style, when you were still swimming in your dad’s nut-sack. I watched Postman Pat before the pube-headed, speccy twat went airborne. OLD school. You feel it?’

‘I’ve seen Rugrats,’ she says haughtily.

‘Bitch, I’m wearing Rugrats mother***ing Y-fronts.’

He gets up and starts strutting away, shouting back over his shoulder:

‘I can’t be seen with you. You’re a fraud. I’m going home to listen to DJ Peppa Pig’s Sick Licks. ON FUCKING VINYL!’

He struts away, his finger held aloft behind him. ‘BYE Felicia.’

It’s the wrong finger, but she gets the idea.

A new tune bangs out across the room. The crowd are going wild, joining hands and jumping up and down, side to side, like one massive conjoined entity: a ska-beast, its veins pulsing pink-and-green on the dimly-lit dance-floor. “PAW PATROL, PAW PATROL, BE THERE ON THE DOUBLE! PAW PATROL, PAW PATROL…YEAH, LEMME HEAR Y’ALL MOTHERFUCKERS SING IT! YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT, SAVE THAT MOTHERFUCKING CHICKEN, Y’ALL, DOGGY-STYLE!”

Wayne, a stocky five-year-old, is out on the dance-floor in the middle of the throng, dancing like a boy possessed. Mainly because he’s absolutely off his tits on E-numbers. He’s had a line of Sherbet, a pure rock of Twix, and a half-bar of Milky Way that’s been cut with Smarties. Not to mention shit-loads of Coke. He’s throwing some shapes. Literally. He’s throwing squares, triangles, circles, rectangles, right at the other kids’ heads. Big thick Fisher Price plastic shapes.

A few feet away from him is Kade, a nursery kid with rhythm in his bones. The crowd’s created some distance between itself and Kade, not because Kade’s such a good dancer that he deserves space to ply his art, but because Kade’s shat himself. Violently. He’s flicking grotty smears of butt-gravy each time he shakes his hips. It’s splatting out of the sides of his nappy like Beethoven’s drool. A little girl a few feet away from him gets a splat of it on her dress, but because her parents are hippies, it goes with the pattern and she doesn’t notice. And still Kade dances, his arms thundering like pistons, his head bobbing like a Churchill dog in the back windscreen of a race-car.

‘CROWD SURF!’ he shouts, and everyone edges further away from him.

Back over at the side of the hall is Isaac, who’s been trying to blend into the wall. He’s wearing designer sandals, khaki cut-offs and a long face. He sees Felicia looking sad, and shuffles over to her. He’s no gentleboy, though; no knight in shining armour. He just knows a captive audience when he sees one.

Isaac sits down next to Felicia and tries to introduce himself over the din. ‘I’m Isaac, yeah? I’m 4 and a quarter. I love these things. You can’t just feel the music, sometimes it feels like you ARE the music, yeah?’

Felicia picks at one of her nostrils and stares at him through one heavy-lidded eye, sighing audibly. Undeterred, Isaac continues: ‘Yeah, you probably haven’t seen me around. I’m actually taking a gap year from nursery this year. It was sapping my shakra, man, I needed some room to grow, you know?’

She jams her finger up the other nostril, and plucks out a runny dollop of squidgy bogey. She grinds it into Iggle Piggle’s eye, all the while staring dead ahead at Isaac, who hasn’t noticed a thing. In fact, he isn’t even looking at her anymore.

‘Yeah, I’m working on a novel, actually, it’s a conceptual piece, my Dad says it’s the best thing he’s ever read, it’s all about how school doesn’t actually exist, yeah, and there’s this dog, but it can talk, yeah, and you find out it represents the main character’s grief at his gran dying, man, but really it’s a love story for our age, yeah?’

‘PSSSSSSST,’ hisses a boy standing over them. He opens his jacket to reveal a row of lollies above a row of packets of sherbet.

‘How much for the jacket?’ asks Felicia.

In a perfect turn of events, the 2017 club remix of ‘Johnny Johnny Yes Papa’ thumps into life around them.

The dealer looks down at Isaac’s shorts and sandals with a sneer. ‘Who buys your clothes? Your mum?’

‘Em, yeah,’ he says. ‘I’m four. Our mums… all our mums buy our clothes. Who… who buys your clothes?’

The dealer smiles. ‘Good point, son. Want to get fucked up before our mums come to pick us up?’

Isaac shoots to his feet. ‘Let’s party like it’s … well, right now.’

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Comets, chicks and rapping dicks

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taylorIt wasn’t so long ago that bearded British scientist Matt Taylor, who was involved in a mission to land a probe on a comet, had his reputation steam-hammered into the ground thanks to the shirt he was seen wearing in the videos and pictures released from launch control. It was a colourful shirt emblazoned with artsy, cartoonish images of naked and semi-naked women, the sort of attire beloved by big, bespectacled men in IT departments the world over. People went ape-shit. Nobody cared that this man was helping to push the boundaries of human knowledge through the exploration of celestial bodies hundreds of thousands of miles beyond earth’s orbit; they cared that his shirt, when viewed through the Hubble telescopes of their eyes, appeared to be beaming back images from the 1950s. He was hounded on Twitter. ‘You meteor-shite!’ they snarled. ‘You Star Wars wanker, you mother-hating space rapist!’ (All of those tweets were from me, incidentally) Inevitably, he was forced to appear on television weeping with contrition like some errant child, each individual tear-drop containing a micro-world of apologies for everything from the extinction of the dinosaurs to Citizen Khan being recommissioned.

If that’s the world in which we’re living and evidence of the stern standards we wish to uphold, then fine: let that big bastard’s tears fall from his eyes and form a gushing river of change that will sweep our culture’s misogyny out to sea. As long as the rules are consistent, and punishment for dissent is meted out in parcels of equal size, then I don’t have a problem with that. But that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Before I expand on that, an admission. I’m rather out of touch with the zeitgeist. At home, I only watch TV shows that I’ve specifically sought out on the back of recommendations or internet buzz. I don’t do live TV, so I don’t do soaps, reality TV, talent shows or chat shows. My current in-car CD collection comprises the hits of Bob Dylan, Ray Charles and Johnny Cash. When I’m not listening to golden oldies, Radio 4 is my station of choice. Whenever I venture from my middle-aged comfort zone by scrolling through the other channels, I inevitably catch a blast of contemporary music and find myself moved to the point of murder by the inane, ear-battering mantras besieging my brain (I felt this way even as a teenager – I think some part of me has always been 35). For the same reason, I don’t do music television. (that, and the fact that I’m unhip as fuck) Which is why it came as something of a culture shock to witness a few hours of MTV whilst babysitting at a friend’s house.

rapThat saucy-shirted scientist with whom I kicked off this article was on the brink of being dragged behind a tractor through a field of AIDS-tinged razor blades for his sexually insensitive taste in clobber, and yet most of today’s male music superstars – especially those performing under the urban banner – seem to have built their careers and fortunes upon singing about overpowering, deceiving or manipulating women both socially and sexually.

In one video, a young gentleman decried women for being materialistic whores, whilst wearing a £10,000 watch. In another video, a trio of gentlemen itemised the things they were gong to do to an unspecified woman’s ass with or without her consent, a grimy and depressing little ditty that had the look and feel of a video manifesto for Rape Club (I know, I know, first rule, we shouldn’t talk about it). In yet another video, a sharply-dressed young gentleman with snakes for limbs spent four minutes calling his girlfriend a slut through the medium of song. And yet these guys, far from being derided on Twitter, are celebrated as heroes. It seems that it’s okay to be a retrograde, chauvinistic thug as long as you sing it and don’t put it on a shirt. Plus, singing about pussy is clearly more important to humanity than landing space probes on a moving comet.

rap2

Perhaps Matt Taylor could’ve emerged from the whole fiasco with his dignity intact had he gone on TV and, instead of crying like a big bitch, broken out an angry, sexual rap about the probe mission:

‘You see me comin’, girl, uh,

You see me comin’ through the void of space,

Gonna wreck your place,

Gonna land on you and probe you all up in your face,

Gonna read you girl,

Uh, you need me girl,

Gonna do you hard in full view of the human race.’

And instead of wearing the shirt with the naked ladies on it, he could’ve had actual naked ladies on stage with him, who could’ve rubbed their crotches against his leg as he chucked money at them.

And finally…

dancing-dadWhile I’m here taking an angry shit on the modern world, from which I’ve been displaced since birth, what in the name of God’s hefty testicle has happened to dancing? It would appear that the best way to wow a club dance floor in 2015 is to dance like a man with an itchy arse having a stroke on the moon. This stinks, primarily because that awkward, twitchy-legged spasm has always been my signature dance move. How cruel for this style to come into fashion only once I’m an antediluvian irrelevance who isn’t even allowed to dance at family weddings for fear of unleashing a tornado of shame and embarrassment.

I once perpetrated some dance-moves on the packed floor of a night-club in Magaluf circa 1998. My style was described as ‘top-half 90s, bottom-half 70s’. If I tried that now the description would remain the same, although the numbers would refer instead to literal ages rather than stylistic decades of the 20th century.

You’re not required to dance to Radio 4. I think that’s why I like it so much.

PS: I wrote this while wearing a polo-shirt with vaginas all over it. You mean pictures of vaginas, right? Em… yes?

Of … course.

Goodbye.

Young Jamie: Kindergarten Cock (Part 3)

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Let’s not beat about the bush here: this is one fucked up kids’ party. Not only is there an adult man there who looks like a) a Wild West saloon owner from 1889, or b) the lost member of the Village People, but also there’s a little blonde child perched on a rock with a mighty blue boner sprouting from his stomach. Plus, the moustache guy’s pissed himself. Was he thinking about the blue boner? Or was he thinking about the dead child with the green trousers who’s lying next to him? Jesus, we really knew how to rock and roll when I was 7. IT’S NOT A PROPER PARTY UNTIL THERE’S A DEAD CHILD LYING AT THE FEET OF A MAN WHO LOOKS LIKE HE’S ESCAPED FROM A TINTIN COMIC. Interesting to note that ‘I wasn’t dancing atall all (sic) through the party.’ Not much has changed. This is because when I dance I look like a spasticated sex offender. Sometimes, my top half will be doing a dance from the 1990s, whilst my legs are pulling off moves from the 1970s. Not a pretty sight. I prefer to stand around looking like I’m above it all, but really it’s because I’m conscious that any very limited sex appeal I might have possessed will be eliminated the second I begin dancing. My rhythmic style could charitably be described as ‘disturbingly epileptic.’ Anyway, back at the party I was content to go around ‘pretending to spray people.’ Maybe that was me with the big blue boner…