something about the beat

(Marc Anthony "Valio La Pena") 

When you were listening, could you sit still?!

Neither could I!

There’s something about this music that just makes you want to move your body, right?!

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture (ie very difficult to describe) but there’s obviously something powerful here that should be acknowledged.

Let’s compare this to a minuet, or a waltz:

It might make you sway a little. (Or maybe, as I found myself doing, make you conduct an invisible orchestra.) But it doesn’t instill the same instinctual pulse, the same carnal desire to move to the beat as that salsa number.

I recently attended an open forum where Dr. Paul Kerry led a discussion on how our (U.S.) society of courtship and dancing has disintegrated from the controlled, statuesque technique of European ballroom, into the base, carnal, sexual movement of our modern social dance (mostly through rock and roll).

In the book “The Closing of the American Mind” by Allan Bloom, the author says that Music is the medium of the human soul. He says, “Music is the soul’s primitive and primary speech and it is without articulate speech or reason…. Even when articulate speech is added, it is utterly subordinate to and determined by the music and the passions it expresses” (71)* So how you use this very powerful medium, hits something in the very soul. 

Dr. Kerry’s theory was that the change came in the percussion. He said there’s something about a drumbeat that innately drives the listener to move their hips. This, of course makes the dance more sexual. But I think it’s more than just the drums. It’s the rhythm—the syncopation, the pulse…

So should everything with a beat be banned from a wholesome campus such as BYU? To prevent urges to break the honor code…? Maybe.

Because obviously there’s something so powerful about this force that needs to be acknowledged.  Something human about this release of tension, this thrust into a world with no rules, with just passion, emotion, and desire: maybe it puts people in Lacan’s realm of the REAL. 

Listen to that song again, just try to stand still. I swear it’s impossible.

*I only have a copy of the chapter, not the citations for the book, but if you wanted to find it, the quote is found in the chapter entitled “music”