teamsweeting

This is why I don’t take it lightly that everyone talks about Ellen Willis testing her records by dancing in front of her mirror. Dancing is often belittled because it’s seen as an anti-intellectual response to music, plus it’s something girls like to do. But it’s actually a great way to evaluate your records, especially if what you’re searching for is the experience of freedom that rock and roll promises. Rock music lied when it claimed to tell women, “Fuck the rules.” Instead, rock generated its own set of intricate rules, which—as historically has been the case with rules—came down hard on women. Though the mosh pit is praised as a safe place where you can take out your frustration and aggression in ways unacceptable in the outside world, the pit just recreates the oppression it pretends to disavow. It has a code of etiquette and a visible structure—necessities given the brutality at its core. You can’t get to the center of the action unless you’re willing to injure and be injured. You’re obliged to pick people up, but that’s just because you’re knocking them down in the first place. Dancing, on the other hand, is anarchic. The structure of a dance floor is fluid: you can dance from one person to the next, you can ignore people, and you can take up space, publicly insisting on your own pleasure without turning it into a fight. I like to imagine dancing as the physical representation of the filtering process we use to mold music to our fantasies; when I dance, I am living the self that could be.

Erin Sheehy “Rocks Off” for n+1