Supernatural Delight

The Future Sound - "The Function"

It's not as if one strange day people just stopped dancing to rap music, but one strange day people just stopped dancing to rap music. They didn't stop jamming or bopping, naturally. But at some point in early '92 everyone* stopped Roger Rabbit-ing the fuck all over their parents' cluttered dining-living rooms. Compliance was universal yet unheralded, like when caramel Carhartt quilted duck jackets became standard issue stomp-out wear. The word spread without alphanumeric memos relayed across the mighty skypager nation. Brimstone announcements never seared the pages of Right On! and not one creepshow PSA screaming the body grotesquerie was aired either. For once, relevant murals weren't vomited onto multi-use handball courts and ballistics went simply unkicked - the word spread even though porcelain cat statues were the only group that saw an immediate benefit.

Contrary to pervasive wisdom, the uncanny style reversal depicted in Special Ed's "Neva Go Back" video may qualify as valid ethnographic reportage -- people really do toss their ragged traditions aside at the crash of a comet. Monday's child was a whirlwind pyramid of tacky Marshalls-scrambled nylon, his low-cut fade sneaking halfway to porcupine bushy and what? Come Tuesday, he's more the geometrically tapered screw-faced lout keeping comically intense vigil over lofty Nike Air 180s. In hazy prehistoric sixth grade, a fifty cent toothbrush and a leaky C.H. Martin steam iron was enough to warn inconsiderate jinns to ease back. Homespun vendettas and internecine beefs were obscured and gradually knotted together with looming, ancient entanglements in which whole sections and eras got yoked up and even bisected by piano wire skyways.

The notion that scuffs and creases were worthy of  attention (let alone retaliation) lived a trillion country miles from a palatable grammar school outcome (e.g., freaking the girls from Bayway to the "Bonita Applebum" remix), but the rush to denounce difference got played out hard in junior high. Sundry cliques of willfully indeterminate origins that had previously agreed to blend nicely (or were simply too young to squabble over subtle mitochondrial differences) must have forgotten how to act. The incompatibly layered variegated housing stock loops that flickered across my scratchy bus window view for the whole length of Broad Street since kindergarten ached with upheaval. Every architectural wrinkle within a wrinkle, no matter how austere or hearth-like, signaled danger in meandering dialects. Toxic, superlocal alien ways of life seemed liable to leak out and fuck up the ozone layer without audible provocation.

Our surroundings felt less like the virginal wonderland promised by the cover art of Tribe's debut and more like an atrophied enclave of real-time aggression. In second grade we slaughtered hundreds of invisible Apaches and Russians in the courtyard of our low-rise apartment complex but these atrocities were not linked to a version of history that mattered to us. Any herb walking the streets clasping the idea that he could start shit with the Polo-clad Trinidadians from the semi-detached houses near Jefferson Park was asking for trouble. Doubly so if he planned to live long enough to post high as the Northside garden apartment bubble vest Boricuas and then sleep soundly while the Guess-boosting midtown morenos from the co-ops plotted his demise. Your personal enemy list was rearranged as frequently as the grapes, sevens, and bars on the A.C. slots and you were advised, however hyperbolically, to keep up or catch a bad one.

Our parents, teachers, and older siblings served up tawdry, unverifiable just-so stories about our neighbors' basest behaviors, dousing our pubescent instinct to mingle with a paranoia so burdensome and fatiguing that the coldest bop quickly killed off every lingering dance craze. It was easier to stand and nod - your kicks stayed clean and beats started slowing down and coarsening anyhow. For this transformation to have occurred (and it did), it seems perfectly logical to believe that one strange day people must have started dancing to rap music (and they did). Imagining how this originary moment went down is a beautiful, aimless pleasure. Attempting to generate consensus on your conjecture, however, is a bad parlor game in purgatory - catch yourself telling the wrong narrative in the wrong neighborhood to the wrong natives and you'll never hear the end of it. From the uprock to the running man, everyone has their own overdetermined theory of origin and decline, though I'm reasonably sure that breakdancing was dead by '87 at the latest (my friend Alex from East New York crazily insists it was alive and loitering until late '89 but fuck that).

If the fantastic romantic fables of the rec room era are to be trusted (and they aren't), the Herculords (preceded by The Nigger Twins and later supplanted by the Rock Steady Crew) ruled a vast empire of mountains, savannah, and forests that was further divided into twelve autnomously administered kingdoms which co-existed for centuries in prosperity under a truce that was made possible by a universal recognition that the spirit of Afrika-Asia or Akebulan spins counterclockwise on the blank linoleum of the wicked North American Wilderness much like the windmills in your mind after being summoned to revolutionary motion by the late great style master general W.D. Fard Muhammad who ended the hideous in-fighting of the barbaric negro clubs with a freeze later dubbed "The Missing Sphinx Nose" which we all know hastened the creation of the last great social programs of the 20th century and completed the meta-cipher of the Age of Aquarius by coalescing every dance style from the lindy-hop to the east coast stomp to the superman dat hoe into one vainglorious movement of movements.

But no amount of coherent research explains how The Running Man and its cousins went extinct (recent ironic fascination does not constitute a resurrection). At the time it was bothersome to envision turning fifteen and going through the hassle of obtaining a fake ID, only to arrive at some fabled spot and find the party people more into ice grille-ing than throwing game at snotty Queens girls. Like the garish and sheltered crew from Hangin' With The Homeboys, we remained hopeful against an ocean of contrary indications but preliminary reports from those old enough to sneak into The Tunnel suggested that the basic two step, a dance so easy and non-committal that permanently volatile thugs could do it calmly, would prevail well into the first decade of the 20th century (and it did). However foolishly, I dreamed and imaginated an alternate universe where good folks got down in peace to the likes of The Future Sound's "The Function," a beautiful little '92 ditty by one the first acts managed by Damon Dash (he gets dissed by an Afrocentric college girl in the video for their one minor hit) which contains the indisputable axiom "dance can't be fatal if you really think about it."

"The Function" is an album cut with an obvious sample from a New Rochelle-based group that played second fiddle to Original Flavor and lacked a Hilfiger endorsement, so the song never rocked a party. The only reason I hold it in high esteem (their mostly ignored, highly creative album has at least ten better tracks) is because its plea for peace is a kindred spirit to King Harvest's "Dancing In The Moonlight," a song my father included on the eclectic mixtapes he'd compile for road trips to visit relatives in Southside Williamsburg or Hartford. Me and my sister loved the song so much that we invented its back story: we heard the soulful, vaguely Southern affectation as pointing to a humble Tennessee origin, thinking that perhaps some Bill Withers cover band made good. We were hilariously far off the mark. I longed for a legitimate rap version and assumed that Prince Paul would eventually bring the idea to fruition. "The Function" will have to suffice until a party groove that doesn't contain vocals from some brooding wallflower with a gun catches on - until then I'll just favorite these jams in iTunes and try to pinpoint the day my contemporaries became so quick to denounce rap's millenial return to danceability with a fire in their beer bellies unseen since Yusef Hawkins' slaying.