Ribbons and Bows - Kacey Musgraves
I like a nice pop song: a cheerful and repetitive beat, simple and catchy hooks, and a few clever lines if you decide to pay attention to the lyrics. This song lasts a pop-perfect three-and-a-half minutes. It samples laughter and handclaps. It’s a bit basic, maybe, but that’s kind of the point? It’s supposed to be easy to follow; you’re supposed to sing and dance along.
A friend and I have been watch-partying through an online music theory/appreciation course, which at one point contrasted different kinds of simplicity in three songs, including some Bill Withers blues. I appreciated the lecturer’s point that, sure, there’s not much interesting formal melodic analysis to be done on Bill Withers (the melody has like four notes) but that’s beside the point. The song isn’t aiming for an interesting melody, it’s using repetition and simplicity to guide you into “a profanely meditative groove”.
I’ve been dancing more this year. The aforementioned endless-flick of tiktoks is partly responsible, but, also, in a year where too few things can be relied upon to feel good, dancing delivers. Club Quarantine worked. If the song has a solid groove, if I actually let myself move to it, and even if my friends are just pixel-blurs in a laptop zoom window―dancing feels good. Maybe the real fun was in my body all along.
It seems like a lot of the white anglosphere (hello, it is my culture) grows up without a ton of dancing for the joy of it. I’m not sure why. Some Christian traditions oppose dancing, but two of my grandparents met at a dance in a church basement, so that feels like it can’t be the full story. I helped to build a wooden dance floor for a friend’s backyard, but it was surprisingly hard to fill it up. I’ve been to a lot of bars where the ratio of nodding along to the beat and truly throwing down was… disappointing. Does dancing feel better for me than for other people? Or are we just self-consciously denying ourselves the pleasure of it?
I don’t have a good theory here, but if you find this song as catchy as I do, maybe try dancing to it?
Swaying my hips to the handclaps,
—Tessa