Twerking: It’s not like we didn’t see it coming Subtle is something we don’t see much of these days. And no, it’s not because it’s being practiced to perfection, either. That said and not that anyone asked, but I’d like to weigh in on the twerking thing. It was about 10 years ago at a wedding reception where I first encountered this thing called twerking. Not that size matters, but I saw some rather large young women twerking; some side-by-side, others rump-to-rump and all of them totally absorbed in themselves. Don’t recall any fully extended tongues a la Miley Cyrus, but a few did manage to swig beer from a 10 ounce can while bent at the waist – and put it down again without spilling any. Thongs revealed in the process were, no doubt, the coup de gras. And it’s an image, like happening upon a car wreck that I still can’t shake from my head all these years later. In my naiveté, I just thought their twerking was a result of overindulgence combined with misplaced youthful exuberance. Misplaced in that they were doing it at a wedding reception, and not behind closed dorm room doors or in a gentlemen’s club. But the worst thing about it was the expressions of the grandparents and great-grandparents. They looked like a litter of lost puppies that mistakenly wandered onto the interstate during rush hour. Apparently, the time and place rule of etiquette never occurred to these young twerkers at that wedding reception. Do not take me for a prude; nor am I throwing stones. Dancing and people have always pushed the envelope, sometimes painfully and embarrassingly so. Heck, I’ve probably done both myself dancing to Cajun music and zydeco. As a kid, I remember my older teenage sister talking about the ‘Dirty Dog’– face-to-face hip-gyrating on the dance floor that was considered provocative at the time. And in a few years, The Bump emerged during the Disco era that resulted in bruised hips and occasional summer romances. And we also slow-danced to slow songs – formerly known as belly-rubbing music – and no doubt consumed by the motion, we even lip-locked in public, too. Twice in my life I’ve seen a woman drop to her knees on the dance floor; lay back and thrust her pelvis and pump her arms as if she’d just scored a goal in a World Cup soccer match. And about three years ago at a post-blues festival near Greenville, Miss., I watched an inebriated middle-aged woman suggestively dance alone until an equally inebriated middle-aged man paired up with her. They danced very, very close and then they sort of stumbled about and ended up on the ground where they continued to dance with their clothes on. Even today in our homegrown music, I’ve seen people dance to zydeco and to Cajun waltzes with steps that aren’t for the faint of heart. It shows that dance steps to the same tunes can run in a parallel universe with the different generations and, yes, even at the same time. But going back further than back in the day, the Limbo walked the line of overt/covert suggestiveness – depending on how low you can go. Call it reverse twerking, if you will and if you honestly think about it. So, twerking, while seemingly obnoxious and attention-getting and even revolting to some, remember every generation has had a way of tweaking the senses of the one that came before it on the dance floor. Twerkinng? While we ain’t seen nothing yet, we’ve seen it all before.
Posted on: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 22:45:29 +0000
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