With its propulsive opening and declarative lyrics, Males With out Hat’s “The Safety Dance” stays an plain hit. A membership floor-filler with an anti-establishment bent. The “man” on this case? Membership bouncers who had no time for New Wave’s misfits.
In 1982, the pop music panorama was altering. Disco was on its manner out, and New Wave had sprung as much as take its place. This was under no circumstances a easy translation, and together with a brand new type of music got here a brand new subculture and magnificence of dancing. As an alternative of disco’s easy two-step actions, New Wave followers began pogoing – leaping up and all the way down to the music – and bouncers thought of this act a hazard to different dancers.
The music’s origins
Ivan Doroschuk, frontman of Canadian New Wave act Males With out Hats, was one of many many pogoers who struggled to have their strikes tolerated by membership safety. “Every now and then [DJs would] slip in Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’ or ‘Rock Lobster’ by The B-52’s [to their sets],” he instructed Pop Tradition Addict in 2012. “Well, obviously, anybody who was into that kind of music would rush on the dance floor and start jumping up and down and would bang into the guys trying to do their disco two steps. I got thrown out of a lot of clubs because of that.”
Aggravated that he wasn’t being allowed tips on how to dance how he needed to, Doroschuk turned to the medium he knew finest to protest and penned “The Safety Dance,” the band’s first huge hit. “We can dance if we want to/We can leave your friends behind, the singer declared in its opening lines. “‘Cause your friends don’t dance, and if they don’t dance/Well, they’re no friends of mine.”
Doroschuk initially conceived of Males With out Hats as a punk outfit, however because the music world shifted, so did the band.
“I just realized that pop music was one of the biggest platforms for getting a message across. So I made the switch from punk guitars to New Wave synthesizers for that reason,” Doroschuk shared within the 2016 guide, Is This Reside?: Contained in the Wild Early Years of MuchMusic: The Nation’s Music Station.
The observe was launched in 1982 because the second single from Males With out Hats’ debut album, Rhythm Of Youth. Though it took a number of months for the music to turn out to be a success in Canada and the US, it will definitely climbed up the charts in each nations. At residence, the music peaked at No.11, whereas it did even higher stateside, reaching No.3 and spending 24 weeks on the Billboard Sizzling 100.
Completely different interpretations
Because the success of “The Safety Dance” grew, so did completely different interpretations of the music’s that means. Some thought it was a euphemism for protected intercourse, whereas others – impressed by the imagery within the music video – presumed it to be an anti-nuclear protest music. In 2020, Doroschuk defined the previous interpretation was incorrect, whereas the latter wasn’t strictly true. “It wasn’t a question of just being anti-nuclear, it was a question of being anti-establishment,” he instructed The Sudbury Star.
Like many hits of the 80s, the worldwide reputation of “The Safety Dance” was pushed by the music video, directed by Tim Pope, who made a reputation for himself helming movies for The Treatment and Discuss Discuss. Through the pre-internet days and period of expensive worldwide calls, Doroschuk and Pope mentioned the video’s script and coverings by mail, the place they each settled on the concept of Doroschuk as a pied-piper character.
The band then swapped the woods of Mount Royal in Montreal for the English countryside and decamped to the city of West Kington, Wiltshire. Pope leaned closely into the situation and included extra British imagery into the video, together with conventional Morris dancers, a Punch and Judy sideshow, and even a maypole. It was this unlikely setting and Doroschuk’s Medival look that set the band other than their pointy-shoe sporting and completely coiffed New Wave friends.
Within the intervening many years since its launch, “The Safety Dance” has maintained its standing as a cult hit. In 1984, “Weird Al” Yankovic parodied it along with his music “The Brady Bunch,” and it was later inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Corridor Of Fame in 2020, alongside Males With out Hats’ most profitable single, 1987’s “Pop Goes The World.”
“I’m very honored,” Doroschuk instructed The Sudbury Star on the time. “It’s just hard to describe. It amazes me every time something like this happens — whether it’s the hall of fame, or popping up in commercials and movies, I’m always amazed [those songs are] still going […] It’s a bit surreal, for sure, but I’ll take it.”
Purchase or stream “The Safety Dance.”
