Men Without Hats -- The Safety Dance

 

Happy Canada Day and all that! I'm hoping that my fellow Canadian viewers of KKP are enjoying their July 1st from coast to coast to coast. Of course, being a statutory holiday today means that I've got a special round of Reminiscings of Youth.

This all starts with my regular bus ride to high school all the way back in 1982. One of my classmates hopped onto the TTC and saw me. We often commuted together and he always nattered on something irrelevant like one of those "Seinfeld" side characters. This time around, he asked me whether I had ever heard of this song called "The Safety Dance" and proceeded to speak out the first verse:

We can dance if we want to

We can leave your friends behind

'Cause your friends don't dance

And if they don't dance

Well they're no friends of mine

He was rather obsessed about those lyrics as I recall. Anyways, it was some time later when this Montreal-based band called Men Without Hats who had recorded "The Safety Dance" showed off their music video.

In the years to come, whenever I have seen the video, I always wondered whether my university's Society for Creative Anachronism had anything to do with it. Anyways, this was Men Without Hats' 2nd single released sometime in that year of 1982 and at the time, I wasn't all that impressed with it. I guess I was no friend of theirs.

But then as I got more into extended remixes and began hearing them on Saturday night radio broadcasts, I realized that the remix version of "The Safety Dance" sounded pretty good with the focus on the underlying rhythm, the famous bleeping riff (I'm not trying to be profane here) and the singers spelling out "SAFETY". After that, I became a convert to the cause. America became even more of a convert than Canada did in its initial release, since Billboard recorded it reaching No. 3 while in Canada, it didn't even crack the Top 10...it just scraped by at No. 11.

"The Safety Dance" is also one of the best pop culture examples of turning a negative into a positive. Songwriter and singer Ivan Doroschuk had apparently been ousted from a dance club for doing some pogoing or slam dancing one time which he felt was rather unfair. So, in what would perhaps be a form of revenge and therapy, he created "The Safety Dance". As a personal aside, a bunch of us tried some pogoing at a university dance. The results were unfortunately mixed and painful...especially when I jumped in to move my weight around. But in any case, Doroschuk's creation became his band's most famous song...something whose popularity and fame has continued right to this day.

It's been given the affectionate mention in cartoons on either side of the Pacific.

There was even a Men Without Hats conversation channel on Conan!

Heck, even movie and TV dance compilation videos have used it. "The Safety Dance" may have become the most famous Canadian song to be utilized on social media. Wouldn't it be nice if the song got some coast-to-coast-to-coast tributes tonight?

In any case, since I couldn't find out in which month "The Safety Dance" was released, let's just go with July 1982 to find out some of the singles that were released back then.

Aming -- Matsu wa (待つわ）

Hidemi Ishikawa -- Yu-re-te Shonan（ゆ・れ・て湘南）

Akio Kayama -- Hisame （氷雨）