Slow dancing with a burning cheek

On basement house parties, early intimacy, and memories left unrecorded

My first real slow dance was in grade 7, with a pretty brown-haired girl named Cia who apparently “liked” me, which was the lingo of the time for having a crush on someone.

I’m certainly mis-remembering parts of it, but the story I’ve settled on is that it was at a house party in Heather Harkness’ parents’ basement. One of Heather’s older brothers, lurking upstairs and having had enough of the agonizing awkwardness of what was going on, came down to teach us all how to slow dance: Put on a song; girls hands go here, boys hands go there, turn clockwise in a slow circle till it’s over.

And so it was that I found myself standing in front of Cia Christensen, reaching out with my arms locked like some middle school Frankenstein. She adjusted my hands, pulled me a little closer, put a hand on my left shoulder and leaned her chin on my right. I couldn’t tell you what song was playing; whatever it was was drowned out by a roaring waterfall in my ears. All I remember is how unexpectedly warm it all felt, her breath hot on my neck, her cheek burning against mine.

Slow dancing became a staple of our collective adolescent awakening, in that shoulder season between the indifference of childhood and the anxious, alcohol-fueled dramas of our later teenage years. It is hard to overstate the way it has burrowed itself into my memories of that period, in a way that managed to be both shockingly intimate and surprisingly innocent. Slow dancing almost never led to anything more; boys and girls would come together, twist in a circle for four or five minutes, then move apart as if it had never happened. It was a prelude to other things, of course, but those wouldn’t come for a few years yet.

If the trendspotters are to be believed, slow dancing among Gen Alphas has pretty much died out. Writing for Billboard, Kyle Denis chronicled the “evolution” (i.e. gradual disappearance) of the practice a few years ago, largely through interviews with DJs who had been observing how the risky intimacy of slow dancing had given way to a more ironically sexualized set of dance floor moves, mostly twerking. In a widely-circulated essay in the Globe and Mail last December, the Kelowna writer Kelly Young picked up on a report from her Grade 8 niece, who told her they never played slow songs at school dances, and she hadn’t once slow danced with someone she likes.

This is not necessarily a problem, or anything to remark upon for reasons other than misplaced nostalgia. I’ve never been to a sock hop, danced the jitterbug, or taken a girl to the soda shop for a milkshake, and I don’t feel like I missed out on anything crucial. Youth culture changes quickly, and the norms around boy-girl interaction and how intimacy is negotiated and navigated are so specific to a time and place they can be completely opaque to the olds. In a lot of ways, that opacity is precisely the point.

What is concerning though are the reasons why slow dancing seems to have gone the way of acid wash jeans and leg warmers. As the Billboard story reports, part of it has to do with changing tastes in music — lovey-dovey power ballads or romantic R&B stuff giving way to more raw and blatantly sexualized themes. At the same time, there is some evidence that the changing politics of gender is an issue, as Gen Alpha recoils from the way the “traditionally binary-gendered exercise of slow dancing leaves out many people.”

But more than anything, the culprit seems to be that ever-present companion of our analog lives, the smartphone, and the new dimension it brings to the proceedings. Kids today live in a constant fear of being what they call “cringe” — to be the object of second hand embarrassment on the part of their peers. Almost any type of behaviour can be cringe, it just has to violate any one of the mess of unwritten norms around social media behaviours, such as a lack of self-awareness or social awkwardness, showing excessive emotion, or just being a pick-me or a try-hard.

That’s not a new thing, by any stretch. Every youth culture has its tacit rules around appropriate public behaviour, which almost always sets limits on what is an acceptable amount of earnestness and enthusiasm one is allowed to demonstrate. But what is different today is that cringe-inducing behaviour, however incidental or limited, can be filmed and edited and shared for all the world to see. It is one thing to have your friends in laugh as they watch you trying to slow dance with a girl six inches taller than you; it is another thing entirely to have the episode shared and edited and stitched into a hundred different reaction videos on TikTok.

In short: kids don’t slow dance, because they are afraid of being filmed slow dancing.

This is a small aspect of a more general social shift. We are only in the earliest stages of the 360 degree 24/7 surveillance panopticon we’re building for ourselves, and its full implications for all of society will play out for years to come. But for kids, the problems are immediate and acute. As Kyle Denis puts it, slow dancing was such a culturally important experience because of how it funnelled “heightened levels of intimacy and vulnerability into core memories — a phenomenon that is harder for Gen Z to cultivate because of the unprecedented omnipresence of technology in their lives.”

It is precisely that combination of intimacy and vulnerability that was enabled by those basement house parties that were the major signposts of middle school. Periodically through the year, someone would announce they were having a party, which meant that about twenty of us, more or less equally divided between boys and girls, would show up on a Saturday night, mumble hello to the parents, then troop down to the basement for a few hours.

Nothing much happened at these parties. The boys would talk about sports, the girls would take turns crying. There would be chips and pop. We would maybe watch a movie or some videos, but mostly we would listen to music, lip syncing or trying out moves from music videos or deciphering the hidden meanings in the album’s liner notes.

Those basements were bubbles of safety where were were hidden from the prying eyes of parents, teachers, and other classmates, and where the terror of risk and experimentation was buffered by the security of knowing that nothing really bad could happen. We didn’t do much, partly because we didn’t know what to do. Whatever hormonal and psychological stirrings were happening in our early adolescent brains and bodies, they had no clear target or outlet.

That is, until we were taught to slow dance. But even then, the best that could happen was that you’d spend a few minutes in awkward and experimental intimacy with someone you maybe sorta kinda liked. The worst was… the same thing. For those few moments in those few years, to slow dance was to be balanced on a knife edge between play acting grownup behaviour we barely understood, and stepping through a portal to something that would eventually prove to be far more fraught, for better and, more often, for worse.

The memory I have of my first slow dance is so strong precisely because it is so incomplete. No recording exists, no one can modify or correct it. All that’s left are a few images and a burning cheek, reshaped by forty odd years of remembering it into something that is entirely mine. And that is ultimately what Gen Alpha is being robbed of: that private and personal challenge of stepping uncertainly toward another person, into an experience that belongs only to them, unverifiable, unchallenged, and unshared.

---

From the X-Files

• From the WSJ, Generation X goes to the Moon begins with the observation that all four of the Artemis II astronauts were Gen Xers, and explores what that means for a generation traumatized by the Challenger disaster.

• In a sign of shifting political winds, the new premier of Quebec is a Gen Xer, as are all of her rivals. Speaking of Quebec, Melissa Auf der Mar’s book Even the Good Girls Will Cry is part rock memoir, part love letter to the Montreal of the 1990s.

• CFNY: The Spirit of Radio is a TVO documentary about the Toronto radio station that defined alternative and indie culture in the eighties and nineties.