“I can't imagine anything but music that could have brought about this alchemy.  Maybe it's because music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, your breath.  We're walking temples of noise and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way.”
Anne LaMott “Traveling Mercies”

Picture two different scenarios.  The first is a dance fitness class - 40 people in a big room with the sound system cranked several notches above loud.  The participants range in age from kid to great-grand and they are dancing simple routines to a series of songs that are about 70% Latin and 30% songs the instructor loves and wants to jam up for the crowd.  It's a Zumba class; Zumba being one of the dances based fitness classes that are the current hot trend.  This is my class and for one of my “30%” we do hip-hop meets funk with some kickbox kicks thrown in to Euge Groove's "Get 'Em Goin'."  It gets 'em goin'.  Everybody is sweaty, stomping, yelling and in party mode.  After class, they will ask about the music, including "that funky saxophone thing."  Segue to scene two.  It is a meeting room at a chain hotel.  The walls are soundproof beige panels; the carpet is brown.  A group of people sits in folding chairs at banquet tables.  A clean cut moderator in a shirt and tie plays a series of extremely short clips from songs they may or may not know.  They either turn a knob from side to side or fill out a grid to rate the songs.  After the first 50 or so most of them start to glaze over, fidget, and shift to autopilot.  They don't ask what any of the songs were, they're too shell shocked by the pace and the process of "grading" to care.

Scene one sends people home to fire up their computers and search for songs to buy.  Scene two sends them to the drugstore to search for headache meds.  But you can guess which one matters the most to the music industry.  The scores that songs get on these tests have been the basis for music selection at radio stations for over two decades.  At first, these numbers were one of a group of factors that were considered.

Sales, requests, watching people at clubs and concerts, street team feedback and an even intuition and instinct were also taken into account.  Over the years, it has turned completely into a numbers game.  Internet buzz, hits on social networking sites, download sales, screaming crowds, spikes in sales after TV appearances, those things don't count.  Just cold numbers generated by a group of people who were totally distanced from any element of the way they normally experience music.  Who experiences music by sitting in a sterile room listening to some stranger play seven seconds of a series of songs?  Dancing to them, well that's something else entirely!

When people start dancing something wonderful happens.  They bond with the songs they are dancing to and as they hear and enjoy more types of music, they start to step out of their personal safety zones.  People who would hit the button the second a hip-hop song came on the radio and start to look at the door when the song starts in class are swept into the dance that goes with it.  Avowed skeptics wander into a Gospel/Praise dance class and find themselves moved by the music they are moving to.  As for my sneaky smooth jazz songs, Euge's and Steve Oliver's "Festevo," that billboard the energy drink company put up a few years ago covers the reaction most of the group would use if I tried to get them to voluntarily do a "smooth jazz" search on iTunes. But give 'em a stomp, slide, kick, or basic salsa and they're on their way. When we step into the currently trendy group of classes based on international music - Zumba, Masala Bhangra, Drum and Dance, and others - it gets even more interesting. When the language changes their biases drop away even faster. Women who are straight down the center of the "Lite" station's target demographic get caught up in learning the dance that goes with "Whine Up" when it's the Spanish version that is coming out of the speakers. I've seen men who are all business by day shake what they didn't even know they had at a drum and dance jam at a local club on a Friday night. You never know what you'll get caught up in when you don't have a chance to analyze it and filter it through a collection of preconceptions.

Have we lost touch with the spirit of the music as it has become necessary to turn everything into numbers and visualize it only as grids and pie charts? In the analytical mode, only the safest and most generic elements survive because the only thing that works in that context is what has already been done. You can't analyze what hasn't happened yet and you can't represent emotion with a number or a chart. Music evokes feelings. When music is designed to pass through this series of research-based filters, it takes on deepening shades of neutrality. Music that is designed to not affect the listener causes people to lose interest in music. I don't even want to think about how pressure to create neutral music affects the musicians who are expected to play it. Music is physical, music is emotional. When you dance, you throw your body into the song and all those little filters shut down for a while.

 My wish for you for this coming year is that you go to a concert, dance class, or party, shed some self-consciousness and just move like the music tells you to. When you do that, all those filters start to fall away and every time you let the music get under your skin you leave a few more of those filters behind. When neutrality falls out of fashion, the exciting music that has gone underground will start to resurface. So shake a tail feather and shake it loose. It's time!

-Shannon West