DMB Digest: Let's All Safety Dance

Sticking it to the Man, forty years later.

The Safety Dance lives! Men Without Hats would be proud. I spotted the Safety Dance in the wild this past Sunday during an NFL game between the Washington Commanders and the Philadelphia Eagles.

Let me back up for those of you who missed my post from last week during which I shallow-dived into the concept of meme (joke) songs from back in my day. By the end of my typical ramble, I had landed on the super awesome music video of The Safety Dance by Men Without Hats. (I mean, wow, it’s a classic eighties music video.) To wrap up my last post, I requested insight from anyone who might be in the know as to the meaning and origin of The Safety Dance.

Thanks to the kind response from a concerned reader (who may or may not be based out of Montréal) I now have the rest of the story! Many thanks to setting me straight. It turns out The Safety Dance was in response to being kicked out of Canadian dance clubs for “pogoing” during the decline of disco (early 1980’s). Pogo-style dancing is the type where you bounce up and down like a rigid pogo stick…but with slight improvisations that may allow for a certain amount of thrashing around. In certain clubs this was seen as an unacceptable risk for the more mainstream disco dancers. (It turns out the greater risk was disco itself.) Or maybe the club owners were afraid they would no longer be able to discern between dancing and serious seizures and other medical conditions?

Anywho, Ivan Doroschuk (the lead singer of Men Without Hats), was apparently thrown out of at least one club for expressing himself in dance. (This happened to me at more than one high school dance, so I know the feeling.) Soon after, he birthed the hit, The Safety Dance.

Fast-forward forty years and I’m sitting on my couch watching the mediocre Philadelphia Eagles (I said it!) beat the stretchy pants off of the terrible Washington Commanders (no one’s gonna even argue this one). And what do I see? In the third quarter, one of the Washington defensive backs (I want to believe he played the position of safety) successfully defended a long pass attempt to a Philadelphia wide receiver. As means of celebration, the Washington player stood in the end zone and performed the Safety Dance! Straight out of the music video! (The main dance gesture is easy to do. Simply hold one arm over your head and the other across your abdomen in a protective manner, and then switch them. It looks like you are trying to protect your most vital organs from the nonsensical hand waving and hip thrusting of disco dancers.)

How is this even possible? The player would have been negative-eighteen-years-old when the song was first written and performed. The obvious answer is that he read my email two days earlier and thus dedicated his noble effort on a terrible team entirely to Men Without Hats in support of their ongoing anti-establishmentarian efforts (not to be confused with the campaign to disestablish the Anglican church of Ireland in the eighteenth century).

On that note, keep sticking it to the man. Fight for your right. Don’t back down. Stay hungry…and any other eighties rock anthem you can think of. Because the Man is gonna try to tell you that your form of dancing is a hazard to everyone around you. That your body odor is a chemical weapon. That your jiggling, loose flab is a dangerous distraction for those operating heavy machinery. Whenever the Man tries to keep you down, you just dance…the Safety Dance.

We can dance if we want to
We've got all your life and mine
As long as we abuse it, never gonna lose it
Everything'll work out right

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

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