"Safety in Numbers"

When I heard that lyric on Madonna’s “I Feel So Free”, I knew why more than one friend was sending me videos of them dancing to Confessions II. Granted they were huge Madonna fans (who I’ve wanted to introduce for years, partly for that very reason) but this album is different - it warrants sharing with friends.

It’s scientific fact that music creates positive shift in our brain (check out my early Sound Bath posts if you want to dig into that). But I think dancing expands that shift into our body. And when you dance with other people, that positive shift opens beyond ourselves. But dancing with strangers can create a chain reaction that makes that positive shift spread at a rate that would make cyclospora jealous.

For a while, I’ve been telling friends that we’re in the midst of a social media comedown. We got hooked on platforms that felt like they were focused on connecting us to our friends, culture, and the larger world around us. But as these platforms took our time, attention, and energy and pushed them towards monetization, they’ve also pushed us to feel isolated and empty and now we’re looking for a fix that we know we can’t get from our phones anymore but we forgot how to get with people who come within inches of us (special shout out to COVID for adding to that fuckery). And I think the dance floor might be the instinctual detox treatment we need to feel the beauty of connecting with each other again.

Not everyone likes to go out dancing or thinks they can dance. But dancing is innate. I had a neighbor who had studied dance and told me babies dance before they walk. That concept hit me again around a year later when I used music to help me recover from an asshole Douglass fir tree that decided to fall on me. I started making playlists of tracks that would keep me sane while I was figuring out how to function in a wheelchair with one working arm. When I made playlists to distract me from the PT routines that made me painfully aware of my new limitations, I focused on dance music. Lying on my back, able to raise my arm for the first time, Basement Jaxx’s “Rendez-Vu” came on and my arm started to move in ways no PT routine could create. It stretched and twisted like it was holding a glow stick in the warehouse party dance floors I grew up on. The 125 bpm reconnected me with memories of my safe space and reconnected my brain with the muscles and tendons that had be dormant for months.

Music is medicine but the dance floor is where it does its best work - healing us individually and collectively, physically and metaphysically. And we need more of that right now. That’s what Confessions II is about. That’s what Madonna wanted to remind us if when she made it. I could hear it within seconds of the first track but it was confirmed in that interview:

“We all talked about feeling like outsiders and how the club life and being on the dance floor make you feel like you’re part of a community, without saying anything. It saves you every time, whenever you’re feeling down, whenever you feel like you can’t get it right, whenever you feel like a failure, whatever. Go out dancing because it will save you.”

Thanks for Reading.

Now go listen to some music.

🫀+ 🎧