15. Dance Music
It’s a blast of energy, even in the too-pristine version of the song on The Sunset Tree: “All right I’m on JOHNson AVEnue in SAN Luis OBISpo and I’m FIVE years OLD or six MAYbe.” The stresses land on the chord changes (G-C/G-D7/G-G) and the chords change fast; Darnielle sings like he’s talking and Hughes, repeating a G, follows his lead. “And indiCAtions THAT there’s SOMEthing WRONG with OUR new HOUSE” (quick-time, up-and-down melody)—“TRIP down the WIRE twice DAIly” (sudden lift from the rhyme)—“I’m in the LIVing ROOM watching the WAtergate HEARings as my STEPfather YELLS at my MOther” (wait a minute)—“launches a GLASS across the ROOM straight at her HEAD and I DASH up STAIRS to take COVer”—and now the story is on, and Darnielle spreads out the chords so that we can’t miss what he sings next: “Lean in CLOSE to my LITtle record PLAYer on the FLOOR/So THIS is what the VOLume knob’s FOR.” Then, with the last words hanging in the air, the G-C/E-D7/F#-G chorus: “I listen to DANCE MUsic/DANCE MUsic.”
You might think that you know what “I listen to dance music” means, but the more you hear it, the more complicated it gets. It’s about seeking shelter in music, maybe, using it “to drown some of the other stuff out.” Or maybe it’s about dance music in particular, not music in general—or maybe it’s about all of the rhythms that animate and extend you, including the “dance-like rhythm” of “actual, in-the-moment speech.” The second verse doesn’t clear things up. The now-seventeen-year-old speaker and his girlfriend are doing lots of drugs together, and he’s thinking that if she’s going to die from her addiction (There’s only one place this road ever ends up) he’d rather die with her than live without her (I don’t want to die alone). “Let me down, let me down gently,” he sings (probably because he’s using heroin to soften the descent from meth). “When the police come to get me/I’m listening to dance music/Dance music”—because it’s a healthy alternative to romance/heroin? Or because it’s just what he turns to at certain moments, moments that in one way or another jack him up? No way of knowing. To me, though, “Dance Music” doesn’t feel like a song about healthy alternatives; it feels like a song about hyperarousal and everything it fuels. “I don’t like to say this, but it was an exciting time, you know?” Darnielle told the interviewer Terry Gross in 2015. “It’s like I was doing the things that were dangerous and tasting that sort of rare air of doing dangerous things.”
Domestic abuse and reckless drug use don’t magically generate the kind of people who can unambivalently sever their ties to such things. The people who are lucky enough to have emerged from those experiences have breathed a rare air, relatively speaking, and when they stumble out into the common air, they often feel, along with their relief, a sense of bewilderment and loss. Something has to come in to mediate the relationship between the rare and common atmospheres. For the speaker of this song, who is very much like Darnielle himself, dance music is that medium. It’s a highly social kind of music, but it’s also sheer, wordless excitement; it orients you toward other people and toward your own intensity. It can magnetize all of your other excitements, including your worst ones, and enlist them in the service of a danceable, shareable moment. “I listen to music almost constantly now,” Darnielle wrote on Last Plane to Jakarta in November 2003, when he and Lalitree were packing up their apartment in Ames. “It holds me together; it makes me giddy much of the time. Last night I listened to the new Lawrence CD and I almost went insane.” That’s what the volume knob’s for. It helps you over the wall, gets you from one place to another, and, after a while, lets you travel back and forth. It shows you that you don’t have to flee from pleasure and joy when you flee the things that fill you with fear and desperation. That you can lean in close to the things that allow you to make your hyperarousal your own. “This next song is about God’s plan for the salvation of all of us,” Darnielle said before playing “Dance Music” at a show in 2005. “Really.”