Presenting the wildly anticipated second episode of A Word on Swing.
This has been a pretty fun project for us. As you’ll see, it’s still a little rough around the edges (and a little bit on the inside). What you see here, is the sum total of my video editing experience as I’m treating this video blog as a learning opportunity.
This is why I don’t post off the cuff that often, because I forgot a whole section of thoughts I wanted to include in my last post. I talked about why DJ’s can and have to play lots of unfamiliar stuff.* Simply because if they don’t then everyone stagnates. The dancing, the music, your breath, your mom's breath etc. However, I've come to realize that it’s easy to forget that most people that come to a dance very rarely listen to this music outside of the dance floor. Many don’t listen to it at all. The few that do probably just have those well worn hits that they really like, and they get excited to dance to those same tunes when good dance partners are around.
I DJ'd for for my friend Gretta Thorn's (Now Gretta Thorn Stone) wedding a few weeks ago. She's one of the founding members of The Jam Cellar. And even though there were a good amount of dancers there, she wanted to keep the rest of the guests comfortable, so me and my DJ'ing partner for the evening, Luke Albao ended up playing the the wedding party greatest hits for the night. That's the reason why the last song appears on the playlist below. We had a lot of fun strategizing how to get from "Twist and Shout" to "Celebration" while working in a Madonna song in there. We thought people might think we were being too cliche, but they were having too much fun to notice. At the end of the night Nina Gilkenson told me that she hadn't danced that hard in a long long time. This coming from a woman who gets flown out to a big dance event every other weekend. This got me to thinking about why those songs are popular and also about Lindy Hop's own hit parade.
