How to pogo dance
Debbie Harry Demonstrates the Punk Pogo Dance for a U.S. Audience (1978)
in Music | September 16th, 2020 5 Comments
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Each generation takes what it needs from early punk and discards what it doesn’t, so that countless subgenres have descended from a small, eccentric collection of punk bands from the late 1970s. The speed and brute simplicity of the Ramones took over in the 80s. The Clash’s strident, reggae-inflected anthems guided much of the 90s. The angular art rock and new wave disco of Television, Talking Heads, and Blondie defined the 2000s.
But some things became almost terminally passé, or terminally stupid, after punk’s first wave: like signing to major labels or wearing swastikas, ironically or otherwise. Already out of fashion by 1978, the first punk dance, the pogo, was so tragically unhip that Debbie Harry pronounced it dead on arrival in the U.S. on famed Manhattan cable access show TV Party, above. She offers to demonstrate it anyway as a “historical” artifact.
Her commentary seems like both a sarcastic rip on the ridiculous spread of trends and a genuine warning to those who might try to make this, like, a thing in New York. Don’t bring a creaky pogo stick with you to the club. Do pour beer over your head after a sweaty half-hour of whatever dance you do. There was so much to learn about punk etiquette even then. Unless you happened to be Sid Vicious, or in the audience of the first Sex Pistols shows. Then it was all fair game.
The pogo originated, so the lore goes, with Sid.
As Steve Severin of Siouxsie and the Banshees remembers it, “We first met [Sid] at one of the concerts. He began bouncing around the dance floor, the so called legend of the pogo dance. It was merely Sid jumping up and down, trying to see the band, leaping up and down because he was stuck in the back somewhere.” Just as everyone who saw the Sex Pistols started their own band, everyone who saw Sid bounce around started to pogo.
What at first looks like harmless fun, especially compared to the brutal mosh pits that took over for the pogo, was anything but. “Pogoing was very violent and very painful,” one eyewitness remembers. “People were not quite crushed to death, but serious injuries occurred.” We might rethink Men Without Hats’ “The Safety Dance,” the 80s hit written in defense of pogoing. Lead singer Ivan Doroschuk penned the tune after he was kicked out of a club for doing the pogo. “I think people can relate to the empowering kind of message of ‘The Safety Dance,’” he says.
“The Safety Dance” would not have been the empowering worldwide smash it was had it been called “Pogo Dancing,” a minor hit for the Vibrators in 1976. Not nearly as iconic, and overshadowed by a hipper dance of the same name in the 80s, was the robot, elegized by The Saints in “Doing the Robot.” This dance was “both more expressive and less spontaneous,” as cultural theorist Dick Hebdige describes it in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, consisting of “barely perceptible twitches of the head or hands or more extravagant lurches (Frankenstein’s first steps?) which were abruptly halted at random points.” Hardly as practical as the pogo, but probably a lot safer.
via Boing Boing
Related Content:
How Blondie’s Debbie Harry Learned to Deal With Superficial, Demeaning Interviewers
A Short History of How Punk Became Punk: From Late 50s Rockabilly and Garage Rock to The Ramones & Sex Pistols
The 100 Top Punk Songs of All Time, Curated by Readers of the UK’s Sounds Magazine in 1981
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Follow him at @jdmagness
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Back To Top Sources used in this page are personal recollections and Rotten - No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, You'll never be 16 again - Peter Perrett. Photos by Annette Weatherman and Erica Echenberg of pogoing down the Roxy Club. |
People were not quite crushed to
death, but serious injuries occurred. If you've got a hundred people all
jumping up and down very frenetically together, you're going to get
people hurt, and that was part of it. I was frightened of pogoing except
with people that I knew well, because it was dangerous. Yes, performers
leaping off the stage into the crowd and glasses being thrown and
instruments being thrown. It was all very violent and very dangerous,
and thats why I think it was so attractive to people."
"
But it just don't look
so good and is only for the uninspired or faint hearted. So come on you Punks lets see a bit more pogoing
at the gigs! Not that drunken, shuntin' or even
worse...standing still like statues. You'll have a good
laugh in the process and within a few 45's you'll
have mastered it. Fuck what the rest of the bores think, real punk music demands
it. There are some things in
Punk Rock you just can't assimilate!
..was
both more expressive and less spontaneous ....It
consisted of barely perceptible twitches of the head and
hands or more extravagant lurches (Frankenstein's first
steps ?) which were abruptly halted at random points. The
resulting pose was held for several moments, even
minutes, and the whole sequence was a suddenly, as unaccountably,
resumed and re-enacted." Hebdige - Subculture:meaning &
StylePogo (dance) - frwiki.wiki
For articles of the same name, see Pogo.
Spectators dance pogo during the concert.
Pogo is a dance that appeared around 1976 in which the dancers jump up and down in disarray while pushing each other. Pogo gets its name from its similarity to the use of the pogo stick , especially in the common version of the dance where the dancer keeps the torso still, arms still, and legs close together. Pogo is associated with punk rock and is a precursor to mosh.
Pogo was invented by Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols: although he wasn't part of the band, he would have attended one of his shows. To see better, he desperately jumped up and down: people quickly began to imitate him.
The origin of the pogo dates back to the mid-1970s, even if the term comes from the jumper invented by the Germans Polyg and Gottshall in Hannover in the 1920s. Sid Vicious, bassist of the famous Sex Pistols, credits himself with inventing dance during the first concerts at 1976 year.
Summary
- 1 story
- 2 Style
- 3 variants
- 4 links
- 5 source
- 6 External links
History
Pogo is a dance of the punk movement.
In the documentary "Indecency and Fury" (subtitled "The Real Story of the Sex Pistols" ), bassist Sid Vicious claims he invented the pogo around 1976 during punk concerts in London. It was a way to play a prank on people who came to see the Sex Pistols but weren't part of the punk movement. Gradually, other viewers began to imitate him.
Shane McGowan of The Pogues, himself an early adopter of the punk movement, also attributes the pogo dance to Sid Vicious, claiming that the leather poncho he wore to concerts prevented him from dancing other than "jumping up and down". In his autobiography “ Clothes, clothes, clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, boys, boys. Viv Albertin, guitarist for The Slits, claims that pogo is inspired by the way Sid played the saxophone while jumping.
Style
Mosh practice during the concert.
The basic movements are open to interpretation, some of which may seem rather abrupt. Pogo dancers have a choice:
- Keep your torso still or bump into each other
- Keep your arms straight at your sides or wave them
- Keep your feet together or kick with your feet
- Jump up and down, jump forward and backward, or spin in the air.
Sometimes the dancers collide, but this is not necessarily part of the pogo dance. An uninformed observer might get the impression that the dancers are attacking each other.
Sometimes dancers get injured, but more often when they fall to the ground, they are helped not to stomp.
Similar to the more aggressive hardcore punk that emerged in the early 1980s, the dance becomes more violent and turns into a mosh (or slam dance): the dancers run and jump around them, deliberately pushing and bumping into each other.
Variants
Pogo spawned different variants:
- Layer : also called "body surfing", then to move from the stage and be carried by crowds, lying on the hands of the population.
- Scuba diving stage : swimming from the stage into the crowd in order to perform helmet .
- Wall of Death (Wall of Death or Braveheart or even War ): The pit splits into two, and at the signal of the singer most often, both sides rush and meet with force. The bands Dagoba, Disturbed, Black Bomb A, Trepalium or even TRIVIUM organize it regularly during their concerts and the band Caliban organized a huge one during the edition of Wacken 2006 Same for the hip band. th step of Foreign Beggars, on the last day of Dour Festival 2010: they organized two brave hearts , which was named " split " for the occasion, referring to the album by the Dutch band Noisia: Split the Atom . Most recently, French band Mass Hysteria released one for their latest song during their concert on the main stage of Hellfest 2013.
- Circle pit : all public turns in the same direction, usually at the signal of one of the band members present on stage as the band Less Than Jake did several times during the Warped Tour. This is the late 19 variant80s that can still be found in metal, death metal, hardcore, etc. At Hellfest 2013, the Mass Hysteria singer and guitarist descends into the audience and throws a circular pit around them. Black Bomb A, another French band, is very fond of circle pits and often throws them for the first time before the merry crowd provokes them all throughout the concert.
- Mosh Pit : Close to pogo, often more violent, this is a hardcore version of this.
Recommendations
- ↑ August 2, 2012, 7:00 am, " Pogo is still rocking " on leparisien.fr, (accessed February 6, 2021)
- ↑ (in) Sam Jones, " Walk Your Way to Health Punk " on theguardian.
com, - ↑ (in) Laing Dave: One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press) - 1985 - pp. 34, 61, 63, 89–91. - ()
- ↑ (at) Jay Boyar and Roger Moore, " Holds` Filth Festival" Secret, Nonsense " at articles.orlandosentinel.com,
- ↑ (in) " Sid Vicious - Biography of " on imdb.com
- ↑ (ru) Clothes, Clothes, Clothes.
Music, Music, Music. Boys, boys, boys. : Albertine Viv - Editions: Faber & Faber - 2014 - page = 109- (ISBN 978-0571297757) - ↑ a b and c " Pogo still shakes rock ", on leparisien.fr,
- ↑ a and b Mosh-pit, or pogo, analyzed by a group of scientists.
Source
- (fr) This article is taken in whole or in part from the English Wikipedia article titled "Pogo (dance)" (see list of authors) .
External links
- (fr) Pogo dance
Das Leben ist ein RockkonzertLife is a rock concert Schon als Jugendlicher hab' ich gemerkt: Hör auf zu überlegen, Tja, das Leben ist kein Ponyhof, das war gelogen, Yeah, Es brennt, Hör auf, dich anzupassen, Tja, das Leben ist kein Ponyhof, das war gelogen, Als jugendlicher hab ich mich gewundert Already in my youth I noticed: Stop thinking, Y-yes, living life is not a field to cross, it was a lie, Yes-ah, burning, Stop adjusting, Y-yes, living life is not a field to cross, it was a lie, When I was young, I wondered Y-yes, living life is not a field to cross, it was a lie, Translated by dayneya Like the translation?Das Leben ist ein Rockkonzert Lyrics Rating: 5 / 5 2 opinions | Die bunte Seite der MachtSDPTracklist (10)
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