Which dance craze tracks have topped the charts?
Ah, the dance craze, a concept that everyone thinks they grew out of when they stopped going to school discos.
However, get all those people lightly buzzed on prosecco and shove them onto a wedding party dance floor, and you will see that these songs are still baked into our muscle memory, whether we like it or not. They may be about as cool as a ‘Make Poverty History’ bracelet, but no one can deny how effective they are. These songs have a nigh-on ruthless ability to burrow into our frontal cortexes like a plutonium-powered tick.
They stay there long after our mother’s maiden name and our PINs have left the building. The real estate these maddeningly catchy novelties take up and refuse to vacate has a more insidious effect too. Because these aren’t just personal crosses to bear. The fact that we can’t get rid of all these dance crazes means that they propagate, giving them more of a cultural legacy than the vast, vast majority of the biggest hits of the day.
Put it this way. The Village People’s deathless hit ‘YMCA’ hit number one on the UK Singles charts on December 31st, 1978. At number three that same week was ‘Lay Your Love On Me’ by Racey, and at number four was The Barron Knights’ ‘A Taste of Aggro’.
If you were a dedicated chart listener around at the time, you may be able to hum those songs, and let me tell you that no one who was born after those songs charted can. Yet, there are kids born during the Covid-19 lockdowns who can hit the ‘YMCA’ dance at the drop of a hat. How it’s not a Fortnite emote, I’ll never know.
It’s very fitting that ‘YMCA’ was the song to dethrone Boney M’s ‘Mary’s Boy Child’ from the summit of the UK charts. Dance craze songs and Christmas songs have a very similar cultural ubiquity that’s quite separate from their supposed quality. Put simply, they’re music with utility. A Christmas song is about Christmas, and a dance craze song is about a dance. People know what they’re for in a way that they may not do with other music, which makes them last in the mind a lot longer than most forms of art broadly considered good.
Why are dance crazes still so popular?
To contrast, ‘Make Me Feel’ by Janelle Monáe is one of my favourite songs ever. I don’t think that’s a particularly renegade choice among a certain set of pop nerds; it’s an ubiquitous party-starter. However, since it’s more of a piece of genuine art, its barebones usefulness is up in the air. People can have different interpretations and feelings about ‘Make Me Feel’. With a dance craze track, you don’t have to have those conversations. Does it teach you a dance? There you go. Which is why the practice of releasing dance craze singles goes right back to the very beginning of pop music.
In fact, looking at the ones that reached number one plots a pretty thorough timeline through all the major eras of pop music. The 1950s churned out plenty of singles built around teaching listeners the latest dance crazes, but it was Chubby Checker’s 1960 smash The Twist that really broke through, becoming the first to hit number one on the Billboard singles chart. Not long after, Little Eva pushed Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s The Loco-Motion all the way to the top in 1962. And, of course, it wouldn’t feel right to leave out Bobby “Boris” Pickett, whose goofy but unforgettable Monster Mash also clawed its way to number one that same year.
The glory days of rock ‘n’ roll as a mainstream concern saw the dance craze die down for the late 1960s and early 1970s, but funk and, in particular, disco brought it back with a vengeance. Rose Royce’s ‘Car Wash’, Van McCoy’s deathless ‘The Hustle’ and the aforementioned ‘YMCA’ all hitting number one. Since then, not a decade has gone by without at least a few dance crazes starting up. However, the 1990s and 2000s are arguably the banner decades for them.
‘The Macarena’ is obviously the most enduring track, a number one hit for 14 human weeks, but technically speaking, Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ is the hipster’s choice. It is about teaching a specific kind of dance, after all. ‘Cha Cha Slide’, ‘Laffy Taffy’, ‘Crank That (Soulja Boy)’, all number one hits of their time. Halfway through the TikTok decade, and if anything, it’s kind of a wonder why there aren’t more reaching the top of the charts, but if you can learn one thing from the dance craze, it’s never to count it out. Another will come, given time, and you’ll almost certainly know it without even really trying.
