Think you can dance? TV on the Radio wants you at their concerts
von Jed Gottlieb am 3.6.2009
Confused about what kind of rock ’n’ roll you’re allowed to dance to?
By way of clarification, all rock ’n’ roll is permissible dancing music.
Express yourself people! Show off your Watusi at a Metallica show. Do the mashed potato at Nine Inch Nails. And definitely feel free to bust a move at TV on the Radio’s sold-out show Thursday at the House of Blues.
The Brooklyn, N.Y., band has a reputation for being complex, political and intellectual. But sometimes the quintet just wants to dance - or at least it wants to get its fans on their feet and moving.
“People don’t really go to shows to dance, unless it’s to do this supermacho, fake football dancing,” TV on the Radio guitarist/vocalist Kyp Malone said.
Lately, Malone has seen some fans mosh during his indie rock/electronic soul tune, “Crying.” Not good enough.
“I’m trying to encourage people to just dance,” Malone said, “instead of moshing or just sitting with their arms folded.”
Maybe some of the blame should be placed on a music industry that creates genre divisions where they don’t belong.
“What is sold as dance music right now is not what I consider to be dance music,” Malone said. “My mother played a lot of Motown when I was a kid, and we danced to it. I also grew up dancing to the rock records I had. The idea that there is now one type of music that’s dance music is ridiculous.”
Motown often hid intense emotional experiences in finger-snappin’, hip-shakin’ hooks. TV on the Radio inverts that by sneaking dance beats into intense, emotional indie rock.
“I was a big Smiths fan as a kid,” Malone said, “and that’s just one example of a band that can write a melody that sounds fun but touches on some darker aspects of life. I feel like that marriage is not really particular to us. A lot of people do that.”
True, but few do it as well or as uniquely as TV on the Radio does it on its latest album, “Dear Science.”
The band’s 2008 disc is the record Prince would have come up with if he came out of the current Brooklyn, N.Y., indie scene. Or maybe it’s what Radiohead would have sounded like had it been a late ’70s Minneapolis band. It’s music hipsters can dance to - and should dance to, even if they don’t know it or don’t want to admit it.
“This album was a little bit about wanting to do something a little more fun,” Malone said. “I remember having a conversation with (producer and band member) David (Andrew Sitek) about wanting to do something that didn’t have us strictly talking about politics in interviews.”
While there’s plenty of politics in Malone’s “Red Dress” - one of the standout tracks on “Dear Science” - better you should just groove to the song’s refrain: “You’ll all shake your hips/And you’ll all dance to this/Without making a fist.”